NELSON Tells you the Second Thing you need to Know

This day's entry will be about the first SSE talk listed above. Roger Nelson is not a researcher in my field of study, but is a researcher that I looked forward to meeting with and listening to every time I was at an SSE convention. He is one of the people in my life that I instinctively liked immediately... so there might be some bias in this blog's presentation, but frankly, Roger's research just speaks for itself so I don't believe so.

Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn's lifelong colleague at the Princeton PEAR Lab, introduced Roger. That was especially appropriate for [as you can see from her face], he was like a young pup experimentalist that she and Bob Jahn "grew up" into a mature research scholar. The affection between them was palpable --- something never seen at a science convention.

The slide above reveals that Roger has been about this business for seventeen years worth of work [probably with a little overlap of the two tasks]. With Bob Jahn and Brenda Dunne and their cohorts, the PEAR Lab demonstrated one of the most significant "lab" discoveries in world history: that the human mind could intentionally affect the microcosmic world at the electron/ Quantum Indeterminate level. This demonstration, phrased in old-fashioned [but appropriate] terms, gives "scientific" data upon which to base the "belief" that the human will can influence the micro-structure of physical reality to produce "choices". Or even simpler: Free Will is Real. The Jahn team never expressed their results in their scientific papers this way, as they wished to keep even the deductions [powerful as they were] to a minimum. But the effects of intention on the quantum processes in their Random-Event-Generators [REGs], demonstrated that if human intention could operate on these "mechanical devices", how much easier would it be to operate upon the electron activities in the brain from which "chosen action" would flow. Some day in the less-hung-up future, Bob Jahn and the PEAR experiments will be recognized as the great leap forward in demonstrating the connection between "soul" awareness [consciousness] and the base of physical textbook reality.

Of course, the dominant material-reductionists will not have it, and so they steadfastly ignore the work, hoping it will fade away. Roger doesn't dwell much on negativity [one of the reasons that he's so likable]. So he has merely surged ahead with the next phase of the research: seeing if groups of devices can be affected by conscious awareness and response. After some rudimentary fairly localized field testing made this look at least an interesting project, he set sail on a worldwide array of REGs.

The three slides above are, I hope, self-explanatory. Roger got many colleagues [you can go to his Global Consciousness Project site and get the current count and a map similar to the above] to host his "EGGs". REGs affectionately transposed into the nickname "EGGs" and the EGG hosts were distributed all over the world. The actual distribution was organic, dependent upon who knew about the Project, and who Roger trusted with keeping their EGG safe and healthy, as far as function 24/7 and sending their datastream "home" to Roger's lab. {As an aside, I've always thought that I should offer to host an EGG, but never got up the gumption to ask. Now Roger has plenty of "coverage" in the USA Great Lakes area, so it's probably not very useful anymore.}

Go to Roger's site for any true physics details as to how the system works. Very crudely, each EGG constantly has a current in one side of a separated space. The current in a sense "builds up, pushing against" the separating barrier. At the Quantum level, some electrons from that "cloud" will tunnel through the barrier --- you can just see some manifestation of that as a light "fog" in the "empty" side of the chambers above.

The amount of this Quantum Tunneling is not regular in amounts like an assembly line. Sometimes an "average amount" goes on, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. One can sample the "empty" side's resultant voltage to measure the fluctuating amounts of tunneled charged electrons moment-by-moment. This is the type of non-determined system which PEAR found influenceable by intention. Roger wanted to see if a worldwide array of these could be influenced by world events. "Influence" would be defined by a significant statistical deviation from the average expected Quantum Tunneling flow.

There are two sorts of devices: the Mindsong and the Orion, pictured above. Using slightly different technologies, they sample the same thing and, by a lot of testing, are equally good at responding to this sort of influence.

Roger constructed a general statement of the research hypothesis, as you can read above. The Project then went on to collect the data streams continuously and blindly. The idea was that, without knowing what the EGGs were cumulatively recording, if an event occurred in the world which one might speculate could have a general statistical effect on the array, DID it? This is good methodology, as whether one picks all the "right" events or not, one simply measures the effect and reports: one event did occur when the array evinced an abnormal distribution of statistical significance, and another event did not. Ultimately you should be able to refine the working hypothesis to: events of this type seem correlated to statistically significant data diversions in the EGG Array. Finally one may hypothesize that the fairly consistent correlation begs the conclusion that certain events were a cause of the diversion of Array status. Or: certain events are responded to by some accumulated numbers of human consciousnesses and their response can be crudely measured by the EGGs.

Across any given period of time, Roger's central collecting point gets a wildly zig-zagging data trace for the group of EGGs. This wildness rockets up and down around a central flat "average-to-be-expected line". {the box on the left}. The zig-zagging is because every EGG is responding with its own brand of Quantum indeterminism --- some "behaving" pretty close to the expected average, but others winging it higher or lower.

When you sample these critters, their behavior can be graphed as in the middle box, and it shows what you'd expect for a statistical process, a Bell-shaped curve "centered" on the expected average. Roger has sampled his array many times just to check that this is going on, and the array properly behaves.

Now what he wants to see is: when an unusual event occurs, does this Bell-shaped curve slide left or right away from the normal "average" position? Does it look like "something" caused it to move? And again: this would mean that the unusual event was coincident with excess tunneling or less-than-normal tunneling in a portion of the EGGs.

That third box [to the right] shows the sort of cumulative "deviation" of the array over a lot of general sampling trials. The cumulative signal line {in Red} should blunder about around the flat central line, and it does. If the array was misbehaving, that red jaggedy line should be cumulatively leaving the flat average line and going "north" into unlikely probabilities. Roger often uses a blue arc to represent a probability line "over" which it is statistically unlikely that the event is only chance. {I think that the blue one above is the five-out-of-100 line, but it might be lower odds yet. }. When you get a graph which rides up to the blue "unlikely" line and above, the honest researcher should begin to wonder what is going on, since it statistically shouldn't be. The realworld vision of this is that too many electrons [or way too few] are tunneling across the barriers in the devices, while these dramatic world events are going on, and Roger's cumulative counting system is plotting too high or too low "red data points" on the graph.

The question, phrased differently, then is: When a certain type of world event occurs, why do the EGGs register non-random statistical behavior? Why are more [or less] than normal electrons tunneling then?

Since the foundational PEAR Lab experiments showed that individual conscious intention could cause this to happen in an individual device, are the grouped consciousnesses of humanity causing the grouped devices of the array to act non-normally??

Here's a pair of event examples. On the left a disastrous factory fire in Pakistan, and on the right a car-bombing in Baghdad. The EGGs ignored the factory fire, the redline zigzagging around the flat average, but seemed to respond to the car-bombing, rising resolutely out-of-the-statistical norm . Again two things:

1). Roger samples the array to look for evidence that his EGGs are blundering about like graph two, and they don't do that in time intervals where no dramatic world event is going on; and
2). Roger understands that when he gets an arising that this does not mean anything more than something happened to push the array out of norm. Coincidence is not causality, but a whole lot of similar coincidence is getting pretty close to being there.

Also note Roger's notation above: About 70% of the incidents looked at "show departures correlated with what seems to be conscious effects on the EGG array". One of his goals is to amass enough incidents [I believe that he has several hundred by now] to be able to learn of a certain type of event in the world and predict the EGG array behavior before looking at it.

 Roger had much more to say, but it's on about a dozen more slides, plus my back isn't having a good day. So, I'll get to that next time. I PROMISE.

Peace and Health and Blessings in this fine old world --- which might just be a little more "connected" than we thought.