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Observer Ensoulment
Scientist all over the world are hosting data collectors [called eggs]
in an attempt to measure energy they observe without affecting it while
trying to figure if they affected it, in theory that is. It's more to
get you thinking, I think.
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Mind over Matter
27 April 2007 - theage.com.au
Can the presence of human consciousness be measured by
machines? A global experiment is in the throes of finding out, writes
Katherine Kizilos.
THE EGG IS MADE OF metal and is about the size of a matchbox. It sits
in Graham Andrew's software company in Hallett Cove, Adelaide, where
it releases a random stream of zeros and ones all day, every day. Its
extraordinary purpose is to see if the thoughts and emotions generated
by humanity can be measured by more than our hearts and minds.
It is to see, in other words, if the presence of human consciousness
can be detected by machines.
The Adelaide egg - or random event generator, as it is also known - is
one of 70 that have gradually been distributed around the world, on
every inhabited continent, since 1998.
Each of the eggs is connected to a server and the data is sent to
Princeton University, where it is stored and analysed. The eggs use a
quantum level process, either thermal noise or electron tunnelling, as
the source of the random data. Graphs are made of the information
generated by the eggs and attempts are made to discern a pattern.
Common sense says the eggs should produce white noise, and mostly they
do, but Roger Nelson, the director of the project, says sometimes
minor deviations occur in the data and that these deviations tend to
coincide with international events such as the September 11 terrorist
attacks, the Boxing Day tsunami, or New Year celebrations.
Speaking from Princeton, New Jersey, Nelson says the September 11
pattern (an upward curve in the graph) began hours before the first
plane hit the World Trade Centre in New York. He does not know why the
shape of the graph should have changed before the attacks took place.
The Global Consciousness Project website divides information about the
experiment into two separate but complementary halves. On one side is
the scientific explanation, on the other artistic and philosophical
approaches.
The scientific side includes technical specifications of the eggs and
gives Nelson's background with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies
Research (or PEAR) laboratory. It is this work that laid the
foundation for the Global Consciousness Project.
For more than 25 years PEAR studied "whether sensitive electronic
devices including random components might be affected by special
states of consciousness, including strong emotions and directed
intention". The website says the experiment "yielded an enormous
database, with a bottom line indicating a small but significant effect
of human intention on random data sequences".
In 1997 Nelson attempted to see if two events causing a mass public
display of emotion - the funerals of Princess Diana and of Mother
Teresa - would affect the behaviour of random event generators. From
this it was a small step to proposing that the eggs be established
around the world as a means of assessing whether global events could
influence their behaviour. Advances in internet technology meant that
the research could be undertaken simultaneously around the planet.
The idea that the activities of the human mind can affect the physical
world is familiar in the world of fairytale and myth, but does it have
a place in science? Roger Nelson hypothesises that interacting
"consciousness fields" might provide a mechanism, but concedes that
the observer effect could explain the data received so far by the
Global Consciousness Project. In science, the term "observer effect"
refers to changes that the act of observing can make on the phenomenon
being observed. In the strange world of quantum physics, for example,
the observer is apparently able to influence the inherently
unpredictable behaviour of subatomic particles, which will either act
as a particle or as a wave depending on what the observer wishes to
measure.
But the observer effect is known in other areas of science, too. The
placebo effect in medicine is a well-known example of how expectations
(by patients and doctors) can influence the effectiveness of a
treatment. The observer effect also has an application in the social
sciences and psychology when people and laboratory animals change
their behaviour as a result of being watched.
IN AN ARTICLE ON THE observer effect, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake
describes how some experimenters appeared to influence the behaviour
of random event generators and gives the example of "Helmut Schmidt,
the inventor of the Schmidt machine, a random number generator whose
output can apparently be affected by willing certain patterns to
emerge".
In the course of his researches, Schmidt, an accomplished meditator,
found "that he is often his own best subject", in other words, that
the machines were more responsive if Schmidt himself were conducting
the experiment.
For sceptics, results such as this simply demonstrate how the outcome
of an experiment can be skewed by the biases of the researcher, but
for Sheldrake the influence of someone like Schmidt on a random event
generator has more interesting implications. If it is possible for
results to be influenced in this way, "then the conventional
separation between experimenters and the subjects of their
investigation breaks down," he writes. "Moreover, if people can
influence physical events . . . then the conventional separation
between mind and matter breaks down too."
Sheldrake's comments can also serve as a response to the central
criticism of the project: why should the information generated by the
eggs bear any relationship to what goes on in the minds of human
beings? The idea that this data may have meaning mirrors an ancient
way of looking at the material world - as a place that reflects the
energy and intentions of the beings who live within it, that is
ensouled.
Not surprisingly, the metaphor used by the Global Consciousness
Project to describe the experiment is a scientific one, in tune with
the spirit of the age. The website says the eggs dotted around the
globe resemble "the placement of electrodes on a human head for
electroencephalogram or EEG recordings, though of course the data
would not be fluctuating voltages, but randomly varying numbers".
When the experiment was being set up, researcher Greg Nelson suggested
the network could be seen as an "electrogaiagram" - Gaia being the
name of the Greek goddess personifying the earth and of James
Lovelock's hypothesis that our planet is a superorganism which
actively works to protect the conditions for life - and as a result
his colleagues began to call the experiment the EGG Project.
Roger Nelson describes the experiment as "an important insight into
human behaviour on a large scale" which potentially "might help us
consider a more credible, co-operative future than we are (now) able
to imagine".
Yet he also concedes that the data, so far, is not solid enough for
global consciousness to be said to exist at all. It is not possible,
for example, to look at the data and predict with any accuracy what
(if anything) the eggs may be responding to, although some of the
results do raise interesting questions.
Nelson says, for example, that since the project began, 600
earthquakes of a magnitude of six or more on the Richter scale have
been recorded. When the earthquakes occur "there is a pattern", he
says, "a negative trace that bottoms out right at the time of the
earthquake. But it only happens with the ones on land, not the ones in
the ocean, where nobody knows about them. With the earthquakes that
matter to people, the data changes."
The eggs also seem to respond to local events - the generators that
are closest to an earthquake, for example, tend to show the most
emphatic response. The website gives the poignant example of New
Zealander Barry Fenn who hosted an egg in Auckland and who died on May
22, 2000.
The eggs across the networks showed a downward curve in the hours
preceding his death, the website noting "this could, of course, simply
be chance fluctuation, although this part of the graph looks quite
distinctive".
The two New Zealand eggs also showed deviations at the time of his
death, forming a symmetrical figure on the graph. Writing about this,
Nelson says: "In the individual graphs, the trends during the last few
hours before Barry took his leave are remarkably clear. In the
composite figure, I get an impression of a great, common sigh across
the network, beginning eight or 10 hours before the hour of passing,
and then, afterward, a resumption of the normal random walk. Life goes
on."
GRAHAM ANDREW SAYS he volunteered to host an egg in Adelaide after
attending a meeting of the local Jungian society. A talk was given on
the project and he realised that, as a software engineer, he had the
technical expertise to host an egg (in November 2003 he installed an
egg in his company office). Andrew says he does not contact Princeton
himself although he takes an active interest in the project and often
checks out the website. He has no trouble believing that the eggs
might be detecting the energy generated by a collective unconscious as
proposed by Carl Jung.
The website suggests other possibilities too: the morphic fields
suggested by Rupert Sheldrake as a way of explaining the process of
evolution; the noosphere posited by the French Jesuit paleontologist
and biologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which he envisaged as a
"planetary thinking network" and part of the earth's growth towards a
higher state of consciousness.
Or then again we could be looking at nothing more than a tantalising
puzzle; a giant experiment that has found traces of what it was
looking for, as observer effect theory predicted it would.
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The
The
Labors in the Spirits of
Science
Living on the Lost Planet 
