Mon, Nov 8, 2010 Permanent linkI will participate in http://newrealitytransmission.com but mostly to observe how other people organize their thoughts together so I can fine-tune some similar and much more technical experiments I'm planning for years from now. Also, if you read below, I'll explain how to do http://newrealitytransmission.com more accurately this time.
Except for the part comparing reality to a group dream, http://newrealitytransmission.com got the basic ideas right of how to think something to make it happen, but lacks the detailed understanding of how to organize all those people's thoughts so they do not cancel each other out.
Think about reality like an ocean where many blind people each row on the left or right side of the boat. To navigate effectively, the direction and speed of rowing can not be random, but since most people can not read each other's minds and have no other way of organizing most of their thoughts (which they do not know how to put into words), some row too fast or too slow, and the boat eventually turns in big circles. It does not matter if everyone agrees to row forward, because if nobody can see to navigate, the boat will circle around the same general area many times, almost as ineffective as rowing randomly. What http://newrealitytransmission.com has done is get people to agree to row the same direction at the same time (a few specific patterns of thinking), so we should expect the world to change a very small amount in the ways they expect, but mostly it will circle around randomly.
Compare that to 2 people on the left and right sides of the boat who have practiced and become good at rowing at the same speed and the same time. Its much less people, and it moves much slower, but it will eventually get farther than a full boat of people with less organization between each 2 people. This is not a numbers game. You can't double the number of people to double how well it works unless you can organize all thoughts to flow smoothly together.
I'm building a software that will solve those organization problems at the subconscious psychology level, but it may not be ready for years. You can read about that at http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=180216 but until then I offer a software that will organize it only a little but still much more than organization through a website that does not change during the 11 minutes of each of 11 days (11:11 pm EST from 11/11/2010 to 11/21/2010).
Princeton University has done research into the connection between the paranormal and science for years, and this program which I built continuously downloads numbers from their quantum physics hardware located at 65 places around the Earth, and the program converts that to a smooth sound like blowing wind which goes faster or slower and changes its sound based on the random-appearing numbers generated by such quantum hardware. Their theory (which they say has been statistically verified) is that major world events and what people are thinking has statistical effects on the number of ones and zeros in the random numbers which this program converts to sound.
Therefore I recommend that everybody participating in http://newrealitytransmission.com download the program http://sourceforge.net/projects/appletaudio (It's a *.jar file), double-click that *.jar file, a window opens (not in applet mode which would be in the web browser), and listen to the quantum physics experiments during each of those 11 minutes. Don't use any of the buttons or testing controls in the program. It starts playing sound as soon as you open it.
The best way to listen to the program's sounds while doing what http://newrealitytransmission.com says is to hold both of your arms to the side, palms outward, and feel something flowing in and out of each of your hands. Observe the patterns you feel in your hands in combination with the patterns of sounds, and change what you're thinking slowly to make the patterns align. The sounds are the same as everyone else hears, regardless of where they are on the Earth. Those sounds represent 2 things: (1) a lot of randomness in quantum physics, and (2) some of the combined mental patterns of everyone on Earth. That's what the program's sounds come from. Therefore if you are skilled enough, you can influence the patterns of sound just by thinking it. Continuing the boat analogy, http://sourceforge.net/projects/appletaudio is a navigation tool. It won't tell you where to go, but it will let everyone organize their thoughts, and reflect their thoughts back through it in a cycle, at the level of 1 second instead of 11 minutes.
It may appear that I'm making all of this up, but I've done lots of paranormal things. Here's a video where I demonstrate moving a piece of aluminum foil in a clear closed box only by thinking it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ww8rI0BG9k
I'll explain how I think the universe works and how the basic idea of http://newrealitytransmission.com connects thinking things to making them really happen.
You can't just think something to make it happen. Its a skill that you learn, not something you can do without lots of practice. Its like learning to move your arm. As a baby, you didn't know how to move your arm except randomly a little, and over a long time, you learned to move it in whatever pattern you want. Similarly, you can learn to make things happen just by thinking it, but first you should learn to make a fair coin land heads a little more often than tails, or learn to make a piece of grass bend 1 millimeter by thinking it. If you want to change the world in a large group of people thinking the same thing, a lack of skill enough to move a piece of grass 1 millimeter is a big obstacle. I can't do it any time I want, but there are some times when I can choose to do those small things, as shown in that youtube video. I think you're starting too big and should practice on smaller things first, but I will help anyways.
Now the physics part of why I think it can work.
My theory of everything is: The Kolmogorov-Complexity of the universe is 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity That means the same thing some of the eastern philosophies say, which is the universe is balanced in an infinite number of ways, and if you take it all as 1 thing then it averages to nothing, so it does not really exist on average but parts of it individually appear to exist. Max Tegmark says it as "All structures that exist mathmatically exist also physically" which is explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Level_IV:_Ultimate_Ensemble Basically the universe equals all of math. If we continue to learn more accurate physics, the physics books and math books will contain the same equations, and there is already a lot of overlap between what we know of physics and math.
If the universe equals all of math, then one way to describe it is the set of all possible laws-of-physics and the set of all possible locations of everything relative to everything else. Nothing changes. Instead, change is navigation between all those parts of math.
Statistically, things in math tend to stick together. If it wasn't that way, then reality would fly apart and we would not see patterns. The laws-of-physics are made of patterns, like everything else is. They are the hardest patterns to change. The patterns we can easily change are locations of things and their speeds and other things described in physics books. The new idea I'm adding here is that location and speed and other physics properties are patterns just like the laws-of-phsyics are. Physics is made of mass/energy like everything else is, which is made of math.
As explained in the boat analogy, accuracy gets far more results than lots of people doing it together, exponentially more. That's why brains can be very small compared to the events they try to statistically influence and still do it. Brains evolved for accuracy, so they can make things happen that would not happen in a million years by random movement of atoms. For example, playing all the way through a video game is that hard with random moves. Now think about how brains work in combination with the universe equalling all of math (a multiverse of all possible laws-of-physics and locations of things). The skill of making things happen by thinking it is using small patterns of electricity (and maybe other things) in your brain to affect much larger things through very indirect patterns that science may not know about yet. That is exponentially unlikely to happen, but intelligence makes exponentially unlikely things happen.
I won't get into the math of it here. You can see the details at http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=180216 The way the laws-of-physics formed from simpler patterns is the same way things move and change other physical properties. Patterns work at the level of atoms and the level of planets, galaxies, and the whole universe. All sizes and all ways of viewing math will work if you use statistics correctly. In that thread, I propose a way to use bayesian-networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network in combination with psychology software (also it must be constantly adjusted using new statistics measured each second) to create mind reading (telepathy) effects between the users of the software, which is 1 of many ways to think things to make them real, but it is about specific patterns learned instead of just thinking about things happening.
My long-term project that includes experiments similar to http://newrealitytransmission.com is http://sourceforge.net/projects/humanainet and those parts will be a plugin instead of part of the main program. Its an artificial intelligence program for connecting the minds of many people and computers through the internet. What http://newrealitytransmission.com does in a disorganized way, that plugin to Human AI Net will do with calculus and bayesian statistics and psychology software. I will help with http://newrealitytransmission.com so I can observe (in the same way I learned from this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ww8rI0BG9k video) how people's thoughts organize together, so when I build my program I can fine-tune it more accurately.
Tue, Nov 9, 2010 Permanent linkThanks for the info, Ben. I admire your determination to help people better understand some of the intricacies and oddities of a subject matter that is sure to profoundly affect our future...
I think I understand your ocean analogy, but let me take a stab. New Reality Transmission wants people to direct their thoughts towards a "good" future. But "good" is relative and thus what is "good" for one person may be different for another, and what one may think of is good for the human race, may not be actually be good for everyone. So, what you suggest that NRT is lacking is a scientific constant that everyone can "start" from, a sort of infallible, neutral "good" which allows any outcomes of the "mind > matter" experiment to actually be measured and would ensure the maximum potential of the experiment?
Tue, Nov 9, 2010 Permanent linkInfinitas, that's part of it, but the bigger problem is even if everyone was thinking the same thing at the same time, different brains are wired different ways so the same thought is different patterns in the differrent brains. Intelligence can overcome some of that, but since most people are not skilled at paranormal things like this experiment, they won't be able to see the problems with aligning those different thought patterns and try to start solving them. The software I'm talking about would be a statistical translator between the different patterns, so it can use them together.
The experiment may still work some, and there will be a scientific measure of it. http://noosphere.princeton.edu takes statistics on the combination of events like this and their quantum physics hardware which generates "random" numbers (less random when people do things like this). They added this experiment to their list of times they predict their numbers will become less random. When its over, we will see what effect it had. Their list of events and results are in the pages after you click "main results".
Fri, Nov 12, 2010 Permanent link"SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today."
It sounds like science fiction, but its really just what I did last night.
Day 1 of 11 (11/11/2010):
It was the most fun I've had all year, and it worked better than I expected. I didn't expect much, but now I think the Human species has already evolved past the need for language (talking and writing) and continues to use language because of resistance to change. For years I've thought that I would have to build certain parts of such a mental system in software ( http://HumanAI.net ) but now I see that those parts already exist in people and are just not being used much. I can still accelerate the process by building such software. It will be a slow process changing to the new way of communicating. There will be no problem with people who choose not to do it, because what I observed is this mental network only interacts with people thinking similar things to each other. You have to choose to do it for it to work. That's just my guess. I can't reliably predict what would happen if there was a critical-mass of people doing things like this mental experiment, but I'm interested to find out.
Between 2 and 6 pm, I felt like something bad was going to happen, but that changed gradually from 6 to 11 pm. I think that was to balance the events.
At 10 pm, I started to feel tingling in my hands which I could control some by thinking, which normally happens in paranormal events.
My strategy is to first mentally connect to the others doing this experiment, and then once we are aware of each other, do the things described in the instructions.
Its scheduled for 11:11 to 11:21, but in practice it got spread out more.
The normal way I experience paranormal things is a continuously changing 3 dimensional vector field, probably because brains evolved to understand things in 3 dimensions.
There was much confusion from 11:00 to 11:15. During that time, all I experienced was changes in such vector field, as it twisted and stretched depending on what I was thinking at the time. It appeared to be controlled by multiple people at any 1 time, and the people thinking similar things were connected to the same few dimensions in this vector field.
The strongest experiences were from 11:15 to 11:25. It felt like me and many others were finishing each other's thoughts. For example, I thought about the sounds of Pink Floyd's "Brick In The Wall", and when I got to the parts that I normally don't remember, I heard those parts in my thoughts anyways, as if somebody else had remembered for me.
Many thoughts came and went about various locations and objects. I tried to explain some things about math that most people do not know, including the problem "If I flipped 2 coins, both landed, and at least 1 landed heads, then whats the chance that both landed heads?" which has the correct answer of 1/3 chance. I tried to explain some of my mad-science theories and things I planned to build.
Every time I transmitted more specific thoughts, it appeared that those who were listening were filtered and I got a more specific audience. Its like a paranormal search engine.
There is 1 specific thing that may be important, something a few of us thought of together. Its purpose is to help people connect to this mental network easier, and they would be put up similar to cell phone towers. I don't know if it would work, but it might. It's something to experiment with.
The idea was a quantum capacitor with 4 vertical tubes in the center emitting some kind of energy upward which bounces off of various curved surfaces many times in a closed container. Its purpose is to generate a carrier wave (Example: FM radio uses a carrier wave) where the carried part statistically aligns to the geometry and patterns of brainwaves. The brainwaves change the energy field in a quantum-observation way which has the result of changing what other brains observe when interacting with the same energy field. Again, I don't know if it would work, and theres lots of details to choose before doing any experiments.
Overall, my experience in the "New Reality Transmission" was like being a cell in a larger brain, and being able to share as many or as few thoughts (or none) as I wanted to.
I think it worked so well for me because I opened my entire mind to the network. I didn't try to hide any thoughts or resist anything. My dad was good at this kind of stuff too. He said the key to it is "No resistance." I like to say it as "The Kolmogorov-Complexity of the universe is 0." Both are a way to explain the balanced way things work.
I think everybody's brains work mostly as science understands today, but a very small part of how brains think is a telepathic network where all people share subconscious thoughts. I don't think the "New Reality Transmission" mental experiment is new or unusual. I think most people are just unaware they're doing it all the time in very small amounts.
Theres 10 days left. Try it. Its fun.
Wed, Nov 24, 2010 Permanent linkIn the last 10 of 11 days, I didn't experience anything nearly as strong as that first day (written above), but I think I get to keep some of it as part of my subconscious mind. I feel a little different than before it started. But still I can't do it any time I want. I'm not that skilled at it.
RESULTS:
The experiment is over and totaled 43000 people going by Facebook clicks. As measured by the quantum physics experiments of http://noosphere.princeton.edu (click "main results" then "bottom line graph" then find event 351), the numbers that would normally be "random" had a significant pattern. The way to interpret that pattern was decided before the experiment started. The results are non-random enough that it would only be expected 2.9% of the time. Of course that would happen 2.9% of the time by random chance, but the difference is a formal prediction was made that it would have a pattern at those specific times and way of measuring the pattern. That's a 97.1% chance the patterns they measured were not completely random and New Reality Transmission worked some.
~351. 10.11.11 Meditation, 20101111 Many people 69-71 1-sec 1.892 0.029
The New Reality Transmission experiment has been scientifically verified as certain as the following: If I said "I'm going to flip these 5 coins and I expect all of them to land heads", and then they all land heads.
By itself, a 2.9% chance (.029) happening as predicted is not enough to know it worked, but http://noosphere.princeton.edu has 353 total predictions and experimental results which taken together (only the first 340 they've calculated so far) are a .0000000002144 chance. You've got more chance of winning the lottery than their data happening only by random chance, assuming the experiments were done and reported correctly.
I still think its statistical clustering of the different views of reality in the multiverse being pushed around in a chaos-theory way by electricity patterns in brains. A "global telepathy network" already exists, and we used it. I'm planning a bigger and more interactive (through computers and psychology software) experiment:http://spacecollective.org/BenRayfield/6447/Global-Telepathy-Network
I wouldnt go as far as calling reality a shared dream, as New Reality Transmission suggests you think about during the experiment, but me and 43000 people did push some scientific measurements around just by thinking certain things.
Sounds very New Age to me, and the quantum physics talk has the usual interesting speculations but cannot be considered as consensus science by any means. It is safe to assume that most physicists and mathematicians perfer to keep away from this, if anything for fear of damage to their professional reputation.
But what the hell, sending a collective pulse of hope into the fabric of reality cannot do any harm, and it can provide psychological benefits to those who do it. In this sense, by giving more motivation and drive to more people, the experiment can have a real impact indeed (ref William James).