Global Consciousness and Disinformation

Just recently I've become more interested in Princeton's Global Consciousness Project.

For those who don't know of it, it's a summary of data from a worldwide distribution of random number generators. The researchers have noticed that when an attention-grabbing event occurs, these random number generators start producing non-random data. Here are two examples of MSM handling of this story...




I'm sure that any resemblance of one of the newscasters to Chad from NewsBeat (the blond one) is entirely coincidental...


You will note that in the interests of "balance", each news segment has a viewpoint from a "skeptic". We'll come to those guys in a minute.

First, I'd like to point out a massive piece of hypocrisy from the skeptical camp. How many times have we heard the line:

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"?

I've never cared much for this, myself: and I've literally, just while writing this, realised that it's a logical fallacy - the argument from personal incredulity, which Richard Dawkins is happy to cite against those who doubt Darwinism (like me), and yet is blind to his own tenacious grip on it when it comes to the like of ESP.

Anywayyy...

The consciousness project has been going for some time now, and considering its implications, has, in my view, been drastically underreported. Human attention can have a physical affect on electronic systems... and events, like 9/11, that get a large-scale response with intense human emotions involved, are registered before the event occurs.

Radical, right? Enough to turn our world upside-down?

Strangely, the skeptics have been a bit muted on this one. I was able to find this rather poor attempt at debunking it:

Anyone else suspect they know what's going on here? Various scientists claim to be baffled, so maybe I can help them out. Here's what's probably happening -- humans are being human. You see a spike in the numbers, you scan the news headlines to look for some big event. If you find something, then you can say that the spike you saw detected it. If you don't see anything, wait a bit and check again. Then when you find something, you can say that the spike you saw predicted it.

Note the Here's what's probably happening.

Here's what's actually happening: a skeptic, fired up with an unacknowledged argument from personal incredulity, attacks the GCP without actually looking at the data. If you doubt me, go to the website and check for yourselves how thoroughly they've covered it. That's why "various scientists claim to be baffled" - because they're scientists and have checked the protocols. The project has gone on for 10 years and has scored a number of notable successes. There's some great stuff about it in Lynne McTaggart's fascinating book The Field, which I commend to one and all.

Now let's have a quick look at the skeptics involved in the two reports I linked above...

First up there's Jerry The Skeptic. How did he get a gig debunking accredited scientists who've been working in their field for ten years? I don't know. Here's a rather revealing review on Amazon:

I am not an academic, I have a scientific bent, and philosophically I'm a thorough going realist...

So that's all it takes? A scientific bent? Do you think Jerry took the time to look at the data? If he did, would he have understood it? I don't think so.

Now, if you look at the website, you'll see that the GCP make available their raw data for anyone to download. If someone really wanted to, they could actually do the work and come up with some serious criticisms... if they could find any. So far, no-one has.

The other skeptic trotted out by the MSM is much more interesting: Jeff Scargle, who bears an uncanny likeness to Jerry on the news segments (when I first saw the clips I thought they were the same guy) but whose website picture is much prettier... click the link and check. Nice job, NASA.

Now, unlike Jerry, Jeff really is a scientist. I can't find much of his stuff on the web, but, again, a book review he wrote provides us with an interesting tidbit:

The theme of this book is the detection and characterization of chaos in dynamical systems, based on measurements of the system state as a function of time.

You'd think he might be a bit more trenchant than Jerry, but look at the clip again... he's on for less than two seconds. Weird.

It's possible that his analysis was too difficult for the target audience of presumped simps, or that what he said simply wasn't damning enough. I suspect if the story continues to gain ground, he'll be trotted out again.

And I'm hoping that the story will continue to gain ground. There is research to suggest that collective meditation can produce a calming effect: this was pioneered by the TM people, and of course has been rubbished simply because of presumed bias in the people concerned. However, of late, more and more people are looking to influence things this way and the notion of collective meditation as a way of averting or ameliorating unpleasant events and of "healing the planet" is starting to take hold.

Call me paranoid if you must (oh, come on! this is ATS - A Tinfoil-hat Speaks!) but it does seem to me that there are people who don't want this meme to take hold. Those who've looked at the work of Richard Hoagland will know what I mean - and in that context it's interesting that Jeff is from NASA.

If people wake up to the fact that they can change the world through collective meditation - you don't have to do anything or go anywhere, you just sit on your butt and think beautiful thoughts - the PTB have a real problem on their hands.

And there are already people trying to organise that kind of collective action:

www.glcoherence.org...
www.healingexperiment.com...

So watch out for growing disinfo about the GCP. It's the real deal and hard to deny. Under-reporting has only slowed things down a little and I suspect that there'll be a lot more to come.

Very interesting! I booked marked that site!

And I'm hoping that the story will continue to gain ground. There is research to suggest that collective meditation can produce a calming effect: this was pioneered by the TM people, and of course has been rubbished simply because of presumed bias in the people concerned. However, of late, more and more people are looking to influence things this way and the notion of collective meditation as a way of averting or ameliorating unpleasant events and of "healing the planet" is starting to take hold.

you know what is funny about what you said? I can imagine that the people that would put this concept down are the same people that when a church member is in the hospital and not doing well, they all get together and collectively "pray" for the individual.............. isn't that the same as a group meditation?

Thanks for posting this, it's interesting because I didn't know that the GCP had ever had any news coverage at all-what is getting trotted out a lot in the alternative media is the web bot and Cliff High, he's on radio shows all the time.

It would be cool to track both of these and see how often they have had corresponding data, the web bot is predictive and the GCP is real time, if I'm not mistaken, so some kind of backward tracking of the data might tell us something.

Great topic!!

Originally posted by Oolon
Very interesting! I booked marked that site!
you know what is funny about what you said? I can imagine that the people that would put this concept down are the same people that when a church member is in the hospital and not doing well, they all get together and collectively "pray" for the individual.............. isn't that the same as a group meditation?

Richard Hoagland maintains that the collective goodwill of Coast to Coast listeners aided his recovery from a heart attack.

I'm getting involved with the collective meditations myself, but what I'm trying to do is to engender feelings of peace within, the idea being that they will then percolate out through the collective psyche. I would say that this is different from the Christian idea of prayer, which is to appeal to a discarnate entity (Jesus, Mary, the saint of your choice, or, of course, the big G himself) for help.

This, of course, perpetuates the idea that people are powerless. If only your imaginary friend can help, you're dependent on them... or their Earthly representative.

There are those who maintain that Yahweh is not the "true" God, but a lesser entity who did stuff for the Israelites. Given that this entity seemed rather keen on blood sacrifice and was a bit capricious, it's an idea I can see having some appeal.

Similarly, I had a girlfriend who was a full-on SGI Buddhist. I was never keen on chanting (it does strange things to your breathing patterns) and didn't care much for the iconography of it - you have to chant at a scroll which you treat as holy, it has to have its own special box and you light candles in front of it and so on. She tried to convert me but I just couldn't shake the feeling that I didn't know to what or whom I was chanting.

If I'm anything, I'm a Taoist. There are all sorts of sensible things Taoism has to say about this kind of thing, but Taoists don't proselytise. I'm tired and off to bed... if you wan't to know more about the Taoist perspective, a good place to start is the books Relaxing Into Your Being and The Great Stillness by B K Frantzis.

[edit on 8-2-2009 by rich23]

I am myself a big supporter of, for lack of a better term ('cause these suck), 'consciousness' and 'human potential' and 'psi'.

However, I think there is some legitimate critique regarding the global consciousness project -- from others in the parapsychology field, not from outside scoffers.

I'm busy right now but I will try and get back to this thread in the next couple days (gotta check sources) with some examples.

I think it (RNG 'influence' measure) is a fabulous idea; but I also think (my opinion only, here) that it has failed to live up to its hoped-for potential.

Best,
PJ


[edit on 18-3-2009 by RedCairo]

I'll be interested to see genuine criticism, but I think if something fails to live up to its hoped-for potential, that might just mean that the expectations placed on it were inappropriate.

Do post again, though, I'll be interested.