The Global Consciousness Project

Also... when it's claimed that global consciousness affects RNGs... what propery of consciousness exactly would be at work? Awareness? Emotions (and which one(s))? Will power? Attention? Intention? All of them?

I don't think that's really been addressed (or maybe I haven't read the part of the literature where it has). Except it's been suggested that the important thing may be large numbers of people thinking about the same thing, so that coherence is the important aspect.

Certainly the events they've looked at are a very mixed bag - disasters and terrorist attacks, sporting events, religious and secular festivals, mass meditation events, astrological conjunctions, global orgasms ...

One relevant point is that various XOR masks are applied to the raw stream of bits produced by the hardware, swapping certain bits between 0s and 1s in order to eliminate any systematic bias towards one or the other. I was going to post a bit about that when I got a chance, as it's also been argued on that basis that this isn't a kind of field effect owing to consciousness (or at least not the naive concept of a field effect), because the XORing will be different for the different random number generators, and it's the output from that process that is found to be correlated. But equally it makes it even more difficult to see how the output of different random number generators could be correlated because of conventional physical processes.

Not sure what you refer to when you say "field". Can you briefly elaborate?

,,, because my sense is that this potentially connected to a spiritual or metaphysical "field", which is of course not necessarily  an electromagnetic thing, and doesn't just impact analog circuits. It is probably more pervasive than that, and could just as easily function on either side of the analog/digital system boundary.

Not sure what you refer to when you say "field". Can you briefly elaborate?

,,, because my sense is that this potentially connected to a spiritual or metaphysical "field", which is of course not necessarily  an electromagnetic thing, and doesn't just impact analog circuits. It is probably more pervasive than that, and could just as easily function on either side of the analog/digital system boundary.

Yes, I think I agree. The "naive" idea would be that the field was somehow acting on the hardware to modify the raw output, and the problem was whether that effect could survive the processing with the XOR masks, in such a way as to produce a correlation in the final output recorded in the database. Essentially the answer was that it couldn't, because even if (for one type of RNG) there was a way in principle for certain patterns in the raw output to produce correlations in the final output, the computers weren't synchronised closely enough for it to work.

But we don't know how psi effects work anyway. Why shouldn't they modify the final output rather than the raw output, and why shouldn't they take into account the lack of synchronisation as well?

... global orgasms ...

Wait, what?!

Wait, what?!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Orgasm

It's an annual event. though apparently only numbers 1 and 3 were included in the Global Consciousness Project registry. The results weren't statistically significant.

(NB Don't miss the "See also" section of that Wikipedia page.)

But we don't know how psi effects work anyway. Why shouldn't they modify the final output rather than the raw output, and why shouldn't they take into account the lack of synchronisation as well?

There you go. That's what I'm talking about. 

There is no reason whatsoever to think that this "psychic" field (if it exists in this case) has any affinity for EM waves or even digital electronics. It may act in a way utterly irrespective of these things. 

Or who knows- maybe this effect is completely cognizant of analog AND digital systems and interacts in whatever way appropriate to achieve a desired outcome. Who or what's desire? Who knows?  

Scientists seem to to want this to act like a piece of mindless machinery, when in actuality perhaps it is a communication channel or non-physical spiritual linkage of sorts.

Who's to say? 
Bottom line is that we shouldn't restrict our thinking too much as it may blind us to other possibilities and explanations. Also which may also lead us to make rash and incorrect assumptions such as: 
- it must be a EM field, 
- so it will have certain predictable behavior, sensitivities, and modes of operation
- so we can look at it, and isolate it in this particular way. 

All those statements are predicated on a assumptions that could quite possibly be wrong.

Also... when it's claimed that global consciousness affects RNGs... what propery of consciousness exactly would be at work? Awareness? Emotions (and which one(s))? Will power? Attention? Intention? All of them?

Thanks

The issue of Explore from May/June 2007 had several articles from the PEAR lab. Throughout these, they described the thing they were trying to measure as “resonance,” but in the final article, “Epilogue” they suggest that “love” would be a better term. The final paragraph reads:

“In most of the papers included in this anthology, we have resorted to the term resonance as a relatively antiseptic substitute for the academically discomforting word love. But as the PEAR spirit prepares to move beyond its present physical confines, it is also time to relinquish this semantic conservatism as well. In its place, we would leave our readers with reiteration of the heartfelt conviction with which we concluded the paper “Information, Consciousness, and Health,” namely, the scientific message is this:
In loving ourselves, we can heal ourselves;
In loving the world, we can heal the world.”

Jahn R.G., Dunne, B.J., "Epilogue", Explore, May/June 2007, Vol. 3, No. 3 339

I wrote a lot about this elsewhere on Skeptiko, but these devices are very sensitive to power fluctuations, particularly voltage drops and you'll see bias appearing in the ratio of 1,0's, severe in some devices with just a 1-2% voltage drop.

I'd be looking at correlations with electricity demand... Here's one I found randomly for California on a hot day in 1999, very roughly fits Chris's graph above (also see a slow reduction in demand from 6pm), although I don't really know what his graph is showing.

[Image: elec_load_demand.gif]
It's not just based on lack of supply vs demand either, it's a complicated mix of demand/supply and localised activities etc, for example I get very visible brownouts, and voltage drops when any of the neighbors in my street start up an electrical motor, but only when demand is high locally in a residential district...

Yes, the total demand does look quite similar, but there are two problems with any straightforward explanation based on this idea:

(1) In the graph I posted the upper curve shows the average diurnal effect associated with the set of specified "global" events, and the lower one is the equivalent for the whole database - that is an average over the full 17 years - and that doesn't show the same variation, or any statistically significant diurnal variation at all.

(2) The XOR masks are going to cancel out any imbalance in the numbers of 0s and 1s, so the mean of the output is constrained to the right value. There would be an effect on the variance. But what's observed is essentially correlation between the different RNGs, and a change in the variance wouldn't tend to produce correlation.

I think if the effect is some kind of statistical artefact, the likeliest mechanism is some kind of subtle diurnal variation in the behaviour of the hardware, coupled with the non-uniform geographical distributions of the RNGs and (probably) the chosen events and time periods. But I still find it very difficult to see how it would work.