What follow is at the very margins of interest to most readers of this
list, but I think it's of potential significance.
Some list members will know that I speak up occasionally in favor of a few
apparently reliable investigators doing work in the field of parapsychology
or anomalies research, especially those at PEAR, the cut-price lab run
under sufferance at Princeton University. Dr Roger Nelson and others at
PEAR have been conducting a curious open-ended experiment for several
years, based on the premise that consciousness might indeed have a global
or holistic character, detectable in its occasional interactions with
mechanical instrumentation. To this end, they have been building a network
of independent random event generators and recorders in various parts of
the world. Their surmise (on rather wishy-washy grounds, by my standards)
is that events capturing the emotional attention of a large part of the
world's population will bias or skew the output of these REGs in a
systematic and statistically significant fashion.
I immediately noted, a few hours after the WTC event blanketed the world's
media, that this terrible event was a perfect natural experiment. If their
instruments failed to show a major blip, this would serve as a suitable
refutation of the theory that mind can couple `paranormally' to machines
(or perhaps that we live inside a simulation using common objects or
macros). The preliminary results are now in, and they are rather... striking.
Go to http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
and hit the link titled
Analysis of the EGG response to the terrorist attacks on WTC and
Pentagon September 11, 2001.
There are charts, analysis, and further links.
>An estimate for the probability can be made, and lies
>between 0.003 and 0.0003 (an odds ratio on the order of 1 in
>1000). If we extrapolate the anomalous trend, it begins at about
>04:00 (08:00 GMT), some four hours before the first World
>Trade Center tower was hit.
Verrrrry interesting.
Damien Broderick
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