The black box random generators
15-Feb-05
OK, my atheism is not completely without belief in the unknown, just the unknowable. In this regard, I differ somewhat from my grandfather (who was the first-generation atheist in our family) and my mother– I do believe in “magic” in a sense, and I believe in the power of human belief and imagination. I think the cure for cancer lies half in hard-core medicine and half in the power of the mind over the body. I believe that magic, paranormal phenomenon, psychic events, and miracles (well, most miracles…. some are clearly manufactured) are, or could be, the result of an underlying energy that we have not been able to identify and quantify. The way electricity and magnetism were magic until they were understood. The way quantum forces are only starting to be understood, and when they are, there will be a little less magic and a little more science, but in truth, the result will be that things that were once miraculous can become commonplace. In some ways, people might see this as a loss of magic, but…. to make everyday miracles is a magic unto itself, no?
But I digress….
The Global Consciousness Project is basically a bunch of random number generators, scattered all over the world. On September 11, 2001, it “spiked.” I knew this, thought it was significant, but also found it odd that no one was really talking about it.
Apparently, that’s not the first time it’s happened, nor the last. It spiked just before the tsunami (big surprise). I wonder if it spiked before or during the Iran earthquake. BIG disasters, and BIG celebrations (Y2K new year’s) seem to cause it to generate numbers not-so-randomly.
The big news, of course, is that it has done this, in the case of 9/11 and the tsunami, before the events happen, which leads to all sorts of questions about time and consciousness and psychic phenomena. But even if it had happened at exactly the same time, that’s still a phenomenal event.
The counterargument, as provided by the Skeptic Report, is that the methodology is suspect, which is, I think, a fair criticism of the research (though it’s odd– the main target of the article is Dean Radin, who is only mentioned in the RedNova article as working on the image-response experiments, not the Global Consciousness Project). It’s clear that we’re at the very beginning of a path to knowledge about this, not the end. The Global Consciousness Project’s data cannot be easily dismissed, but they also cannot be accepted as they are.
However, I think they’re going to need to ally with quantum physicists instead of parapsychologists if they really want to get adequate credibility in the scientific world.