Can This Black Box See Into the Future? (Random Event Generator)

[Dover]

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?


DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.... Cont'd

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649

Global Consciousness Project: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

[Elidor]

1. This is FASCINATING! I love it!

It's the intersection of science and the paranormal and it reads better than a novel. I may have to repost this in the Spirituality Group. Vote it up!

[OneBlueSky]

2. wonder if it can generate winning lottery numbers . . . :) n/t

.

[VegasWolf]

15. Yes, before everyone gets too excited, lets see it do something

concrete like that.

[Archae]

3. Unfortunately, like so many other claims, it's pure crapola.

February 11, 2005. RedNova.com has a nauseatingly fulsome article today about the Global Consciousness Project (also called the EGG project). The article falsely claims great success for the forerunner of this project, the work of Robert Jahn, Roger Nelson, and Brenda Dunne at Princeton. For an accurate account of their work, see my entry on the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Project.

Dean Radin, in his book The Conscious Universe (1997) gives a detailed account of his take on the work of Roger Nelson in “field consciousness.” This work demonstrates what kind of contribution to consciousness studies we can expect from parapsychology. According to Radin, when groups of people focus their minds on the same thing, they may influence “the world at large.” There may be something like a “global mind” that is spawned by the interconnections of many individual minds. What evidence is there for such a claim? The evidence is statistical and involves alleged anomalies.

According to Radin, “In the basic field-consciousness experiment, we measure fluctuations in a group’s attention while simultaneously measuring fluctuations in the behavior of one or more physical systems” (1997: 161). For example, data from random event generators (REGs) is collected for the time just before, during, and after a “global event” like watching the funeral of Princess Diana or Mother Teresa. The researchers then look for fluctuations of order in the REG outputs from various sources around the world. Chance fluctuations of order are then measured against any fluctuations of order during these and other events where large numbers of people might be focusing on the same thing. Then, cumulative odds against chance for the random data collected before, during, and right after the global events are calculated.

http://skepdic.com/refuge/bunk23.html#global

[northamericancitizen]

5. Archae, I read the link you posted

I respectfully think that you are mixing up different paradigms that shouldn't be.

I dont't believe in "miracle workers". I don't believe that human beings or machine can predict the future and I don't believe that "global consciousness" can influence a machine.

On the other side I like to believe that all human being have accesss to a certain kind of shared energy.

Call it collective memory, subconcious enlightment or any other unmesurable phenomena that could influenced a large number of human beings.

Here I am not talking about influencing a specific event in a timely way. It has more to do with evolution. Good or bad.

[lala_rawraw]

4. So, Impeachment or no?

Or are we all to head north like our favo poet/prophet told us? Wait... they found this? Like walking by they noticed something? How come I can never find such goodies, damn it. I can't even win an i-Pod (trying to for a year, lol).

[salvorhardin]

6. Well lala,

You too can have your very own Random Event Generator! Simply take an old transistor radio and tune it midway between two stations (I like to tune it between a Evangelical Christain station and a Heavy Metal station to help maximize the randomness).

Then you just clip the speaker leads and connect it up to an old Radio Shack voltmeter.

Next go to this web page and pick the first number you see:
http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/ISC/dataB/isc/C/pi10000.txt

We'll call that number s.

Now take readings from the voltmeter every s seconds.

Finally, every time you take a reading tell your wife, husband or kid to do something useful around the house. Voila! Instant Random Event Generator.

Now, watch Bill O'Rielly (to ensure maximum emotive force) and observe whether or not your wife, husband or kid actually do what you tell them to.

[lala_rawraw]

8. HEHEHEH

[aneerkoinos]

7. Reversed arrow of time

The famous Bierman-Radin experiments show that perseptions can cause physical effects backward in time:

"8. Conclusion

Human physiology changes in predictable ways in anticipation of and after exposure to emotional visual stimuli. In a series of experiments reported by Radin (1997), it was found that even when stimuli were adequately randomized, so that the upcoming stimuli could not be inferred, that anticipatory responses (as measured by changes in skin conductance) before exposure to emotional pictures were significantly larger than before exposure to calm pictures.

The results of three new experiments, the first and third close replications and the second a conceptual replication of Radin’s studies, confirm what was called a "presentiment" or pre-feeling effect: The anticipation or "presponse" preceding emotional pictures in these studies, measured again as changes in skin conductance, was greater than the presponse preceding calm pictures. One of the three studies had an independently significant over-all effect (Mann-Whitney U: z = 2.4; p = 0.008, one tailed), and the compound score for the three studies pooled was significant (z = 2.16; p < 0.016, one tailed). Examination of the data suggest different presponse patterns for specific categories of stimuli, e.g., violent vs. erotic pictures.

Sequential response patterns and other possible artifacts were examined as a possible normal causal explanation of the data, but it is concluded that these data only seem explicable as a form of "backaction" or retro-causal effect due to conscious experience. Backaction was discussed in the light of the role of time-symmetry in physics. It was speculated that consciousness plays the role of a highly coherent absorber and is therefore responsible for constructive "backaction" rather than destructive retro-causal effects which are thought to arise from non-coherent absorbers."
http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Anomalous.html


Matti Pitkänen ( http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/ ) has extensive discussion about these experiments and their meaning for his theory:
"Consider now the TGD based explanation. In quantum jump deterministic quantum history is replaced with a new one: this means that, not only the future, but also the past changes. Therefore, if the mean galvanic skin response of the subject person provides a faithful representation for some aspects of subject person's deterministic quantum history, the entire time record about skin response must change to a new one in any quantum jump. If subject person experiences a highly emotional stimulus, the moment of consciousness is expected to be more intensive than for calm stimulus in the sense that the non-determinism associated with the quantum jump is expected to cause observable effects in a larger space-time volume of the quantum history (represented to a good approximation as quantum average space-time surface geometrically). Therefore also the change of the quantum past is expected to be more dramatic as it indeed seems to be according to the results of the experiment.
At first it might seem that there are no means to test whether the past has changed at the moment of consciousness. The experimental arrangement of Bierman and Radin, although certainly not originally planned to test quantum jumps between histories concept, circumvents in an ingenious manner this difficulty by comparing the skin responses associated with calm and emotional trials. Standard physics, which is based on assumption that there is no signal propagation backwards in time, predicts that the average
skin responses before the stimulus should be identical for calm and emotial trials. This is not the case so that the results of the experiments indeed support TGD based world view."
More: ftp://rock.helsinki.fi/pub/misc/matpitka/cbook/timesc.pdf

[Dookus]

9. Hrmm..

To understand this better, I'd like to see if they had an a priori definition of what constitutes a statistical anomaly. For example, if it were simply a coin-flipping machine, I'd like to know up-front how many heads or tails in a row is considered meaningful.

Then, I'd like to see how often one of these "anomalies" occurs. In fact, I'd like to see a graph for the last few years, which every anomaly clearly marked so I could check it against real-world events.

How many anomalies have they had that don't correspond to major world events? What time-frame do they allow for an anomaly to correspond to an event? In the WTC case, it occurred 4 hours early.

Here's an article about Dean Radin, referenced in the article, and how he dismisses some out of hand.

http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/radin2002.htm


To me, it looks like they find some event and then look back at the data to see if there was any "spike" within a day or two of the event. To be meaningful, they should announce up front what constitutes such a spike, then immediately publicize when such a spike occurs - every time - so we can then see if they relate to events. It shouldn't work the other way around.

[Archae]

10. Exactly.

That's why in the link I posted, the word "shoehorning" was mentioned.

Some event occurs, these "researchers" go back and look for a "spike."

[aneerkoinos]

11. Anomaly

That's easy, statistical anomaly is deviation by significant degree from the expetation of 50/50 zeros/ones or heads/tails. I'm not expert in that field of math, or any field of math, but I'm sure you can find the relevant info from the site, if you are really interested.

It seems that they have published all the data for public domain, so if you are not just making rhetorical questions but sincere ones, you should be able to find answers by taking a little trouble.


The methodological questions related to probability calculations are pretty complex, and what limited understanding I have the worries you are presenting seem to have been taken care of. Proving it to you is a different matter, because quite obviously neither of us has the required understanding of statistical math to make informed methodological judgements of that depth.


>>To me, it looks like they find some event and then look back at the data to see if there was any "spike" within a day or two of the event. To be meaningful, they should announce up front what constitutes such a spike, then immediately publicize when such a spike occurs - every time - so we can then see if they relate to events. It shouldn't work the other way around.<<

To me it looks like that is exactly what they are doing - events like widely published catastrofies of course cannot be announced beforhand, but events like New Years Eve can be. So the choise of events to be compared is necessarly somewhat arbitrary, but that does not make the argument invalid. To my understanding the events they have selected for closer scrutiny (before looking at the data) are compared to average level of fluctuation, and the deviations from those averages in the "world events" chosen for study seem to be significant.

[aneerkoinos]

12. double standards

That "skeptic" article is in fact pretty crappy as evidence of debunking.

When believing an "refutation" about scietific experiment, one should expect the same scientific standards from the piece refuting the evidence as from the original work. This was just an interview, not a scientific study even attempting to seriously point out any methodological flaws, on the contrary, from the snappy oneliner responses from Radin and other comments in the article it can be quite clearly read between the lines that Radin and the interviewer are not on best personal terms.

So as for debunking purposes, this does not come even close to serious and unbiased attempt, and anyone willing and ready to accept this article as evidence of debunking is just showing his own wishfull thinking.

[Dookus]

13. I didn't say it debunked anything...

it mentioned some interesting things. It wasn't peer-reviewed research.

[seventythree]

14. thanks, I love it, too.

isn't this akin to that famous sociological phenomenon when the monkeys started washing their yams, and when a certain number started doing it on one island, they started doing it, inexplicably, on another?

[Dookus]

18. that never happened

http://www.csicop.org/si/9605/monkey.html

http://www.sumeria.net/cosmo/bunk.html

[seventythree]

20. well shoot,

I liked that "story."

[Dookus]

21. heheh

I know. For some reason, this is one story that disappoints everybody when they learn the truth.

[Dover]

16. Aren't there some similarities here to Chaos Theory?

I'm guessing that if that is true then this suggests that our collective minds may play a role in the "ordering" which underlies chaos.

[pmbryant]

17. No

Chaos theory is about how even regular processes can give rise to practically unpredictable consequences.

--Peter

[DrGonzoLives]

23. And conversley

that even seemingly random processes (like weather), if looked at from a large enough frame of reference, start exhibiting order.

[Squeegee]

19. My problems with this research

Since relatively major events happen every day around the world, you can essentially match any deviation with just about any event that is close to it in time. It seems to me that it is too easy to fit data to the desired results.

If I were to construct this experiment, I would have some sort of control group. However, a control group might be difficult to for this kind of experiment. So, another approach might be to have three independent research groups doing the exact same thing but do not communicate with each other. If all three groups publish similar results, the correlations would be much less biased lending more legitimacy to their conclusions.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

22. kick

[NationalEnquirer]

24. Sounds like a joke, but it is quite interesting.