Measuring Human Consciousness (REGs and PEAR).
On my way home this past weekend, fairly tired of the 6 CD’s in my changer, I opted for some uber-late-night talk radio to either piss me off, intrigue me, or bore me. Turned out to be the middle option. BIG time. On AM 1500 Talk Radio an encore version of Art Bell’s Coast To Coast AM rattled through my head featuring one of the most interesting, and more importantly REAL, speculative science fiction topics I’ve EVER heard of. I was so excited about it I woke my girlfriend up at 3, or whenever the hell it was, just to tell someone about it. ANYONE; if she wouldn’t have woke, no doubt I’d be explaining this to the cat. [*Lil' NOTE: Not sure why I didn't just write about this that night.]
As you know, or if you don’t know, Art Bell was the founder of the program (Coast To Coast) which is now hosted by a guy named George Noory. The show specialized in quite a bit of unnatural phenomena. Paranormal, Bigfoot, speculation and conspiracies, etc. It all sounds like total bullshit at first but is in fact typically well supported by empirical evidence, and Art himself was at times quite a skeptic to callers. But THIS, I had to see to believe. I turned my radio on just as a tester/scientist was calling in about a new product based on a device originally designed by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program.
This device, made by a company (it’s also the name of the device) called Psyleron, Inc., is available for purchase by the public. It comes with software, typically for a PC (fuck Macs), and is connected via standard USB cable. It’s described by one user as a “hyper-coin-flipper”. What it does is it sends out a series of billions of +’s and -’s in the form of streaming, real time, graph/chart/history. Think of a random number generator on an advanced calculator, this thing they’re calling a “Random Event Generator” (or REG), is exactly that a million times per second in a moment by moment sense. So, if you were to place one of these in a controlled environment (an enclosed chamber) it would stay fairly close to center all the time. It essentially measures randomness, or chance, by “flipping a coin” billions of times in succession. Here’s how it works from THEM:
The measurement relies on small changes in the behavior of an electronic device designed to produce a random output. A random event generator, or REG, as used for the GCP data collection, is essentially a high-speed electronic coin flipper. Instead of heads and tails, the REG produces + or – pulses relative to a mean value, and these pulses are converted into 1’s and 0’s, the bits that are the language of computers. The bits can be counted, and stored as samples from a well understood mathematical distribution of random numbers. The device also is often called a random number generator (RNG), which is a name given to computer programs that produce “pseudo” random numbers. The REG and RNG devices used in the GCP are hardware sources of “true” random events — fundamentally unpredictable 1’s and 0’s.
With me so far, right? Well, what’s absolutely even more fascinating than the device itself is that the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Program (who originally designed “REGs”) have discovered that human beings can actually control the device’s levels, effectively manipulating the amount of chance, or randomness, around them. Don’t believe me, do you? The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Program has been running tests with the REG’s, and a whole slew of human subjects for years now (in fact, they’re completely done). If a human being near one of these REG’s even concentrates hard enough, the level of randonimity on the device will literally drop. It’s consistent too. The program has performed thousands of different experiments, each with millions of trials, and the data holds up. The obvious philosophical query here is… what the fuck are they even measuring??? Princeton has this to say:
When it comes to “what we are measuring” the story becomes more complicated because there is no real understanding of the mechanism whereby an REG’s behavior can be altered by thoughts and emotions or intentions. We do not know how a mental state such as an intention or emotion is able to inform the physical system to affect its behavior. In addition, all of the robust measures we have providing evidence for the anomalous effects are statistical in nature, and the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. This means that we typically cannot be sure that the “signature” of an effect in any individual analysis is driven by the hypothesized influence of consciousness. After all the caveats, however, we can say that the evidence for an effect of consciousness on REGs is strong. We are driven by that evidence to infer that something like a “consciousness field” exists, and that intentions or emotional states which structure the field are conveyed as information that is absorbed into the distribution of output values of labile physical systems. The output of the REG differs from what would be expected without the influence of consciousness.
So, it’s our consciousness that’s effecting the REG’s in a linnear, and direct, way. The caller of Coast to Coast mentioned taking the device to a play, a movie theater, or something where a very large group of people are concentrating on one thing together. In these cases, the level of randomness in the room goes down. It also does with meditation, studying, etc. Princeton calls these “field studies” and summerizes them as such:
In “field” studies with REGs we have found consistent deviations from expected randomicity in data taken in situations where groups become integrated or unified by something of common interest. During deeply engaging meetings, concerts, rituals, etc., the data tend to exhibit slightly greater order than random data should, and we are able to predict this deviation with small but significant success.
I know many people don’t believe this shit, but here are many many links to the various sites, devices, and so forth. Amazing stuff.
- The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Program homepage.
- PEAR’s explainations on REGs, human consciousness, experiments, measurements, etc.
- A link to ALL PEAR’s Publications.
- The “REG Package” (for purchase).
- Holy crap it’s an amazing world we live in.
-Sonny
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