Inspired by the PEAR Lab experiments, I made an app to test the consciousness hypothesis.

I know the mind-reality is a very controversial subject, one that dominates 90% of this community posts. But please don't dismiss this as another pseudo rambling disguised as science. This is somewhat a genuine inquiry into the subject to the best of my knowledge in this moment. 

Most people here are likely already aware of the PEAR Lab experiments, Global Consciousness Project (GCP), as well as HeartMath etc. While the scientific community outright rejects this hypothesis (and I am not claiming otherwise), however upon reading more about it, I feel like it is still something we can replicate and test at a personal scale.. So with that in mind, I have been creating an android app where I can run this experiment on our own terms. I tried my best to understand the various consciousness theories and to implement the methodologies these serious institutes had established in their research.

The standard materialist picture, the one most of us grew up with and that dominates academic science (consciousness is entirely a product of physical processes in the brain, that mental states are brain states). What you experience as "intention" is just the downstream output of neural computation, and the idea that it could causally reach outward and alter the behaviour of physical systems it has no classical contact with is basically incoherent within that framework. I get that, it is the most logical framework we have. Also, the explanatory track record of materialism in science is solid and it does successfully dismantle quantum mysticism almost conveniently for me.

I still often wonder if the answer to this question is a philosophical position or a fundamental truth, and I feel uncertain which domain will even have the answers. And that is why for me idealist positions are not entirely dismissive either (the view that consciousness is in some sense fundamental rather than emergent). Not that idealism is obviously correct, neutral monism, panpsychism, dual aspect theories, all of these are in a sense touching a lot of similar threads. But yet no frameworks we currently have can contain it either, almost as if, somewhere along those lines, something could be true, but what, still remains speculative.

Anyway, this is the actual foundation through which this app explores this consciousness hypothesis: the PEAR lab at Princeton primarily used microelectronic REGs among others, devices generating binary output from thermal noise in a reverse-biased diode, with operators seated at a physical distance from the machine, running counterbalanced trial blocks of high, low, and baseline intention, each block producing a fixed number of bits, the accumulated series rather than the individual trial being the primary statistical unit. Some trials were conducted remotely, some, where operators in entirely different locations, as over the course of 28 years or so they have tested this hypothesis through different methodologies. The retrocognitive protocol went further: sequences were generated by the machine and stored before any operator interaction, the intention applied afterward to data that already physically existed.

The GCP scaled the same basic architecture into a network of roughly 65 FieldREG nodes distributed worldwide, each streaming 200 bits per second continuously to a central server, with correlated deviations across nodes during predefined event windows tested using the Stouffer Z method. I went into both skeptical and came out roughly the same. Similarly, PEAR's choice of the series as its statistical unit drew serious criticism for inflating apparent effects, independent replications under stricter per-trial analysis returned null, and the GCP's event windows were inconsistently pre-registered in its early years, which alone is enough to account for the cumulative signals they reported. But learning about the technical side of the experiment was interesting to me, and replicable.

My initial idea was to make a RNG with live environmental data tracking with magnetometer, and radio signals. I mean after-all, most of the popular mind-matter hypotheses like GCP, HeartMath etc are all rooted in the idea of some sort of geomagnetic sphere or of some sort of energy transmission or something like that. And I thought those are the kind of data I can possibly obtain from smartphone sensors. So I first created a foundation with local entropy based RNG and magnetometer readings, and over the course, I eventually added quantum RNG sourced (Outshift/ANU) from vacuum fluctuation measurements on remote optical hardware, which can be run with six physical channels recorded simultaneously: magnetometer, barometer, ambient sound, WiFi RSSI, Bluetooth variance to measure numerous statistical data with proper baseline phases, and also z-scores computed per session and per phase the way PEAR structured their analysis. 

So far what I understand is, the effect size, if it exists at all, is negligible at the scale of individual sessions, they tell you almost nothing. This is a long-term programme or there is no point. Also, for now, as I was building it, I have only been able to focus on the mechanisms and technical specs only until now. So, my data so far is very isolated and meaningless as of right now. 

So I don't know how to frame this experiment theoretically or philosophically. But I am inviting anyone who is interested in the subject to venture into this experiment with me.