CONSCIOUSNESS AND ANOMALOUS PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

Several million experimental trials investigating the ability of human operators to affect the output of various random physical devices have demonstrated small but statistically significant shifts of the distribution means that correlate with operator intention, exhibit repeatable idiosyncratic individual variations, and display consistent patterns of gender dependence, series position development, and internal distribution structure. These effects also appear to be statistically independent of distance and time. In a complementary program of remote perception studies, experimental protocols and analytical scoring methods have been developed to demonstrate and quantify information acquired by individuals about distant geographical locations without the use of normal sensory channels. A wave-mechanical approach to modeling consciousness/environment interactions, based on a metaphorical application of quantum concepts and formalisms, has proven useful in predicting and interpreting the empirical findings and in guiding the development of more incisive experiments. Philosophical and Historical Background The advancement of human knowledge, both individual and collective, devolves from the dynamic interplay of two complementary processes of consciousness: experience, and conceptualization. Throughout life, consciousness accumulates experience, either incidentally or by design, and then endeavors to represent, interpret, and apply it to prediction of, or accommodation to, future events. Anomalies, i.e. incidents that contradict common experience or established belief, insert some dissonance into this dynamic, challenging first the validity of those events and then, if verified, the prevailing pattern of convictions, until some credible resolution can be achieved. The scientific method is just a particularly disciplined form of this instinctive human process. Experiments performed under rigorous controls provide empirical data on the phenomena of interest; theories, formed by a combination of deductive and intuitive conceptualization, metaphorical representation, and mathematical formalism, are composed to explicate or predict the empirical effects. Anomalies, encountered either as experimental observations that are inconsistent with prevailing theory, or as theoretical predictions that conflict with established data, stand like road signs, signaling "wrong way" to the scientific travelers, forcing design of more incisive experiments, or revision of extant models. Most anomalous phenomena that confront scientific logic tend to have only local impact within their particular disciplinary contexts, and to arise and be resolved relatively quickly compared to the overall evolutionary paces of those fields. In rarer instances, such as the anomalous celestial observations that contradicted the prevailing geocentric models, or the array of atomic-scale physical anomalies that precipitated the quantum revolution, their implications can extend much more broadly, and efforts toward their resolution can become more widespread, protracted, and intense. The one genre of anomalous human experience that has dwarfed all others in endurance, ubiquity, implications, and resistance to rational comprehension involves some of the most basic processes of consciousness upon which its observational and deductive skills are based. Throughout recorded history, anecdotal instances of inexplicable consciousness-related anomalies have regularly been reported and variously catalogued as "miracles", "magic", "intuition", "alchemical transmutations", "psychic phenomena", or "gremlins", along with countless other categories of elusive experiences, but little coherence has ever been established among them. Yet, these incomprehensible events have had immense influence on human culture, stimulating the development of religious doctrines, ethical conventions, and even scientific methodology. Virtually all of the ancient and medieval sciences were inseparable admixtures of rigorous analytical thought and intuitive metaphysical inspirations, and the latter components did not entirely disappear with the dawn of modern scientific methodology. Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, proposed systematic investigation of telepathic dreams, psychic healing, transmission of spirits, and the force of the imagination on the casting of dice (Walker, 1972). Isaac Newton regarded the ultimate mechanism of change in the universe to reside in "the mystery by which mind could control matter" (Kubrin, 1981). The establishment of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882 attracted participation by many eminent scholars, among them the likes of Henry Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Lord Raleigh, Sir. J. J. Thompson, William McDougall, Edmund Gurney, Sir William Crookes, Sir William Barrett, Henri Bergson, Arthur, Earl of Balfour, Gardner Murphy, G. N. M. Tyrell, Charles Richet, Gilbert Murray, and William James. A comparable fascination with the role of consciousness in the physical world runs through the philosophical writings of many of the patriarchs of quantum theory, including Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Eugene Wigner, and David Bohm, among others (Jahn and Dunne, 1983b, 1987). The relationship between mind and matter has also pervaded the history of philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, and now evidences growing implications for contemporary biology and medicine. Not least of all, many of the tools of statistical analysis, which undergird virtually all contemporary scientific endeavors, were originally developed to facilitate investigation of psychic phenomena (Richet, 1884). Given this long academic heritage, it is not totally surprising that study of consciousness-related anomalies is now emerging in various aspects of modern engineering. As contemporary information, energy, and materials technologies press toward ever more sensitive components and intensely interactive systems, it becomes necessary to protect against a broad array of extremely subtle external influences and internal interferences. Under such circumstances, indications that human consciousness may be capable of more than passive interaction with delicate information processing tools raise serious questions about the potential vulnerability of much modern instrumentation, control, and operational equipment to inadvertent or intentional disturbances associated with the consciousness of their human operators. From a more positive perspective, those same possibilities may also offer exciting opportunities for more responsive and creative human/machine technologies.