The Global consciousness project

[Michael Larkin]

This blog post might seem to be a complete non-sequitur, but it relates to Mike's recent blog post about belief. I don't intend to say very much myself, but leave it up to you, if you have time and inclination, to follow it up.

First, what is the Global Consciousness Project? Well, if you visit the GCP site at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/intro_bottom.html you will find a brief intro that begins:

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently "causing" them to produce non-random patterns. A description of the technical implementation is given under procedures.

The experimental results clearly show that a broader examination of this phenomenon is warranted. In recent work, prior to the Global Consciousness Project, an array of REG devices in Europe and the US showed non-random activity during widely shared experiences of deeply engaging events. For example, the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana, and the international Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, created shared emotions and a coherence of consciousness that appeared to be correlated with structure in the otherwise random data. In the fully developed project, a world-spanning array of labile REG detectors is connected to computers running software to collect data and send it to a central server via the Internet. This network is designed to document and display any subtle, but direct effects of our collective consciousness reacting to global events. The research hypothesis predicts the appearance of coherence and structure in the globally distributed data collected during major events that engage the world population.

Before you plunge into the site (home page at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/index.html), you might find, as I did, a couple of podcasts to be useful listening, in the following order:

1. http://www.skeptiko.com/73-skeptoid-brian-dunning/
2. http://www.skeptiko.com/74-radin-nelson-global-consciousness/

Listen and judge for yourself whether Brian Dunning, the "sceptic" in the first interview, is a true sceptic, i.e. one who has an open mind, or just a blind believer, a prime example of someone who doesn't know what evidence-based faith means.

As long people continue to have blind belief in politics, science and religion, the world will continue going to hell in a hand cart. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that more human misery has been caused through blind belief than pretty much anything I can think of.