I hadn't seen this before, and found it quite interesting. Robert Jahn, the founder of the PEAR lab,
died on 15 November. The Global Consciousness Project was in a sense a continuation of the work done there on random number generators. The GCP data were analysed for the 24 hours following his death. It's not stated clearly, but it sounds as though they prespecified the standard GCP hypothesis before looking at any data. The result was striking, and represented a p value of 0.001 and a Z value of 3.096:
http://global-mind.org/events/bob.jahn.html
One reason I think this is interesting is that Peter Bancel's analysis of the GCP data led him to the conclusion that they reflected an experimenter psi effect based on clairvoyant/precognitive selection of the time periods of the events, rather than a kind of micro-psychokinetic effect of global consciousness.
On the one hand, it's certainly plausible that the death of Robert Jahn would have a much stronger effect on the experimenter, Roger Nelson, as a former colleague, than on the world at large.
But on the other, the starting point of the time period in this case is fixed by the time of death (which was apparently known, as the commentary says he died "surrounded by family and loved ones"), so there doesn't seem to be any scope for experimenter choice there. However, it could be argued that the length of the time period was still a matter of choice by the experimenter. It was chosen to be 24 hours, which seems a natural enough choice. But a glance at the table of previous events shows that while the time period after the death of a public figure was sometimes 24 hours, it was also sometimes shorter. Perhaps it would be interesting to calculate the probability that the Z value would rise by chance to 3.096 at some point in a 24 hour period.
(2017-12-20, 10:01 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]One reason I think this is interesting is that Peter Bancel's analysis of the GCP data led him to the conclusion that they reflected an experimenter psi effect based on clairvoyant/precognitive selection of the time periods of the events, rather than a kind of micro-psychokinetic effect of global consciousness.
An interesting point mentioned in the recent podcast interview with Garret Moddel (
http://www.originsofconsciousness.com/or...-abilities) was that in 2009 Helmut Schmidt [at the age of 81, 16 years after his retirement] wrote to the
Journal of Scientific Exploration, suggesting that the psi effect seen in the Global Consciousness Project was a goal-oriented pychokinetic experimenter effect. Roger Nelson and Peter Bancel responded, arguing on the basis of other correlations seen in the data, in addition to the pre-specified test statistic, that the effect didn't seem to be goal-oriented in origin. (Peter Bancel has since come round to the idea that it is goal-oriented, though through a rather different mechanism.)
The exchange can be read on pages 507-516 of volume 23 of the journal:
https://www.scientificexploration.org/jo...ber-4-2009
Thanks for this, chris. Stephen Brade has ably pointed out that that drawing any assumptions about the motive force of psi. Is tricky at best.
Thanks for this, chris. Stephen Brade has ably pointed out that drawing any assumptions about the motive force of psi. Is tricky at best.
There is a review on the SPR website, by Gerhard Mayer, of a book in German written by Roger Nelson with a former journalist named Georg Kindel, entitled "Der Welt-Geist: Wie wir alle miteinander verbunden sind" (translated by the reviewer as "The World Spirit. How we are all connected"):
https://www.spr.ac.uk/book-review/der-we...org-kindel
The book was published in March. I had read that Roger Nelson was going to write a book in which the GCP would feature, and I presume this is it, though I don't know why it has appeared in German and not in English.
The review is quite favourable, but the reviewer says that controversies about the interpretation of the research findings are not mentioned. Rather, they are used to support the existence of "a global consciousness", although the concept is not clearly defined.
The reviewer refers to discussion of the GCP last year in the journal Explore. This consisted of the paper by Peter Bancel that Doug linked to earlier in this thread (Explore 13:94-101):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...xploration
There is then a response by Roger Nelson (pp. 102-105) and a rejoinder by Bancel (pp. 106-107). I can't find the full texts of these online, but the abstracts are:
Weighting the Parameters, a Response to Bancel׳s "Searching for Global Consciousness: A Seventeen Year Exploration"
Roger D. Nelson
This brief report is a response to the article by Peter Bancel entitled “Searching for Global Consciousness: A Seventeen Year Exploration” in which he compares a goal orientation (GO) model with a field-like model he refers to as global consciousness (GC). He first attempts to exclude the latter, and then presents selected tests that compare the models. While the article appears to provide support for Bancel׳s conclusion that GC cannot explain the data and must be supplanted by GO, there are good reasons to believe this conclusion is premature at best. I address the vulnerable assumptions underlying Bancel׳s rejection of GC, and then provide multiple examples of parametric structure in the data, which cannot be attributed to GO, but are amenable to explanation by field-like models.
Response to Nelson׳s Weighing the Parameters
Peter Bancel
I thank Roger Nelson for his thoughtful comments on my paper, and the editors of Explore, who have generously provided space for a reply. In response to Dr. Nelson׳s remarks, I would like to provide a broader perspective on why I conclude that the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) measures a goal-oriented (GO) effect.
Oddly, Nelson appears to be
weighting the parameters and Bancel
weighing them.
[Edit: The review also refers to the Journal of Nonlocality. Nelson's paper is actually available on that journal's website, as part of volume 5, number 1 (2017):
http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonlocality/inde...view/71/71
Then there's a paper by Peter Bancel, entitled "Determining that the GCP is a goal-oriented effect: a short history":
http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonlocality/inde...view/70/70
I'm not sure what the relationship is between Bancel's response in this journal and Bancel's response in the journal Explore.]
In answer to a question about electromagnetic consciousness in another thread:
I would contact Roger Nelson and/or Dean Radin about this. The fact that consciousness can have a predictable effect on electronic Random Number Generators would suggest they have a pretty advanced theory of electromagnetic consciousness that they were testing with their Global Consciousness Project.
That, or they just lucked out with little to no prior plausibility.
(2018-10-07, 11:56 PM)malf Wrote: [ -> ]I would contact Roger Nelson and/or Dean Radin about this. The fact that consciousness can have a predictable effect on electronic Random Number Generators would suggest they have a pretty advanced theory of electromagnetic consciousness that they were testing with their Global Consciousness Project.
That, or they just lucked out with little to no prior plausibility.
I find this one of the hardest cricitisms of parapsychology to understand.
The fact is (or at any rate the claim is) that the hypotheses in the Global Consciousness Project were fixed in advance, and that collectively they were supported to a degree for which chance is realistically not a plausible explanation.
As far as I understand, the essential hypothesis - that the outputs of different RNGs would tend to correlate with one another during global events that engaged the attention of large numbers of people - came mainly out of previous experiments that followed on from the studies at Princeton in which people consciously tried to influence RNGs. As we all know, Roger Nelson doesn't have a quantitative model for the effect, but only a kind of qualitative motivating idea. (The person who has analysed the data in the greatest depth is Peter Bancel, and his conclusion is that it's not really a "global consciousness" at work, but unconscious experimenter psi guiding the choice of global events.)
But how does the lack of a theoretical model reflect on the value of the work? Certainly it would be preferable to have precise theoretical predictions that could be tested experimentally, rather than looking for deviations from the predictions of the null hypothesis. But unless you think that developing a theoretical model of psi should be very easy, I don't see how you can blame parapsychologists for not having done it. And I don't think the lack of a model detracts very much from the evidential value of the GCP. It is unusual in that (1) the statistical significance is huge, (2) all the data are freely available online and (3) no one has been able to suggest a plausible conventional explanation (unless it is outright fraud).
(2018-10-08, 07:19 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]I find this one of the hardest cricitisms of parapsychology to understand.
Fair enough. However, there appear to be some experiential prior plausibility to Ganzfeld and presentiment studies, say, or the AWARE studies. This project looks like an exercise in producing overwhelming amounts of noise, and pulling patterns from that noise. Divining those patterns has become its own dark art. Thus, comments like:
Quote:The person who has analysed the data in the greatest depth is Peter Bancel, and his conclusion is that it's not really a "global consciousness" at work, but unconscious experimenter psi guiding the choice of global events.
... must be somewhat of a red flag; a way to explain, for instance, why Captain Sully landing his plane on the Hudson gave statistically non-random outputs, but Concorde slamming into that hotel car park produced nothing.
Quote:But how does the lack of a theoretical model reflect on the value of the work? Certainly it would be preferable to have precise theoretical predictions that could be tested experimentally, rather than looking for deviations from the predictions of the null hypothesis. But unless you think that developing a theoretical model of psi should be very easy, I don't see how you can blame parapsychologists for not having done it. And I don't think the lack of a model detracts very much from the evidential value of the GCP. It is unusual in that (1) the statistical significance is huge, (2) all the data are freely available online and (3) no one has been able to suggest a plausible conventional explanation (unless it is outright fraud).
Well, it's just impossible to know
what they're testing, as Bancel's quote demonstrates. Data without a theory is as meaningless as words without a narrative, and whilst the data may be freely available it is vast and unwieldy. I wouldn't jump to fraud either; remember Diane Powell's research? More unconscious bias/desperation for positive results than outright fraud.