Mind Influences Matter

You're about to flip a coin. You really, really hope to get tails. Does the effect of your hope, your intention, have any effect on the likelihood that you do get tails?

Of course it does. Duh. Thought affects reality, remember? I must have told you that about 50 times in the past two weeks. Haven't you been paying attention?

See below for an article about an experiment, conducted at one of the Ivy League universities in the United States, to determine whether human intention can affect events which are apparently of a purely random nature.

The experiment is still ongoing. Based on current results so far, the answer is yes, pure human intention does affect such random events. So far, the statistical probability that this answer is wrong is calculated at less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000.

In other words, there is more than a 999,999,999,999 out of 1,000,000,000,000 chance that human intention does affect apparently random events.

Note: this is not to say that you're going to get 999,999,999,999 tails out of 1,000,000,000,000 times you flip a coin. What the experiment says is that your intention DOES influence the outcome on the event. And that the probability that such a conclusion is wrong is less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000.

To put it another way, it is quite absurd to believe that human intention does NOT affect "random" events.

Somewhere in the late 1970’s, an undergraduate student at Princeton University approached the then dean of engineering, Dr. Robert Jahn, and complained that not a single member of the engineering faculty was willing to supervise her senior project. “That’s impossible” thought Jahn, until she went on explain what her project was about. “I want to replicate experiments which show that the mind can influence physical matter!” announced the student. When he heard this, Dean Jahn knew exactly what the problem was; even he wouldn’t want to advise a project that was based on such non-sense!

Rather than dismissing her project off the bat, Jahn remembered his earlier promise that students at Princeton could pursue projects in any legitimate topic that interested them. For the sake of promoting free intellectual inquiry he told the student that he would supervise the work himself if she could demonstrate the serious nature of the project.

In the months that followed, Professor Jahn was persuaded that the subject at least warranted some kind of precursory inquiry. Experiments run by a man named Helmut Schmidt at Boeing labs claimed to show a correlation between the output of a device known as a random event generator and the intention of human participants. After talking with Schmidt and contemplating the engineering implications of the data, Jahn agreed to supervise a replication of Schmidt's experiment.

In this experiment, a device called a random event generator would be used much like an electronic coin flipper. The device produces outcomes that can have one of two states, which are analogous to the heads and tails of a coin toss, each with exactly a 50% probability of occurring. Unlike an electronic coin flipper, the REG takes advantage of the fundamental properites of quantum mechanics to generate its random outputs. Unlike most other objects that we encounter, even with information about every element of the system, modern physical theory states that it is impossible to predict the next output from one of these devices.

In the experiment that was being attempted, operators would attempt to distort the 50/50 balance of the device using nothing more than their intention. Operators would literally sit in front of the random event generator and “will” that one outcome be produced more often than another. Over the course of many outcomes, a statistical profile could be built up that would allow the experimenters to contrast the device's output when a person was not attempting to influence it ....

The article is quite long, and split over several web pages. To read in full, start here.

I am busy with some other personal mindhacking projects - I may not blog here so often in the next 2 weeks or so. But rest assured that Mr Wang shall be back to tell you more about how thought affects reality.

There is no escape! Your mind is the universe. Change your mind and the universe must ___________. .