PEAR - Engineering and Consciousness

Are you and your PC, Tablet, or Phone on the same wavelength? Has the universe ever 404'd you?
Sounds like hogwash? I don't think it is.

The thought came to me as I was playing Elder Sign Omens, I read the comments first people kept complaining about how hard it is, but as true Lovecraftian I tried and found out, it wasn't.
All it took was a deep breath, emptying my head and push the button in the moment my mind was empty with a visual memory of what I wanted to roll. It worked so much, I started looking deeper into the subject and I found:

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.

Here is the vimeo

I am truly fascinated by this research. The mind over matter woo, put into a laboratory.

source

One such model has been proposed and developed in "On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomena," under the major premise that the basic processes by which consciousness exchanges information with its environment, orders that information, and interprets it, also enable it to bias probabilistic systems and thereby to avail itself of some control over its reality. This model regards the concepts that underlie all physical models of reality, particularly those of observational quantum mechanics such as the principles of uncertainty, complementarity, exclusion, indistinguishability, and wave mechanical resonance, as fundamental characteristics of consciousness rather than as intrinsic features of an objective physical environment. In this view, the "anomalous" phenomena observed in the PEAR experiments become quite normal expectations of bonded human/machine and human/human systems, and the door is opened for all manner of creative consciousness/environment interactions.

I am pretty sure at least some of you will have as much fun reading all the PDFs and the mind-blowing research done on this topic as I do.

a reply to: Peeple

Always happy to see posts, in which yet the first two sentences tell you, its gonna be amazing read. I'll come back after digging into the info. S&F for now,

Andre.

a reply to: Peeple

Mind.. blown

What can I believe? Now I'm questioning things (even more than usual).. hmmm

a reply to: Peeple

You are talking about the exact thing I've been trying to explain.. "devices on the same wavelength?"
yea that wavelength is what I would call "consciousness"
it's higher up in heirarchy of source.
That's why you can control "reality" to a degree.

the level of power you get from it is directly related to how much of "YOU" is trying to control it, and how much of "observer" is trying to control it.. You have to vibe with it, or like you said empty your mind. If you are you at the time, you can control you only..

honestly what do people think the placebo effect is?
You are more in tune with your body (you relate it as you) than anything else so it's the most easy to effect. It's been experimented to oblivion, the placebo effect is more powerful than most drugs.

But what if you related to more. What if you were everything?

then just as easy as moving your leg (empty minded because the signal is not as strong as nerves going to your brain) to move your spirit is the same way, but it's more subtle, you have to ease into it.

a reply to: Reverbs

Eloquently put - thanks for sharing your perspective on this subject. Fascinating stuff. My heart is up to the challenge.

Time to 'live my dreams"

Don't just say 'wow, this looks cool so I'll eat it right up', go look at some of the issues with PEAR's assumptions and experimental design, of which there are many, some obvious, some subtle.

a reply to: Bedlam

Hey welcone back sir! Good to see you.

originally posted by: BASSPLYR
a reply to: Bedlam

Hey welcone back sir! Good to see you.

EAFB no more! On to newer ground, I hope.

a reply to: Bedlam

Wahoo!!!! Someplace less hot and dry hopefully.

Well glad you got to get some time to relax a bit before going back to the grind.

a reply to: Peeple


Yes, but like the acknowledgement and study of alien UFOs is a dead end in public science because of half a dozen human frailties, so the same with the power of consciousness. --Actually, the two topics are not that far apart. But as for any discussion of the old mind-over-matter topic, there is an unjustified leap being made. IF you want to entertain that area, you must first avoid any frank discussion of mind-to-mind control which is as damning to the human ego as superior ETs.

And on the face of it, it would seem that mind-to-mind control would be easier than any form of telekinesis.

I firmly support the study of any of this work having had personal experiences and--dare I say it?--having undergone a UFO time loss-experience where I lost all control of everything (but bowel control).

a reply to: Peeple
This is really interesting thanks for posting.
I find the more angry I get at a game while playing it the more the game seems to cheat.

a reply to: FamCore

Don't get too excited. So far it's mostly tiny deviations from statistic expectations. Enough, to me at least, to say it is there, not enough for mainstream scientists to take it serious.

a reply to: Reverbs

What I find interesting is people sharing a deeper connection get higher results. The "love vibe"? What if they'd test it with people full of agape? Do those feeling "love" for their devices, the world and all also get better results?
My tablets name is Sam, I love him, is that why he developed a seemingly "mind of his own" sometimes?

a reply to: Bedlam

What problems do you see? I always enjoy reading and learning from smart perspectives. Please share?

a reply to: Aliensun

Don't throw aliens into this, please. The topic has an enough fragile stand as it is already.

So after reading the subject in detail, I see scientists are trying to get connected with the metaphysical laws slowly. Soon, probably they will and all phenomenon like this will be explained in dry scientific language. Thus said, nothing new under the sun, just a bunch of people discussing "why daylight leaves your shadow on the ground... stuff".

Bishop Berkeley fans to the right of me. Enjoying your mental tar-water?

Immaterialism: a philosophical theory that material things have no reality except as mental perceptions.

Bishop Berkeley (Anglican Church, Trinitarian trained philosopher) also suggested (marketed in favor of) drinking tar-water for medicinal purposes, which he conveniently distributed from his Church. The Encyclopedia Britannica mentioned as early as 1910(?) that drinking tar-water causes symptoms similar to carbolic acid poisoning. Immaterialism is his brainchild.

Pine tar has also been used for treating skin conditions, often as soap, though this use as a drug was banned by the FDA [1990] along with many other ingredients, due to a lack of proof of effectiveness.

Source: Pine tar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tar-water was a medieval medicine consisting of pine tar and water.

Source: Tar water - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's where you can recognize the remnants of the philosophy of immaterialism (rephrased and modified to make it less obvious perhaps, as if you're introducing a new idea):

This model regards the concepts that underlie all physical models of reality, ..., as fundamental characteristics of consciousness rather than as intrinsic features of an objective physical environment.

"Mental perceptions" has become "consciousness" and "material things" has become "physical environment". There are a few other slight modifications. The movie "The Matrix" spends a lot of time promoting the philosophy of immaterialism. Enjoy your programming by this system of things.

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: Bedlam

What problems do you see?

Sorry, didn't come back to this for a bit.

Ok. Let's look at the basic issue from my point of view. People see what they want to see. Or expect to see. Or were 'designed' to see. That's one of the most basic functions of science, IMHO, to reduce that. Not that you can get rid of it. It's caused, maybe, by the way your brain processes inputs - you use stochastic filters everywhere in order to get meat sensors and meat processing to work at all. So from sensing to base processing to higher consciousness functions, every step tends to look for patterns based on prior input, or from patterns that tend to remain the same moving against/in/through background noise. It works well for finding fruit in forest cover and making grass beds like Daddy did, and for not being immediately eaten by something with a face. But it's not so good for determining the nature of 'reality'. That sort of thing is why you see the most details in green tinted light and find face shapes in Celotex, unfortunately also why you tend to draw illogical conclusions from correlations - If I prayed to Ongo Bongo God of the Congo last year for a good elephant harvest, and it happened, then She must really exist. And you start interpreting random occurrences in terms of stochastic internal processes - seeing everything as an act of OB due to interpretation of events in the light of prior occurrences, whether that really happened or not, or confirmation bias - telling your perceptual filtering to look for events that seem to correlate to expectations (a sort of false prior event you preload into your filters).

The function of 'the scientific method', IMHO, is to try to get past our meat limitations by reducing our innate tendencies to falsely interpret things. And thus do you get math, and statistics, and peer reviewed journals, and gadgets that can emit a single photon on demand or measure potential differences of millionths of a Volt. And the product of applying all these things is to answer the questions "Did that really happen", "does it happen a lot", "to what degree did it happen", and "am I just imagining it because I expect/want this to be true". And in the end these things all work, or at least help, because they don't use the same processing and sensory equipment YOU do, as the experimenter. Even peer review and replication works because the other guys aren't supposed to have the same confirmation bias, expectation and memories. So their stochasms are running from a different set of internal node values. If you get the same answers from these different sorts of interpretation and sensing, then maybe it's real.

When you get to where you have a 'mystical' or 'woo' sort of thing meeting a scientific process like this, as an experimenter you have to be awfully careful. You hear this stated as 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' and it's true. Most 'woo' is the very stuff of stochastic process error. It's very appealing to your processing because it arises from glitches in that processing method.

A problem with 'metaphysics' and 'parapsychology' studies is that if you believe in it, you believe in it a LOT, and from outside looking in at it, a lot of people who would otherwise apply more rational questioning to what they're seeing tend to not, because they've become True Believers. And the bad part of it is, if you think this sort of thing is bogus, you won't apply any time at all looking at it or trying to replicate it, because woo. And there's this onus on investigating woo, because it might rub off on you or give you science cooties or something, so it's rare that an unbiased researcher will even read papers of that nature and be tempted to try to replicate it, with no preconception for good or bad. So it leads to a weird sort of 'woo divide' with people you might otherwise look up to like Rauscher-Bise and Jahn on the woo side of the divide, and everyone else on the other, and no one really trying to bridge the gap. So you can't easily get what I would call 'actual scientific examination of the issue' because one side is all True Believers and the other side is Pitchforks and Torches. If there WERE a real effect, it would be hard to find out.

(part 2)

Never underestimate the power of becoming a True Believer, either. It is the sort of thing you have to design in protection against, in the engineering world.

We had to implement adversarial engineering and validation, and to some extent adversarial sales. That seems odd, but it works. If you are designing something, you will become 'attached' to it, you will 'own' it. It becomes a part of your thinking for weeks to months. The longer the design project is, the worse this effect becomes. You eventually become blind to the deficiencies of your design because you start internally glossing over the bumps. It's not intentional either. We found that you need to launch off two totally decoupled design teams that meet at the implementation rally point, and examine the approaches. Usually there's a big catfight, and you end up with a sort of melding of the best parts of both, or one way will be obviously better than the other, and if it's TOO one-sided, we restart that phase.

Next, the two groups leave the table and do proposed implementations of the concept, again totally decoupled. Then you do the Thunderdome thing again. Two designs enter, one design leaves. And again, you will find that each approach has cooties, and each team, being a 'true believer' in that approach are blind to it until the other side starts firing ballistas at it in the conference room.

And in the end, one team 'wins' and designs it, but the other side validates it. And again, the design side will have built in some deficiencies, either overt or subtle, and they will be blind to it. And the validation team will tear it up.

You end up with way better products that way. But IMHO you can't get away from doing this. I do it myself. It's an innate behavior to see something you've invested your time and effort into with rose colored glasses.

All that said as background, whenever I see something like PEAR, I ask right off who the True Believers are, and invariably the guys running it are your core. Jahn is a True Believer. He's been into parapsychology since undergrad school. So he's Real Interested. It's a life interest with him. That's not necessarily bad - why would you investigate something you aren't interested in? But the flip side is that True Believership comes with horse blinders. And believing in 'woo' requires a deeper commitment to True Believership than pretty much any other topic in science. Saying to yourself one day 'I think it might be possible that there are particles with fractional spin values other than (n)1/2, is there any evidence for this?' takes less True Believership than does 'I think I can control the value of dimensionless constants with my mind' or 'I think I can alter probability by really really wanting it to change'.

And that's where you hit the divide. If you are Robert Jahn, and you really want to convince people that wanting it to be so can change basic fundamental values, you have to have Carrie levitate some pig blood or chuck some knives into targets on request in other labs than Jahn's. It's got to be such an obvious result that no one can ignore it. And what you get out of PEAR tends to be things that look like scientific papers but if you really examine them have a lot of "miracle happens here in step 2" or are stats that were badly derived, or which should change when you change the sample size but don't, or which any graduate stats guy would say 'that's not the appropriate test to use for this sort of data'.

And it doesn't mean that Jahn's a faker (although he could be) or that he's stupid (he's not), just that he's human, and has become a True Believer over a lifetime of Believing. And now he's systematically ignoring things you would normally do as part of experiments of this sort.

(part 3 after lunch)

(part 3)
So. Let's start with the material in the OP. I won't be able to even be close to totally going over the entire PEAR topic, because I'm starting up with a new job in a new locale, and it's going to sort of eat my time up. But it's a good bone to chew, so let me crank off with this and I'll come back to it in a few days. This post is not meant to be an in-depth look at PEAR either, it's sort of a 'what about this catches my eye'. There's no deep analysis here, because I have a ton of background crap to read for tomorrow for work. So don't say 'that doesn't prove anything, it's, like, your opinion man' because you're right. That's all I have time for - what about this bothers me. In a few days, I'll wade into Jahn and PEAR and we'll pick some of the papers apart. This post is more - 'look here, and here, it's worrisome'

I'm not trying to bang on Peeple, either. It's a very interesting topic. I'm not trying to trash it, or him/her. The question was put, 'what strikes you as manky about this', (mas o menos), and the next few posts will be an overly wordy but very condensed version of what went through my mind from the first time I read about PEAR (they were quite active at the time). And a lot of it was basically 'but wait, how do you know that is actually what is going on? You're jumping wildly to conclusions based on things you think you're seeing..."

And who knows? Maybe it's true. But there are classes of topics that always worry me in the sense that I examine them closely, since I know people have a natural tendency to erroneously think/perceive in certain ways, due to design. One, for example, is seeing faces in random visual clutter. That was such a VERY useful thing in not being eaten in the jungle that you have a chunk of brain that's devoted to doing nothing BUT that. Better still, you have the ability to vary the cut-off level on face detection so that you can talk yourself into getting a positive hit on just about ANYTHING. So, I don't bother reading "I saw Jesus in a cantaloupe" articles. Of course you did. Because you're sort of designed to do that.

Another is, sadly, 'I thought about something and it happened so it happened because I thought about it' topics. That's another 'built-in' that sort of comes from how your brain picks out causes and effects. 'Wish and make it true' has both pseudo-cause and confirmation bias behind it. It's even got a name:"magical thinking". And most kids do it until the ages of 7 or 8, all the time. And most adults still do it at times, even if they laugh at themselves for doing it, and some don't ever get past it. So, another thing I take with grains of salt are results that tend to confirm 'magical thinking', for the reason that it's so easy to fool yourself with it. Not only is it a soft, mushy spot in everyone's perceptual toolkit, it's appealing. What if I could do [x] just by thinking about it? Sadly, the world is probably a better place because I can't - it would probably turn out like The Man Who Could Work Miracles, or worse, It's a Good Life. Anyway, topics like that are a trigger for my 'look closer' filter, just because we all tend to fall short here, scientists included. So, let's look at the material in the OP.

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.

This is, of course, sort of a 100K foot view and not meant to be taken literally, maybe, but what does it tell you?

1) Jahn thinks that human consciousness interacts with physical devices, systems, and processes.
2) He's possibly back-engineered models to try to fit the data - sort of the reverse you'd normally do. Most science that's not pathological (though not all) would have proposed a mechanism and an experimental means for validating and invalidating it, then collected the data. The way it's worded here would seem to indicate they got the data and developed a model to fit it.
3) He thinks that consciousness establishes reality.

Right off, it seems likely that PEAR is going to be a forthright appeal to magical thinking by 1 and 3, and that he's back-fitting models to match data by 2. This is not a good indication that it's going to be good science. Still, if you could prove that 'life is but a dream' (my summary of this mission statement), it would be worth a Nobel. The difficulty will be in actually proving it, as you have to ask 'whose dream is it, then?'. You end up in a sort of multiplex solipsism down that trail. It's hard to prove, and I don't Jahn came close. Still, it tells you something about him and PEAR - it's 'there is no objective reality'. But it seems odd then that they'd try to prove it objectively.


Next, that diagram in the OP. It looks good, and they have some nice bafflegab to go with it. But what are they really saying? You have your 'normal' path - your consciousness takes in data from tangible ('real') events. The double arrow would tend to imply that it directly affects events but I suspect he's meaning here that you physically react and change tangible things. That would be the 'objective' world. You perceive things happening, you make physical changes, they have physical consequences. Great, I'm down with that pathway.

Then he brings in two more blocks that are 'mysterious'. One is the unconscious mind (U) and 'intrinsically unobservable pathways' (I). Hoo, boy. Ever see this cartoon?



Jahn's U and I pathways are tantamount to 'then a miracle occurs'. He does this because (1) it's obvious that there's no direct conscious path to do this, so he has to invoke an 'unconscious' part of the mind that somehow DOES know how to influence probability, and does so as an un-sensed agent of the conscious, and (2) he has no idea how this might be managed even so, so he inserts (I) and for frosting states that it's "intrinsically unobservable". Note that one. He precludes any form of testing or confirmation by stating right out that you can't detect or measure it, or know how it works, by its very nature. THAT's certainly handy, isn't it? It's a sciency way of saying 'Goddidit', only you're sticking in the unconscious mind AND a mystery method that inherently can't be analyzed.

Still, you'd have to leave open the door of 'maybe he's onto something, but just has an execrable way of stating it'. Given his premises, there are tests he could have done but didn't, which would have been one of the first things you ought to have. And assumptions he makes which seem odd to me, which I'll point out at some future time when I have more time to think about them. First would be 'why in the world are you convinced that the use of 'psi' would invariably bias random number generators as a side effect?' He seems to assume this to the point that it's basically the only thing he tests for. Yet there doesn't seem to be a real reason, except that it's how he became a true believer.

a reply to: Bedlam

Just want to say thank you for these three posts -

- they are the most balanced, unbiased, writings on the subject (questioning 'psi' experiments) that I've ever seen, and I really appreciate all the time and effort that you put into sharing your perspective!!


Looking forward to whatever comes next...

a reply to: lostgirl

I also agree and appreciate the effort bedlam put into his posts above.

On a personal note. Bedlams a good man. Hes got a lifetime of experiences and wisdom regarding this and similar topics. My advice is, Id pay attention to most of what he posts. Hes very knowledgeable and extraordinarily lucid.