Pertaining to our ongoing discussion of both consciousness and paranormal events, I'd like to suggest the following paper by Brenda Dunne and Robert Jahn of Princeton University:

Consciousness and Anomolous Physical Phenomena - pdf

-- Anonymous, April 18, 2000

Answers

Downloaded Ken,

Will read in the next few days.

Diane

-- Anonymous, April 18, 2000

Nice find Ken,

Their work is one of the reasons I asserted that random is the underlying control pattern, that humans can shift probabilities, that its all just a big standing wave, that fuller is right, etc. etc.

What I didn't know was the empowering effect of females coupled with the directionality of males, Always wanted to publish Orgasmic Gardening (a spoof on Rhodale),

I had a deep resonance with the idea of being in harmony with the will of heaven, or of being in tune with the tao, as I read the article. Vision of the mad Taoist Monk idiosyncratically shifting probalbilities in the underlying chaos.

Didn't get to read the end well since I just had a call that we have 20 tri-axle loads coming in this morning and now I need to get over there and make some space where they won't get stuck since its rained and the roads are muddy.

-- Anonymous, April 19, 2000

Ken - it is a nice find, and I especially enjoy the engineering approach and statistics provided.

Further in the document I part ways with the theory work when the authors begin to reify "information" and attribute substance-like properties to it. I'll detail my objections later (it's 3:30 am right now - I just finished a piece of European patent work that had to get in), but I think that I can give you a sketch to take issue with.

My sense is that "information" is iconic -- it is a particular aggregation of matter or energy that has meaning ie. acts as a cue to some alive entity. The meaning is the response engendered in the structure of the entity. As such "information" has no existence on its own. I do not think we can point to something and say "there is information". As a trivial example - think of a "lost" language script. Without a reader the markings are not information.

There has been a deep confusion (it seems to me) between the engineering use of the term "information" as proposed by Shannon and Weaver to distinguish over "random noise" and "information" as has been taken up in the vernacular. Going back to the example above - the markings in the lost language are not random, and could be said to contain information? Yet it is meaningless information?

I think the flaw in the epistomelogizing has to do with the removal of the narrator from the modelling.

So succintly - I contend that information without a narrator is oxymoronic.

Other aspects of the article with regard to resonance in the sense of modelling consciousness as a wave that can be modulated by remote phenomena - that fits okay by me as an attempt to explain the phenomena.

I need to study it more.

G'nite.

-- Anonymous, April 20, 2000