Post by psimaster on Aug 29, 2006 9:24:16 GMT -5
Since I have been studying this subject for 28 years, i figured i would help all of you by posting this here.--
Here is a definition which im sure you already now what it mean but here is my definition of it.
Proving the effect is one thing; explaining the cause is another. Most often, researchers place PK in a quantum physics context, where the physical world has less to do with reality than with our perception of that reality. "One interpretation of the results," Broughton says, "is that human consciousness is the ultimate reality. Data isn't real until subjects perceive it. Further, subjects can alter reality when they perceive it."
The "perception is reality" school of thought grew when physicists studied the nature of electrons and noticed that they exhibited both particle-like and wave-like behavior. The duality led to the uncertainty principle: The more scientists studied one aspect of an electron, such as its position, the less precisely they could know something else, such as its momentum.
In his book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye explains how physicist Niels Bohr applied the uncertainty principle to electron experiments: "The electron had no position or momentum before it was measured. In some sense the electron itself did not exist before it made its mark on a laboratory apparatus." Bohr said electrons were like waves, smeared across space, going around corners and through walls. Theoretically, if enough particles could exhibit wave-like behavior, a baseball could pass through a plate glass window without harm to either.
Overbye writes: "At the moment of actual scrutiny of an electron or a baseball, Bohr concluded, the wave function magically 'collapsed' to a specific answer to whatever question was being asked. But the scientist had to ask -- otherwise nature didn't answer."
PK researchers say it is the person observing the REG machine and willing the line to move that makes the line move. Broughton says the results of his experiments don't appear to indicate a mental force tweaking the atoms in his machines. Rather, he says, the human consciousness is inserting information in the machine, affecting its probability.
Jahn and Dunne agree, saying that consciousness, not external reality, is the ultimate factor in any observation. Therefore, the consciousness of the observer can alter the behavior of waves and particles... even in machines.
Dunne explains that one of their REG machines generates a random line across the screen. "Like flipping a coin, you have no way to predict the outcome. As the operators use their intent to interact with the machines, the distribution seems to reflect a few more heads or tails. The probability of its output may only change from .50 (fifty/fifty odds) to .49 or .48, but it is a measurable change.
"Just how it occurs we don't know," she says. "It's as if information has been introduced and the entropy thereby reduced. And distance doesn't seem to matter. If the operator is a foot from the machine or around the world, the results are the same.
"So it's not the classical model theorizing magnetic radiation from the brain or something. It's not a physical force. It's more a matter of altering the fundamental information content than changing the machine itself. Somehow, operators combine their intention with a sense of self-extension, as if they were part of the machine. The division between operator and machine grows blurry. It's like a system and its component parts -- operator plus machine -- somehow producing the results."
At the turn of the century, scientific theory held that matter and energy were separate. Einstein proposed that they were two forms of the same thing. "I think matter and mind might also be of the same energy," says Radin. "When you focus your mind on a physical device, some aspect of yourself becomes identical with some piece of matter. Some people can automatically put a lot of english on a bowling ball, for instance, because they're part of the hall. With a random generator, there's less inertia and it's easier to move. You can place your mind in it and make it do something."
In the British Broadcasting Corporation's television show, Heretics of Science, Robert Jahn said, "It may just be that, beyond the odd logical analytical dimensions of the human mind, there is a whole other pattern of softer, intuitive spiritual capabilities that connect it in this wave-mechanical way with a universe that also has its own spiritual wave-mechanical dimensions. And it is in that universe of interaction, the spiritual part of human consciousness with the spiritual part of the universe, that these anomalies seem to manifest themselves.
methods of testing
Twenty years ago, an undergraduate student approached Robert Jahn, then a professor of engineering and aerospace studies. The student asked him to supervise an experiment designed to determine whether the mind could affect the output of a machine. The machine produced a string of random binary events ones and zeroes that operators could observe as a jagged line winding across a display screen. Research participants tried to move that line up or down using psychokinesis, the power of their intentions. As Jahn discovered, that's exactly what they did.
In 1979, Jahn established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program in New Jersey to continue studying PK. The PEAR lab conducts an array of experiments designed to reveal the possible effects of human consciousness on machines. Jahn, now dean of engineering and applied sciences, and Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist and PEAR's laboratory manager, believe their results cannot be attributed to chance.
They say that if we concede that PK exists, then we also must assume that humanity developed it for a reason. "PK should be useful, if it's like our other abilities, or it wouldn't have evolved," said Dr. Richard Broughton, of the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina. Looking at the data from micro-PK experiments, Broughton said he could sum up PK's usefulness in one word: luck. Using PK can, in one sense, bring us luck. Broughton is not suggesting anything so specific as being able to make slot machines or lottery tickets work in our favor, but we may be able to get life's chances to break in our favor more than nature would predict.
Broughton said, "We think there's more to luck than people's selective memory of when things worked and when they didn't. We'll look at luck as an ecologically valid assumption of PK, a way to look at people's ordinary lives." Broughton's experiments involve testing generally successful individuals to find if they are better able to assert their control.
Physicist Ed May of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, has suggested an alternative to the luck hypothesis. He said PK phenomena can be explained by intuition. May, whose web site (http://www.jsasoc.com/~csl/aircom.html) details his involvement in CIA remote viewing experiments, says now that there's no evidence that the human mind is changing the output of REG machines.
May's theory, which Broughton calls "the fly in the ointment" of micro-PK theories, is that during experiments, operators actually see the future. "Think of a random number generator," said Broughton. "Operators hit a button and 200 trials come down the pike -- a random string of binary events, ones and zeroes. But suppose you looked down that pike and saw when a run of 100 ones was coming and hit the button then. That's not PK; it's precognition."
May calls his theory "decision augmentation theory," or that for short. Broughton said, "We sometimes call it 'that old black magic.'"
May has outlined experiments that would falsify the data augmentation model. Those experiments involve random-event experiments, allowing Broughton and others to test that (intuition) against classic influence models (PK).
In one experiment Broughton conducted, operators don't know whether the machine will generate 100 binary events or 10,000. If influence models prove true, the experiment should generate larger statistical results with a larger number of trials. If the precognitive model (that) is correct, the statistical results should be equal regardless of the sequence length.
"We have a mass of data convincing us an effect is happening, so we're busy trying to understand," Broughton said. "It's an exciting time right now in the field."
Dr. Dean Radin is director of the Consciousness Research Division of the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. Early indications from his experiments may weaken the that model. He placed portable random event generating machines with no feedback display at major events, such as the Academy Awards, the Super Bowl, and the O. J. Simpson trial, to see if the thoughts of many people concentrating in harmony could affect the physical world. The audiences were unwitting participants and never saw the machines. Radin found, however, that their combined intentions affected the machine's normally random output. Since the experiment offered no opportunity for precognition, a requirement for the that model, the recorded effects would seem to indicate psychokinetic powers at work.
Jahn and Dunne undertook similar experiments, in one instance placing a portable REG at a theatrical event. Again, there was no chance for attendees to interact with the machine. Like a barometer, the portable REG was put in place to measure the environment -- in this case, the psychic environment -- and note any changes that a group consciousness might cause to its data. The researchers found "anomalous outputs" in the binary data produced by the machine.
"Participants had told us that during two or three parts of the performance people would be in greater resonance," said Dunne. "Because the performance ran eight times, we were able to show a strong correlation." PEAR calculated the odds against the findings being attributable to chance expectations at 2x10 to the 4th power.
"Intention is only part of it," Dunne adds. "When a group is more like a coherent system, a unified organism, the random processes in the group's environment are made less chaotic."
Based on her work at PEAR, Brenda Dunne believes the odds are slim indeed that PK experimental results can be put down to chance. "When we look across the full spectrum of all our experiments, where there's a real random source, the overall likelihood that this is chance is a couple parts in 10 to the 13th power. We're confident they're real and not artifacts of some statistical or environmental influence. We've refined our designs over the years to preclude any artifacts from altering the output. Nothing can eliminate the effects."
Because most researchers agree that their independent experiments show mental powers affecting physical systems, they have moved from asking "Does it exist?" to "What is it?"
"We're not worried about proving [the influence of PK] to people," says Broughton. "If they're not satisfied with the weight of data now, they won't ever be satisfied. Now, we want the process behind it."
Dr. Dean Radin is director of the Consciousness Research Division of the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. One early experiment at the Center involved the assistance of another Las Vegas group with a well-vested interest in mind-over-machine research -- the Continental Casino.
Radin cross-referenced the casino's daily data for its table games -- blackjack, poker, craps, keno, and slots -- with the daily data for specific environmental factors for the years 1991 to 1994. According to Radin, previous research -- and folklore -- suggested that the lunar cycle and the geomagnetic field affect psi performance. Theoretically, environmental forces could affect ferromagnetic materials in the brain that aid in navigation (like a pigeon using magnetic lines of force), as well as psychic abilities.
"We predicted the payouts would increase around the full moon, and also when the geomagnetic field was 'quiet' (with fewer fluctuations caused by the earth's core, other planets, and solar activity).
"In both cases we found significant correlations in the predicted direction. Since then, we've discovered similar research completed for state and national lotteries, including the Australian, French, and Soviet lotteries. Their results were consistent with ours."
Radin was less interested in gambling than the pervasiveness of psi powers. "If PK is out there and used all the time in places like casinos, it would be interesting if there was no correlation [between lab results and results in the field], but the evidence is there. We call it 'psi in the large.' It's not just little results in the lab or individual stories, but large-scale effects that haven't been studied very long. There are probably social consequences we haven't identified."
Radin agrees with Broughton that the emphasis for human consciousness researchers has switched from proof to process.
"Over the years I've done many direct application studies to provide proof of the effect itself," Radin said. "After 10 years of research, I've decided that PEAR and 75 others doing this work since the. 1950s have seen the same results. There are small but persistent effects. So it's basically proven. Most of my colleagues gave up on proof studies five to 10 years ago. Now they're working on process studies -- under which conditions do the effects appear, which test subjects do better, and what are the differences in their personalities?"
While the idea of sitting in a lab watching randomly generated lines on a computer screen may not twirl everyone's propellers, the results of PK experiments raise some interesting conclusions for researchers. And while the scale of the effects may not give casino owners anything to worry about, it could be of some concern from an engineering point of view.
If the human mind can affect delicate machinery, systems such as 911 dispatch stations and air-traffic controls could be affected. Fortunately, like telephone routing systems, most machines are designed to avoid errors, and they contain error-correcting routines.
Radin believes that if we pay attention to PK phenomena, in 10 to 15 years we could develop machines that respond to thought. One altruistic application might be thought-controlled prosthetics for handicapped people. Adults could train a robotic hand or leg the way a baby trains its body.
"In the future there might be a psychic transistor of some kind to link minds and machines," said Radin. "The result not only would be computer-enhanced perception, but thinking as well. A PK chip could help you with math, for instance. A mind link to a computer could help you figure pi to 250 places."
Radin also envisions machines that would recognize the operator. His lab is using sophisticated computer algorithms to detect individual differences in the PK stream and extract them, in a fashion similar to voice recognition technology.
Possible uses for such a technology seem to reach Orwellian dimensions: Could we identify who is trying to affect a machine with their thoughts, or even what they're thinking?
During the cold war, research labs often relied on government funding. The CIA was interested in remote viewing and other psi abilities. The Russians were reportedly interested in the mind's effect on biological systems, including the ability to influence other individuals.
These days, the private sector is a more likely source for funding. The aerospace industry got PEAR off the ground, asking Robert Jahn to find out if stress and other psychological variants could affect increasingly complex navigation systems. And last year, Broughton notes, Sony publicly admitted to running a PK lab in Japan.
According to Dunne, the number of labs working on PK in the United States is in decline. "It's quite a controversial line of research, so it's difficult to attain funding or support from a university. And the contributors to mainstream scientific journals often call it a pseudoscience. Critics say that human gullibility drives the results, and that the whole phenomenon is off the wall and based on one or two experiments. The problem is, since we don't know the phenomena's cause, it hurts the credibility of the empirical work."
Dunne sees a positive side, however, and believes PK research could lead to more resonant human/machine systems and increased efficiency. But introducing the research to the world will take time. "You could start out with games, like computer games or games of chance," she said. "Have some fun with it, and in so doing bring the human experience into the realm of credibility.
"Perhaps if we played with it, we'd grow more comfortable and incorporate it into our world view. It would expand our view of science. We'd get out of the 'it's an objective world out there and I'm a passive observer' view, and get to study the nature of consciousness itself, to use the technology as a mirror to gain further self-understanding. It would affect our world view and scientific framework, as well as our personal lives. We'd deal more carefully and -- hopefully -- kindly, with a world we could affect."
Here is a definition which im sure you already now what it mean but here is my definition of it.
Proving the effect is one thing; explaining the cause is another. Most often, researchers place PK in a quantum physics context, where the physical world has less to do with reality than with our perception of that reality. "One interpretation of the results," Broughton says, "is that human consciousness is the ultimate reality. Data isn't real until subjects perceive it. Further, subjects can alter reality when they perceive it."
The "perception is reality" school of thought grew when physicists studied the nature of electrons and noticed that they exhibited both particle-like and wave-like behavior. The duality led to the uncertainty principle: The more scientists studied one aspect of an electron, such as its position, the less precisely they could know something else, such as its momentum.
In his book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye explains how physicist Niels Bohr applied the uncertainty principle to electron experiments: "The electron had no position or momentum before it was measured. In some sense the electron itself did not exist before it made its mark on a laboratory apparatus." Bohr said electrons were like waves, smeared across space, going around corners and through walls. Theoretically, if enough particles could exhibit wave-like behavior, a baseball could pass through a plate glass window without harm to either.
Overbye writes: "At the moment of actual scrutiny of an electron or a baseball, Bohr concluded, the wave function magically 'collapsed' to a specific answer to whatever question was being asked. But the scientist had to ask -- otherwise nature didn't answer."
PK researchers say it is the person observing the REG machine and willing the line to move that makes the line move. Broughton says the results of his experiments don't appear to indicate a mental force tweaking the atoms in his machines. Rather, he says, the human consciousness is inserting information in the machine, affecting its probability.
Jahn and Dunne agree, saying that consciousness, not external reality, is the ultimate factor in any observation. Therefore, the consciousness of the observer can alter the behavior of waves and particles... even in machines.
Dunne explains that one of their REG machines generates a random line across the screen. "Like flipping a coin, you have no way to predict the outcome. As the operators use their intent to interact with the machines, the distribution seems to reflect a few more heads or tails. The probability of its output may only change from .50 (fifty/fifty odds) to .49 or .48, but it is a measurable change.
"Just how it occurs we don't know," she says. "It's as if information has been introduced and the entropy thereby reduced. And distance doesn't seem to matter. If the operator is a foot from the machine or around the world, the results are the same.
"So it's not the classical model theorizing magnetic radiation from the brain or something. It's not a physical force. It's more a matter of altering the fundamental information content than changing the machine itself. Somehow, operators combine their intention with a sense of self-extension, as if they were part of the machine. The division between operator and machine grows blurry. It's like a system and its component parts -- operator plus machine -- somehow producing the results."
At the turn of the century, scientific theory held that matter and energy were separate. Einstein proposed that they were two forms of the same thing. "I think matter and mind might also be of the same energy," says Radin. "When you focus your mind on a physical device, some aspect of yourself becomes identical with some piece of matter. Some people can automatically put a lot of english on a bowling ball, for instance, because they're part of the hall. With a random generator, there's less inertia and it's easier to move. You can place your mind in it and make it do something."
In the British Broadcasting Corporation's television show, Heretics of Science, Robert Jahn said, "It may just be that, beyond the odd logical analytical dimensions of the human mind, there is a whole other pattern of softer, intuitive spiritual capabilities that connect it in this wave-mechanical way with a universe that also has its own spiritual wave-mechanical dimensions. And it is in that universe of interaction, the spiritual part of human consciousness with the spiritual part of the universe, that these anomalies seem to manifest themselves.
methods of testing
Twenty years ago, an undergraduate student approached Robert Jahn, then a professor of engineering and aerospace studies. The student asked him to supervise an experiment designed to determine whether the mind could affect the output of a machine. The machine produced a string of random binary events ones and zeroes that operators could observe as a jagged line winding across a display screen. Research participants tried to move that line up or down using psychokinesis, the power of their intentions. As Jahn discovered, that's exactly what they did.
In 1979, Jahn established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program in New Jersey to continue studying PK. The PEAR lab conducts an array of experiments designed to reveal the possible effects of human consciousness on machines. Jahn, now dean of engineering and applied sciences, and Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist and PEAR's laboratory manager, believe their results cannot be attributed to chance.
They say that if we concede that PK exists, then we also must assume that humanity developed it for a reason. "PK should be useful, if it's like our other abilities, or it wouldn't have evolved," said Dr. Richard Broughton, of the Institute of Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina. Looking at the data from micro-PK experiments, Broughton said he could sum up PK's usefulness in one word: luck. Using PK can, in one sense, bring us luck. Broughton is not suggesting anything so specific as being able to make slot machines or lottery tickets work in our favor, but we may be able to get life's chances to break in our favor more than nature would predict.
Broughton said, "We think there's more to luck than people's selective memory of when things worked and when they didn't. We'll look at luck as an ecologically valid assumption of PK, a way to look at people's ordinary lives." Broughton's experiments involve testing generally successful individuals to find if they are better able to assert their control.
Physicist Ed May of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, has suggested an alternative to the luck hypothesis. He said PK phenomena can be explained by intuition. May, whose web site (http://www.jsasoc.com/~csl/aircom.html) details his involvement in CIA remote viewing experiments, says now that there's no evidence that the human mind is changing the output of REG machines.
May's theory, which Broughton calls "the fly in the ointment" of micro-PK theories, is that during experiments, operators actually see the future. "Think of a random number generator," said Broughton. "Operators hit a button and 200 trials come down the pike -- a random string of binary events, ones and zeroes. But suppose you looked down that pike and saw when a run of 100 ones was coming and hit the button then. That's not PK; it's precognition."
May calls his theory "decision augmentation theory," or that for short. Broughton said, "We sometimes call it 'that old black magic.'"
May has outlined experiments that would falsify the data augmentation model. Those experiments involve random-event experiments, allowing Broughton and others to test that (intuition) against classic influence models (PK).
In one experiment Broughton conducted, operators don't know whether the machine will generate 100 binary events or 10,000. If influence models prove true, the experiment should generate larger statistical results with a larger number of trials. If the precognitive model (that) is correct, the statistical results should be equal regardless of the sequence length.
"We have a mass of data convincing us an effect is happening, so we're busy trying to understand," Broughton said. "It's an exciting time right now in the field."
Dr. Dean Radin is director of the Consciousness Research Division of the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. Early indications from his experiments may weaken the that model. He placed portable random event generating machines with no feedback display at major events, such as the Academy Awards, the Super Bowl, and the O. J. Simpson trial, to see if the thoughts of many people concentrating in harmony could affect the physical world. The audiences were unwitting participants and never saw the machines. Radin found, however, that their combined intentions affected the machine's normally random output. Since the experiment offered no opportunity for precognition, a requirement for the that model, the recorded effects would seem to indicate psychokinetic powers at work.
Jahn and Dunne undertook similar experiments, in one instance placing a portable REG at a theatrical event. Again, there was no chance for attendees to interact with the machine. Like a barometer, the portable REG was put in place to measure the environment -- in this case, the psychic environment -- and note any changes that a group consciousness might cause to its data. The researchers found "anomalous outputs" in the binary data produced by the machine.
"Participants had told us that during two or three parts of the performance people would be in greater resonance," said Dunne. "Because the performance ran eight times, we were able to show a strong correlation." PEAR calculated the odds against the findings being attributable to chance expectations at 2x10 to the 4th power.
"Intention is only part of it," Dunne adds. "When a group is more like a coherent system, a unified organism, the random processes in the group's environment are made less chaotic."
Based on her work at PEAR, Brenda Dunne believes the odds are slim indeed that PK experimental results can be put down to chance. "When we look across the full spectrum of all our experiments, where there's a real random source, the overall likelihood that this is chance is a couple parts in 10 to the 13th power. We're confident they're real and not artifacts of some statistical or environmental influence. We've refined our designs over the years to preclude any artifacts from altering the output. Nothing can eliminate the effects."
Because most researchers agree that their independent experiments show mental powers affecting physical systems, they have moved from asking "Does it exist?" to "What is it?"
"We're not worried about proving [the influence of PK] to people," says Broughton. "If they're not satisfied with the weight of data now, they won't ever be satisfied. Now, we want the process behind it."
Dr. Dean Radin is director of the Consciousness Research Division of the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. One early experiment at the Center involved the assistance of another Las Vegas group with a well-vested interest in mind-over-machine research -- the Continental Casino.
Radin cross-referenced the casino's daily data for its table games -- blackjack, poker, craps, keno, and slots -- with the daily data for specific environmental factors for the years 1991 to 1994. According to Radin, previous research -- and folklore -- suggested that the lunar cycle and the geomagnetic field affect psi performance. Theoretically, environmental forces could affect ferromagnetic materials in the brain that aid in navigation (like a pigeon using magnetic lines of force), as well as psychic abilities.
"We predicted the payouts would increase around the full moon, and also when the geomagnetic field was 'quiet' (with fewer fluctuations caused by the earth's core, other planets, and solar activity).
"In both cases we found significant correlations in the predicted direction. Since then, we've discovered similar research completed for state and national lotteries, including the Australian, French, and Soviet lotteries. Their results were consistent with ours."
Radin was less interested in gambling than the pervasiveness of psi powers. "If PK is out there and used all the time in places like casinos, it would be interesting if there was no correlation [between lab results and results in the field], but the evidence is there. We call it 'psi in the large.' It's not just little results in the lab or individual stories, but large-scale effects that haven't been studied very long. There are probably social consequences we haven't identified."
Radin agrees with Broughton that the emphasis for human consciousness researchers has switched from proof to process.
"Over the years I've done many direct application studies to provide proof of the effect itself," Radin said. "After 10 years of research, I've decided that PEAR and 75 others doing this work since the. 1950s have seen the same results. There are small but persistent effects. So it's basically proven. Most of my colleagues gave up on proof studies five to 10 years ago. Now they're working on process studies -- under which conditions do the effects appear, which test subjects do better, and what are the differences in their personalities?"
While the idea of sitting in a lab watching randomly generated lines on a computer screen may not twirl everyone's propellers, the results of PK experiments raise some interesting conclusions for researchers. And while the scale of the effects may not give casino owners anything to worry about, it could be of some concern from an engineering point of view.
If the human mind can affect delicate machinery, systems such as 911 dispatch stations and air-traffic controls could be affected. Fortunately, like telephone routing systems, most machines are designed to avoid errors, and they contain error-correcting routines.
Radin believes that if we pay attention to PK phenomena, in 10 to 15 years we could develop machines that respond to thought. One altruistic application might be thought-controlled prosthetics for handicapped people. Adults could train a robotic hand or leg the way a baby trains its body.
"In the future there might be a psychic transistor of some kind to link minds and machines," said Radin. "The result not only would be computer-enhanced perception, but thinking as well. A PK chip could help you with math, for instance. A mind link to a computer could help you figure pi to 250 places."
Radin also envisions machines that would recognize the operator. His lab is using sophisticated computer algorithms to detect individual differences in the PK stream and extract them, in a fashion similar to voice recognition technology.
Possible uses for such a technology seem to reach Orwellian dimensions: Could we identify who is trying to affect a machine with their thoughts, or even what they're thinking?
During the cold war, research labs often relied on government funding. The CIA was interested in remote viewing and other psi abilities. The Russians were reportedly interested in the mind's effect on biological systems, including the ability to influence other individuals.
These days, the private sector is a more likely source for funding. The aerospace industry got PEAR off the ground, asking Robert Jahn to find out if stress and other psychological variants could affect increasingly complex navigation systems. And last year, Broughton notes, Sony publicly admitted to running a PK lab in Japan.
According to Dunne, the number of labs working on PK in the United States is in decline. "It's quite a controversial line of research, so it's difficult to attain funding or support from a university. And the contributors to mainstream scientific journals often call it a pseudoscience. Critics say that human gullibility drives the results, and that the whole phenomenon is off the wall and based on one or two experiments. The problem is, since we don't know the phenomena's cause, it hurts the credibility of the empirical work."
Dunne sees a positive side, however, and believes PK research could lead to more resonant human/machine systems and increased efficiency. But introducing the research to the world will take time. "You could start out with games, like computer games or games of chance," she said. "Have some fun with it, and in so doing bring the human experience into the realm of credibility.
"Perhaps if we played with it, we'd grow more comfortable and incorporate it into our world view. It would expand our view of science. We'd get out of the 'it's an objective world out there and I'm a passive observer' view, and get to study the nature of consciousness itself, to use the technology as a mirror to gain further self-understanding. It would affect our world view and scientific framework, as well as our personal lives. We'd deal more carefully and -- hopefully -- kindly, with a world we could affect."
