The Playground of Consciousness

Part 1: Experiments and Experience

Science and Consciousness

Consciousness and space-time
Conscious perception
Experimenter bias
Links

To understand the entire Kosmos, including our thoughts, emotions, and everything that is thinkable or ‘conceivably conceivable’, we need to take a look at the consciousness side as well. We will look at investigations into the nature of interactions between consciousness and machines, and also at the nature of perception.

Consciousness and space-time

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research project was established in 1979. It evolved from a project proposed by an undergraduate student in electronics to build a device to test low-level psychokinetic effects. Over the next two decades, many thousands of experiments were conducted, and the program was expanded to include other types of psychic phenomena.

The experiments run roughly as follows. An electronic device called a ‘Random Event Generator’ generates either a + or a -. The device is tuned so that there is a chance of 50% either way. An electronic counter keeps track of the number of +’s en -‘s in a given span of time. The test subject is then asked to try to influence the device in either direction. The correlations between the stated intent of the subject and the output of the device are then studied using thorough statistical methods.

The exact details of the analysis would lead us too far. We will simply list some of the major conclusions of the research.

There is a small but statistically very significant effect of the subject’s intention on the output.
The effect is independent of physical distance, suggesting that the connection is not physical in the traditional sense. All known forms of radiation become weaker at large distances.
The effect is independent of time. When subjects were asked to influence the device at a time in the future or in the past, similar results were obtained.
The effect is dependent on the subject. Some people score better than others across the board.
The combined efforts of several people produce more significant effects, especially when there is an emotional bond between them.
The environment has a definite influence. The effects increase at intimate meetings, during rituals and theatre performances, in sacred places…

These findings confirm many of the results of our physics experiments. Consciousness does have an influence on physical matter. Intentions in the present can influence events in both the future and the past. Finally, spatial separation is not a prohibiting factor in the activities of consciousness.

Conscious perception

In another class of studies at Princeton, the ability of subjects to acquire information about spatially and temporally remote geographical targets, otherwise inaccessible by any known sensory means, has been thoroughly demonstrated over several hundred carefully conducted experiments.

One participant, the “agent”, to be stationed at a randomly selected location at a given time, and there to observe and record impressions of the details and ambience of the scene. A second participant, the “percipient”, located far from the scene and with no prior information about it, tries to sense its composition and character and to report these in a similar format to the agent’s description.

As before, we will simply list the most important results.

There is a significant degree of correlation between the accounts bu percipient and agent of the scene, both in generalities and in details.
The results are independent of physical distance. Whether the scene was 10 or 10,000 miles away doesn’t make a difference.
The results are independent of time.
As before, some people get better results than others.
The method is not always precise. Sometimes, events that occurred just before or after the designated time period are observed.

A variation of this experiment is to let the agent pick an object as a target and put it in a special place. The percipient is then to identify the object. Dozens of informal experiments show that:

A completely accurate description is relatively rare. Most often, certain essential properties of the object are correctly perceived, although they may not be sufficient to identify the target..
The impressions are often symbolic or associative rather than literal. For example, an impression of a ‘copper disk’ had nothing to do with the target: a carved crystal. However, the crystal was a gift from a close friend, who went by the name ‘CopperPenny’.
The previous example also shows that emotional connections are important.

Experimenter Bias

The so-called “experimenter effect” describes the observation that different experimenters, using similar methodologies with no detectable differences, may arrive at different experimental outcomes.

In 1997, Richard Wiseman, a skeptic, and Marilyn Schiltz, a ‘believer’ in psychic phenomena, worked together on a remarkable experiment.

Schlitz had designed a rigorous randomized trial evaluating whether subjects could detect another person staring at them from a distance (over a closed-circuit television system). The study yielded statistically significant positive results. When the skeptical Richard Wiseman failed to replicate the results, he invited her to England to repeat the experiment along with him in two separate but equal trials using the same subjects and the same equipment, and once again she got positive results and he got negative ones.

This is only one study, but it nevertheless points to an intriguing possibility, namely that the beliefs, intentions, and expectations of an experimenter may play an active role in shaping experimental outcomes. This is in stark contrast to the dominant scientific model of which explicitly has the absence of the influence of experimenter bias as one of the corner stones of its experimental methods.

Resources

More on remote viewing and the nature of perception can be found in the following places:

Visit the home of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research.
A good collection of links can be found at Yahoo!.