M I N D D O E S MATTER (part 1)
‘‘Yes, mind does matter.’’
-Abhijith Marathakam
I was fascinated when I read from the book “The Lost Symbol” by Dan brown, about the ever wondering Mind-Matter relationship.
In this brilliant work of fiction, an organization, called IONS (International Organization of Noetic Sciences), frequently pops up. Out of curiosity I simply Googled it, and was successful in finding the IONS official website.
The resources it supplied were Awesome. More than the usual self help manuals’ mantras and blabs, these resources had clarity of scientific proofs and experimentally reached conclusions .Moreover , when my madding curiosity lead me to more deeper levels of M-M research programs I was awestruck and that’s what compelled me to write up this article.
Budding
From childhood I was always having some conceptions, maybe false, but many of these shaped the way I looked at the world and the way I looked on how the world looked at me. Just like any other kid brought up in my culture, I too was told of stories, of great lords like Lord Krishna, Sree Ram, Lord Shiva and their lordly skills and powers. Vedic logics and traditional practices showed me no room of doubt about “What exactly is god?” “God lived everywhere, watching everything, controlling, maintaining the balance of life.” I thought, rather believed.
Those days were having blessed vibrancies, I now recall. Even the simple things I do to help, care or raise others filled my mind with joy. Only because I believed that god loved kids who are kind to others and he’ll definitely return it as blessings. Frequently visited temples and prayed. The little mind was totally free from any form of doubts.
Years passed, just like any other kid me too grew up. The temptation to weigh reason against belief also grew with me. “How can the things told by our forefathers can be right? They are lesser known than us! So why do we believe I n what they’d said or done ..?.”Reasoning started to play tricks with the mind. And frequent visits to temple started to fall back and landed to an extreme ZERO. “Is god Just a Piece of rock?” Logic argued, within, against beliefs. Y...??..Y....??..Y..&..Y???????..... The Mind entered the “Y-Generation.”
Reached out for answers from everywhere for convincible reasons to decide whether to believe or not to believe. But finally came to the vision that “REASON is the greatest enemy of faith!!”Reluctantly, the mind strode away to new answers, wandering all the time....But, In vain!!
Blooms
Experiences, failures, successes, buds and thorns of life taught to believe in the power of believing. Whatever it be, axioms or reasons, God or communism doesn’t matter.
How much you believe is more important than what you believe!!
But the analytic mind was in search of answers to some peculiar unasked questions? ......
The story pauses here...
Now let’s get to the real science part. This is about an experiment conducted by
Mr. DEAN RADIN of Institute of Noetic Sciences,
The peculiar Experiment.
“In this paper we present an analysis of an ongoing experiment conducted by the Global
Conscious Project (GCP). The long-term experiment studies the proposition that subtle
deviations in random systems will correlate with periods of intense collective behavior in
global populations. The project is motivated by extensive experimental evidence documenting
anomalous effects in random number generators (RNGs) under conditions of directed mental
intention. Such effects have also been described in local field-based studies during group
events of a psychologically cohesive nature.”
These are the opening lines of the Experiment’s abstract. Thankfully, I was able to find a way to phrase it in a much more less techie English.
Their research is based on a long term experiment, it s called GCP (Global Conscious Project) .The experiment focuses on the subtle influences on random systems (more on random systems, later) by the collective behavior in global population.
Well, that was little less techie right?
Now let’s get straight to the experiment. It says:
The mental or psychological activities of humans have the capacity to influence, far more than subtle amounts, what we call MATTER!
Before we start discussing about experiment we must have an idea on some novus tools and techniques. So let’s start with RNG.
- R N G’s (random number generators).
In here the scientists use a device called RNG or Random Number Generators, which are electronic noise based devices. RNG's outputs are the basic input for the experiments. So plainly, RNG's are the core devices of the GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS PROJECT.
These are not just software generated random numbers, which comes as RNG output like a rand() or randomize() functions used in c or c++, But they are hardware circuits that rely on inherent electronic noise as a source of randomness.
There are three types of RNG's employed by Radin and colleagues for analysis. One uses noise in resistors and the other two use Quantum Tunneling in solid state junctions.
These Devices are claimed, Radin, to be passed standard tests for randomness (like Marsaglia’s DIEHARD test as well as calibration tests) consisting of a million 200-bit trials. So these are genuine random generators "PASSED OK!".
In Radin's Experiment, these are housed in electromagnetically shielded boxes and the generated noise based random bit are compared to an equal number of 0 and 1 bits with a logical EXCLUSIVE OR(EXOR), to ensure that the mean output is unbiased regardless of environment conditions, component interactions or ageing.
So, more "TESTED OK!" certificates to RNG's.
|
X
0
0
1
1
|
Y
0
1
0
1 |
X(EXOR)Y
0
1
1
0 |
Truth Table for An Exclusive Or Gate
Further, each RNG is attached to a personal computer which collects random bits into one "trial" per second, where each trial is the sum of 200 random bits.
As explained in the experiment journal, each computer records trials into time-stamped files, and all computer clocks are synchronized to standard internet time servers.
According to Radin these trials theoretically follow a binomial distribution with mean =100 and Variance = 50. These systems connected with RNG’s send packets of data over the internet to a central server in Princeton,
So that’s an RNG. I hope "RNG" is now not an alien 3 letter word to you.
Initially in 1998, there was only a very few RNG’s , and RNG network has slowly increased in size overtime as individuals are found who are willing to host an RNG on their PC. As of May 2002, the network consisted of approximately 50 RNG’s located throughout North America, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia. And now I guess the network is far far wider. Check it out yourself from
http:// noosphere.priceton.edu
BINOMIAL DISTRIBUTION.
When I introduced to you about RNG’s a term binomial distribution was used. Many of you may be unfamiliar to this term. Although it’s a basic Statistical term, not everyone who is reading this article might be familiar with it. So here is a fast roundup of an elementary mathematical tool that is used in this experiment.
There is no priority that you must read this section before passing on to the experiment, if you feel even a little bit irritated to read mathematics lecture you can very well skip this part, its compensated in the experiment explanation to a fairly good extent. So let’s get started
“Pardon me as am about to use plain mathematical languageJ.”
{TO BE CONTINUED.............................}