The Princeton Experiment Finding Trillion-to-One Odds that “Chance” is Shaped by a Collective Consciousness
Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project found a trillion-to-one odds ratio that collective thought can affect the output of a global network of quantum random number generators. If true, what does this mean for physics?
The majority of the scientific establishment currently assumes that the patterns that we define as “physical reality” must be the source of all patterns in our conscious experience. But recognize that, ultimately, everything that we know is known through patterns in our conscious experience. Thus, it is quite an extraordinary statement to claim that we know for a fact that all patterns in our conscious experience must come from that small subset of patterns we call “physical reality”. The purpose of this article is to show that the preponderance of the evidence does not support this assumption, and so, if we are being honest with ourselves, we must let it go.
Many scientists will tell you that we know for a fact that our conscious experience is created by brain activity because when regions of the brain are inactivated, people report losing consciousness associated with those regions. However, consider this analogy: if a person wears a virtual reality headset, and the VR headset is damaged, the conscious experiences associated with the VR headset will "black out”; this does not mean the VR headset is the *only* object that can create signals in a person’s conscious experience. In other words, all the evidence used to argue that our conscious experience is created by brain activity is equally compatible with a model in which the brain merely generates signals that our conscious experience is tuned into, akin to consciousness “wearing” or “tuning into” the VR headset of the brain.
How can we distinguish between these two models, one in which consciousness is created by brain activity, and the other where consciousness is merely “tuned into” brain activity? One prediction of the VR headset analogy is that vivid conscious experiences will resume if consciousness can do the equivalent of “taking off the headset”. And indeed, it has been found that subjects who have out-of-body experiences during cardiac arrest are able to describe their resuscitations much more accurately than those who do not have out-of-body experiences. Keep in mind that during these experiences, the brain is deprived of oxygen (which it needs to power itself); claiming that brain activity generates these experiences is akin to claiming that a VR headset can generate an accurate and detailed representation of its reality even when its power source is cut off.
Another prediction of the “VR headset” view of the brain is that when the VR headset is relatively quiet, it should be possible to hear signals from other sources. This is essentially a test of whether certain psychic or ‘psi’ phenomena are possible, and regardless of what you may have read on Wikipedia (which has a strong editorial bias against these topics), the experimental evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of these phenomena existing: this 2018 review of over 1000 experiments performed across 11 categories, published in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association (here is a non-paywalled version), concluded:
The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms
There is even physiological evidence for telepathy: this 1965 article published in Science was the first to report brain wave synchrony between physically separated identical twins. I’ve been told by people who know more about the circumstances surrounding that publication that the research had ties to the US government (the story goes that the US government wanted its rivals to be aware that they were looking into the phenomenon, but did not want to reveal much more), and that was how a paper such as this one was able to overcome the skepticism of the journal editors. It seems that this research is experiencing a revival: on April 10th 2024, an article was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience describing similar findings (the authors write: “overall, this effect was significant at the p = 4 × 10^-8"; in other words, the odds are 25 million to 1 that the result was due to chance).
The results of the Global Consciousness Project suggest consciousness acts retrocausally
Returning to the evidence: one of the experiments featured in the APA review is the Global Consciousness Project (GCP) at Princeton. It tested the hypothesis that during time periods in which there is unusually strong coherence in what people are thinking about (e.g. a terrorist attack), random number generators based on quantum tunneling are more likely to produce correlated results. The main experiment concluded in 2015, and the odds ratio in favor of the hypothesis was a trillion to one. The list of time periods considered was pre-registered and can be found here. The same procedure was performed for duration-matched time periods surrounding the pre-registered time periods, and the results there were a very close match to the theoretical expectation due to chance. I have independently reanalyzed the data I could download from their website, and found that the odds ratio can be reduced by a factor of 100 if normalizing the variance of the devices by their lifetime empirical variance, but the result still remains highly statistically significant (it is above the “five sigma” threshold, which is the threshold used for announcing the discovery of a new particle ). If you are interested in a formal description of the statistical methods, I wrote them up here. I will also say, having been on calls with folks who ran this project after I emailed my thoughts to them late last year, that they spend a great deal of time puzzling over the data — not the behavior you expect of people who have committed elaborate fraud to fabricate the results (as some ignorant people imply).
Things get even more interesting from here. The random number generators used in the GCP work by generating a raw sequence of 1s and 0s (called a “bitstream”) based on the inherent randomness of a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, in which particles are able to jump or “tunnel” through an energy barrier probabilistically. This raw sequence of 1s and 0s is then subject to a bias correction process that is completely separate from the quantum tunneling in which 50% of the values (or “bits”) are flipped (that is, 1 is flipped to 0 and 0 is flipped to 1) to produce the final bitstream. So, for example, if the quantum tunneling procedure produced the raw bitstream of 11110000, and the flipping procedure was set to flip every other value, the final output bitstream would be 10100101.
Here’s the crazy part: the correlations observed in the Global Consciousness Project were in the final bit stream, not in the raw bit stream, even though (due to the bit flipping procedure) the final bit stream is completely uncorrelated with the raw bit stream (i.e. 10100101 is completely uncorrelated with 11110000). The most straightforward way to explain these correlations is if we postulate that consciousness influences the final, consciously observed bit stream, which then retrocausally influences the (not consciously observed) quantum tunneling such that the correlations appear — but only only after the bit flipping is applied.
There is actually room for this type of effect in our current models of quantum mechanics. You may have heard of the Schrodinger’s cat paradox: a cat is placed in a sealed box in which a poisonous gas is released depending on whether or not a radioactive decay occurs. “Whether or not a radioactive decay occurs” is a quantum mechanical phenomenon, and quantum mechanics holds that until the state of a system is measured, that system exists in a combination, or “superposition”, of all possible states. However, the question of what constitutes a “measurement” is the central open question in quantum mechanics (it is called “the measurement problem”), and as far as we know, it could be the case that “a measurement is something that provides data to a conscious observer”. That is why it is said that, as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, from the perspective of an outside observer, until the box is opened the cat is “both alive and dead” (that is, the states “alive” and “dead” are both possible; it is not that one has occured and is merely unknown to the outside observer). The results of the Global Consciousness Project suggest that whether or not the cat will be observed as alive or dead, and thus the history of whether or not the radioactive decay occurred, can be influenced by the state of consciousness relevant to the observation.
Once again, this model contradicts nothing of what is known about quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics holds that when an observation occurs, the system “collapses” into one of the multiple possible states with some probability that is currently calculated according to a postulate called the Born rule. This indeterminacy of quantum mechanics famously troubled Einstein, who said “God does not play dice with the universe”. However, the question of whether there exist so-called “hidden variables”, which, if known, would allow one to predict what the result of the observation would be, remains unresolved. The results of the Global Consciousness Project suggest that such hidden variables do exist, appear to be tied to the state of consciousness, and can create subtle deviations from the Born rule under directed conscious attention. For additional evidence that this happens, see this 2023 article published in Biosystems titled Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: A hypothesis with supporting evidence (non-paywalled version available here).
The kicker in all of this? It resolves the free will vs. “fate” debate: “fate” or fixed outcomes can be said to be authored by our free will/“consciousness”, which retrocausally influences the history of unobserved events so that particular observations occur.
There are even hints of retrocausality at the frontiers of particle physics: the recently-discovered antipodal duality found a mathematical link between "two things that in physics we thought should be independent”, and first author Lance Dixon said that there are hints that the duality has something to do with causality. Specifically, it was a duality between two formulas in which the orders of terms in one formula was the reverse of the order of terms in the other formula. For the formula on one side of the duality there were constraints that mapped on to the established rules of causality, “guaranteeing interactions between incoming particles occur before outgoing particles appear”, but when those same constraints were mapped on to the other side of the duality, they appeared to be arbitrary. My guess is that by extension of the concept of “duality”, it is reasonable to suspect those “arbitrary constraints” have something to do with retrocausality.
If this research is all valid, why isn’t it more widely known?
As an academic myself, I have observed that there is a lot of casual contempt in scientific circles towards people who believe in “woo” (i.e. spiritual) phenomena. Here’s something we as a society are yet to catch on to: contempt is a cognitive distortion used to scare people away from scrutinizing a position. Think of contempt like psychological bullet fire: it floods people with fear and compromises their ability to detect the clarity of an argument, making it unlikely that they will see through bullshit for the same reason that it’s hard to think clearly when tending to a bullet wound. For example, many contemptuously claim that these phenomena “break the laws of physics”, even though the laws of physics are not complete, particularly regarding the open question of whether there are hidden variables behind what we currently model as “randomness”. I wrote about this more in the article below:
It took decades for the scientific community to recognize that homosexuality is not a disease, even though the evidence to realize that it wasn’t a disease (such as the behavior of closely related animal species) was always there. Standing up for the evidence that these phenomena deserve serious scientific investigation is a bit like standing up for the evidence that homosexuality is not a disease before it was socially acceptable to do so. Strong egos stand in the way, and it takes a lot of courage to advocate for positions that your peers would reject you for. Just as organized groups of bigots waged ad-hominem attacks on openly queer individuals, there are organized groups of pseudoskeptics that have “worked hard to trash any Wikipedia pages related to psi, including bios of parapsychologists”:
But denial doesn’t last forever, and when it unravels, it unravels quickly. Consider the following statement from the 2016 president of the American Statistical Association, made during her presidential address:
Parapsychology is concerned with the scientific investigation of potential skills that are commonly known as psychic abilities, such as precognition, telepathy, and so on. For many years I have worked with researchers doing very careful work in this area, including a year I spent working on a classified project for the United States government, to see if we could use these abilities for intelligence gathering during the Cold War. This 20-year project is described in the recent book ESP Wars East and West by physicist Edwin May, the lead scientist on the project, with input from his Soviet counterparts.
At the end of that project I wrote a report for Congress, stating what I still think is true. The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at data!…Now there is a definition of pseudo-science — basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!…Of course I’m giving you an extreme example, and I think people are justifiably skeptical, because most people think that these abilities contradict what we know about science. They don’t, but that’s the subject for a different talk!
If there’s one thing scientists hate, it’s being accused of pseudoscience. Once it becomes recognized that that is what dismissing these findings amounts to, I anticipate a rapid shift. And some messy breakdowns. But that’s what I write these articles for: so people have somewhere to go during the breakdowns.
The implications for our lives
The biggest reason to share these findings is that they challenge our belief that we are fundamentally separate from each other, which is at the origin of the zero-sum selfish behavior that is tearing our societies apart. I urge you to listen to the stories of people who have had near-death experiences and the perspectives that they bring back from “the other side”; there is a lot of consistency, and it will likely change how you see your life.
These findings could also lead to major breakthroughs in health and medicine. Retrocausality (or should we say “retroselective reality”) likely underpins the placebo effect, which is the phenomenon where people tend to get better if they expect they will get better, even if their medical treatment doesn’t change. Consider how powerful it would be if we could isolate and reproduce the mechanism of the placebo effect so that it could cure virtually any illness.
I was surprised to learn that a lot of headway has already been made in this area, in the form of a healing technique called “Bengston healing” that has been studied extensively in controlled laboratory conditions (it was even shown to cause transcriptional changes in cells in a petri dish). In listening to the story of how Bengston healing was discovered, I learned that the doctors of patients who were dramatically healed by this technique typically had no interest in meeting the healer. Heck, sometimes the people themselves who were healed by this technique went into fits of rage when the technique worked, because their identity had been attached to the belief that such techniques would not work. It revealed a lot about why things are the way they are in regards to this research; it’s not just that people think these phenomena are impossible; it makes them extremely uncomfortable to admit that they might be possible.
I could go on and on about areas of science that could benefit from considering these phenomena. For example, breakthrough findings from Michael Levin’s lab at Tuft’s University found organ development is goal-driven — that is, organisms seem to have an idea of their end state and can develop towards this end state even when the initial state is messed with (e.g. in the experiment involving “Picasso Frogs”, the organ positions in the tadpole were moved around, but the tadpole still managed to develop into a normal-looking frog). This is concordant with the thousands of cases from the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies of young children reporting verified memories of other lives in which birthmarks and birth defects on the children were found to align with locations of wounds on the autopsy photographs of the deceased (in most of these cases, the previous life ended quite violently, hence all the autopsy photographs; these are not the kinds of stories that children tend to make up). Here is an excellent article in Scientific American written by a skeptic who took the time to look at the evidence:
Keep in mind that a major mystery in neuroscience is the question of where memories lie; if this evidence on memories of other lives was taken more seriously by neuroscientists, they might realize that memories may not be stored in the brain at all, but rather within the medium of consciousness, whatever that may turn out to be. Thus, a plausible mechanism for the development of the unusual birthmarks/birth defects is that the violent end to the remembered life formed an imprint in the state of the child’s consciousness that “retrocausally” led the body to develop towards a target end state, not unlike what is observed with the Picasso frogs.
While people may understandably fear that suddenly recognizing these phenomena will open the door to ungrounded superstitious beliefs (e.g. “are ghosts real?”), consider that the antidote to superstition is principled scientific investigation, and principled scientific investigation cannot happen if we are in denial that the phenomena are even possible. For example, principled scientific investigation may reveal that “ghosts’’ are real, but mostly keep to themselves (like wildlife), and their ability to affect us is heavily influenced by our subconscious willingness to be affected by them. As another example, in Indian culture it is common to blame people for thier painful circumstances by saying they must have done something in a “past life” to deserve those circumstances, but principled scientific investigation of reincarnation case studies does not support the existence of punishment-based karma (that said, there is some notion of justice in the afterlife; if you listen to near-death experiences, you find that people report experiencing their actions from other people’s perspectives in the “life review” stage itself, and if karma-type role reversals are mentioned, they are only said to occur with the consent of all parties involved).
Ultimately, there is no cause for paranoia; such phenomena, if real, have always been real, and have been attributed to “chance’’; by choosing to study them rather than ignore them, we will be less at the mercy of “chance’’.
