http://www.edtn.com/news/may11/051198topstory.html
EDTN is a Member of CMPnet 

Top EDTN Network News... 	
Top EDTN Network Story: from EE Times
Getting to the heart of mind-matter interaction
By Larry Lange, EE Times 
Tucson, Ariz. -- The nascent field of "mind-matter interaction"--which may hold both short- and long-term promise for the scientific and engineering communities--appears to be coming into its own.
Last week's gathering of 1000-plus attendees at a respected "consciousness" conference here; the impending release of a commercial mind-matter device; and increasing commercial and governmental interest in a technical Web project focused on building a "conscious chip" are all indications that the hard-to-believe convergence of psychokinesis (known to physicists as "psi") and quantum-physics research is moving into the traditional empirical science and engineering space. 
Sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, "Tucson III: Toward a Science of Consciousness 1998" saw dozens of technical workshops hosted by the top thinkers in this burgeoning field. And while the topics at first appear to be straight out of the "X-Files," many of the leading universities and organizations sent representatives to discuss the advanced physics and correlative engineering of consciousness. 
In fact, nearly 40 speakers from the likes of MIT, Oxford and Princeton presented at the gathering, including Jack Sarfatti, noted independent quantum researcher and author, who provided an in-depth examination of his team's ongoing three-year project: the Q-chip (Quantum chip). While theoretical at present, according to Sarfatti, some version of the Q-chip--if, indeed, it can be made to work--is already within the range of micro-fabrication techniques currently available. 
Hardware is here
Far less theoretical, however, is the imminent release of a series of mind-matter interaction devices from startup Mindsong Inc. (St. Paul, Minn.). The company claims its wares can be used to turn lights and radios on and off simply by tapping the power of the user's mind. 
"We recognize that, for most people--including the technically and scientifically trained--the concept of a nonlocal field [the character of a quantum field not located in a given region of space and time] created by intentions, which alters information states and effects physical reality, is mind boggling," said John Haaland, president and CEO of Mindsong. 
But Mindsong claims its products are backed up with significant statistical results: they do, indeed, work, according to Haaland. "We're getting 15 to 30 percent results over chance," he said. 
Mindsong's enabling technology is called "ShifterCell," which is described by the company as "a patented technology that permits a physical system, such as a computer or free-standing electronic device, to be actuated by intentions alone, without any physical or electromagnetic intermediary." Mindsong is preparing both a consumer device and a more sophisticated version for the research community. 
ShifterCell is described to work by creating a sensitive random event that is susceptible to, or able to be altered by, the mind's conscious intention alone. When it senses a deviation from randomness that goes above or below what can be expected by chance, it produces an output that can be used to activate, via the company's "Mind Switch" accessory, any number of devices, such as lights, sounds, or specific scenarios designed into a computer game. 
These are not the first products of this kind from Mindsong. A gaming/learning software product, called "ShapeChanger," is said to allow users to influence the mixing of two images on a computer monitor. Through mind power alone, clains the company, people are able to influence pixels far beyond what could be expected by chance. 
While Haaland admitted that Mindsong's products are rudimentary, he also noted that the firm's line could lead to further applications--possibly in the processing used by builders of nanocomputers, where micro-miniaturization and cycle speeds may require shielding from these kinds of nonlocal influences. 
Engineering anomalies
To back up his claims, Haaland cited more than 20 years of research in human/machine interfaces and remote perception [the ability to perceive remote objects] ongoing at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (Pear) laboratory. Spearheaded by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, the lab's director and manager respectively, Pear--along with the Consciousness Research Lab at the University of Nevada and others (there are at least 10 other research labs worldwide employing nearly 100 hundred scientists and engineers doing related work)--has yielded a huge database of statistical data and meta-analysis. 
Utilizing a combination of random event generators (REGs) and field trials for remote mental sensing, the Pear lab alone has produced literally thousands of experiments encompassing billions of trials. 
Begun specifically to focus on the possible vulnerabilities of engineering systems to mind phenomenon, the Pear lab claims its data has conclusively and consistently proven that the mind has a direct affect on random physical systems. The work has also yielded serious attention from the engineering community--it was featured in an IEEE proceedings paper, and has also been cited in dozens of major scientific publications worldwide. 
"When you look at it from the meta-analytical perspective," said Dunne, "even though these effects on our equipment are marginally significant in some cases, over many replications, these effects are robustly significant." Dunne said that the data produced for the remote perception trials is even more significant. "In that area we're getting about 15 percent more [positive results] than you'd expect by chance. All of the evidence says incontrovertibly that something's going on." 
Some experts, however, say that a mere 15 percent won't cut it in the empirical scientific arena. A leading skeptic, Victor Stenger, author and professor of physics at the University of Hawaii, curtly dismissed Pear's research: "Nobody has replicated what they've done, and it's such a small effect, that, if you want to see the effect, you can make it come out that way." 
Low tolerance
Despite the criticisms, Pear lab's principles say even small but consistent stats could have serious ramifications for the engineering community, in particular. While the scale of the effects come to something on the order of a couple of bits in 10,000, explained Dunne, "that result actually exceeds the tolerance levels of many engineering systems--particularly those that have some random component." 
Dunne and Jahn cite modern information-processing equipment as particularly vulnerable. "Especially if you're running some very sensitive microprocessing technology--radar, computers, telephone lines--where a couple of bits off, especially if repeated often enough, can mess up your systems," said Dunne. 
"That's when you start worrying about the pilot in the high-performance jet aircraft," she added, "where someone's dealing with wall-to-wall microelectronics. Or what about the guy in a missile silo, watching the output of a radar detector hour after hour?" 
In fact, one of Pear's earliest sponsors was James McDonnell, the late patriarch of McDonnell-Douglas. Jahn recounts: "He used to say to me, 'When I put a 19-year old kid in an F-15 in a combat environment, can I be perfectly sure that all of the wire that's controlling that equipment is behaving nominally in the presence of what must be severe emotional radiation of the consciousness of the crew.' " 
The Pear group is currently moving into more sophisticated experiments, involving "group consciousness." There have been recent collaborative tests with four related labs in the U.S. and Europe, and all involved hope this work can translate into business-productivity tools, according to Jahn. 
In fact, he imagines the evolution of a technology that is capable of assessing degrees of coherence--and the creativity or validity--of particular concepts that emerge from, say, a business meeting. 
Quantum chip
On the theoretical front, serious discussion is underway on a sentient microprocessor, also called a "conscious chip." Dozens of the world's leading physicists and engineers from NASA Ames Research Center, the National Science Foundation, the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab, the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley Lab, among others, are logging onto the Web-based "Stardrive" site with input concerning this device. 
A virtual think-tank, Stardrive is funded primarily by the San Francisco-based Internet Science Education Project (ISEP), whose mission is to come up with "outrageous ideas that may actually work and revolutionize high technology," according to Jack Sarfatti, independent quantum physicist-consultant and unofficial moderator of the Q-chip project. 
In it's third year of theoretical conception, the Q-chip group is beginning to see interest from "every major high-technology firm in the world," said Sarfatti, and a slew of other academic and government agencies. 
Sarfatti sees future application for the Q-chip in "conscious robots" and intelligent interstellar probes. In the same vein, NASA has recently launched a related program, called "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics," which seeks to find new answers for propelling vehicles without propellant mass, attaining maximum transit speeds and creating the energy-production methods necessary to power such devices. 
Quantum computers could completely transform computer technology, making possible systems that are millions or trillions times faster than the best we have today, explained Creon Levit, a director at NASA Ames Research Center's Numerical Aerodynamics Simulation Division, and who is working closely with Sarfatti on the theoretical chip. 
Sarfatti explained that the Q-chip, in theory, is a fully sentient [aware] or "conscious" computing chip at the nanometer level (at the 10-to-100 nanometer level), and is based largely on David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. Bohm is considered one of the major thinkers in quantum physics' roughly 100-year history. 
Sarfatti worked personally with Bohm in the 1970s, and began to apply to real-world applications the visionary physicist's notion that the quantum wave-like properties of matter--and the quantum particle-like properties of classical electromagnetic and gravitational fields--represent a "thought-like" field. 
This field goes to the core of quantum physics theory. Classical physics states that two objects can never effect each other instantaneously in space and time because everything must travel through space with a maximum speed limit (the speed-of-light of Einstein's relativity theory) and in a finite time, called "locality." But quantum mechanics is showing that measurements made at one point in space can instantaneously affect the outcome of measurements at another point. This notion is termed "nonlocality," and implies some sort of superluminal (faster than the speed of light) signaling, which is in violation of Einstein's assertion. 
Sarfatti and Bohm's quantum notions take these ideas just one step further, however. Their thought-like "Q-field" supposedly acts directly in a higher-dimensional nonlocal state space, known to advanced physicists as the state where "fractal strange attractors" reside. These attractors also appear in neural-net theory, as well as in the so-called "new biology of spontaneous self-organization" professed by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity and elsewhere. 
Simply put, the concept behind the Q-chip is basically a unique combination of David Bohm's Q-field theory and this new biology. 
Quantum biology
Much of this biology is centered on another concept, which states that the brain itself is a quantum device. Many now theorize that the seat of quantum effects in the brain lies in "microtubules"--the hollow parts of the cytoskeletons of most of the cells of animal and human bodies--and not just in brain cells. Some physicists suggest that they could be, in fact, the cell's own "nervous system." 
In effect, the Q-chip will be emulating the human microtubule infrastructure which, when activated--with suitable I/O devices and sensors--could be capable of something akin to "experience." 
Sarfatti conceded that "we won't know what the Q-chip can really do until we build the damn thing." 
"A Q-chip would put Intel out of business if they ignored it and someone else developed it before them," he said. He explained that, while Intel and similar current chips are based on serial classical Turing machines, the Q-chip could surpass them because of its potential for infinite parallel-processing capacity. Said Sarfatti, it would also have the "ability to correctly decode future states of itself in a self-consistent, highly reliable way because of nonlocal communication." 
Of course, much of the Sarfatti team's Q-chip research hinges on the theory that nonlocal fields are indeed "aware," or conscious. 
The other side
Ask Jack Sarfatti if we live in conscious universe, and you get a resounding "yes," but after 20 years of hard stats, even Pear is hard-pressed to explain the phenomenon of mind-matter interaction. And several physicists offer stiff skepticism, even regarding some of the basics of quantum theory. 
"There's a lot of quantum 'metaphysics' going on," said Victor Stenger, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii. He insists that even the oft-cited quantum mechanical term "nonlocality" exists only as a theoretical concept. He further asked: "And is this thing we call the wave function: real or not?--or is it just an abstract mathematical concept that we [physicists] use to describe things?" 
There appears to be evidence, however, that quantum mechanical theories are proving to be much more than theory. Several advanced physics labs are moving beyond mathematical-thought experiments to actually conducting physical ones. Most recently, the Weizmann Institute, in Rehovot, Israel, demonstrated that a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed--an underlying theme of quantum mechanics. 
Still, Stenger noted that even Einstein objected to the idea of wave-function collapse, calling it "spooky action-at-a-distance." Stenger is no admirer of Pear's research either. Though he admits to not studying their research for the past several years, he said: "Pear can't provide a real empirical basis for their claims, and they've refused to change their protocols, which are suspect." 
Force in physics
Still some are intrigued with the possibilities. "One of the things that has struck us over the years," said Pear's Brenda Dunne, "is that our results show no dependencies on distance--people get results that are just as good when they're doing mind-matter interaction or remote perception from a thousand miles away or when they're sitting directly in front of the machine. There's just no known force in physics--in terms of an energy or a kinetic influence--that would not fall off with time and, certainly, with distance." 
"The only way I can possibly explain the phenomenon," said Mindsong's Haaland, "is that it's occurring nonlocally--outside of space and time." 
He also explained that another area of quantum physics-"quantum entanglement"--seems to be involved. Quantum entanglement is an aspect of nonlocality that establishes a connection between two particles in such a way that the "quantum essence" of a particle can be passed from one to the other. Physicists at IBM researching quantum physics have already utilized quantum entanglement to demonstrate what they term "quantum teleportation." 
This work has Sarfatti's Q-chip group abuzz about the possibilities of "advanced quantum transmissions of information moving backward in time," which, according to Sarfatti, is what IBM shows is happening in the act of teleporting a particle. IBM's theory was recently proven in a lab experiment by physicists the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and researchers are still examining the results. 
In agreement with the notion that quantum entanglement deserves the attention of next-wave physics research is Amit Goswami, a professor of physics at the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon. A self-professed Eastern theologian, who researches and writes extensively on the science of spirituality, Goswami's physics theory, "monistic idealism," seeks to unite both world. "My theory--which I've proved experimentally--states that consciousness is the ground of all being." 
Still, other physicists are deeply skeptical about quantum physics being applied to explain psi--or anything else, for that matter. "It's complete hogwash," said Charles Bennett, a Fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and who spearheaded the quantum teleportation research. He agrees with Stenger that much of the speculation falls more inside metaphysical territory, adding, "What do we even mean that we have consciousness--other than the functioning of the laws of nature as they govern the matter we're made of?" 
Whatever the results of the next wave for quantum research, it appears that mind-matter interaction and consciousness research--and any systems or chips that result from that research--could seep deeper into next-generation science and engineering technology. 
But this doesn't come without a price. Pear's Brenda Dunne likes to remind herself and her peers of what it takes to be a leading-edge scientist and engineer as the decade hurtles toward the millennium: "We must be prepared to say two very difficult things: I don't know, and I was wrong." 

See also: The "Tao of Engineering?" 

All material on this site Copyright (c) 1998 EDTN, LLC - A joint venture of CMP Media Inc. and Aspect Development Inc. All rights reserved. Terms of Service. 

Register	
Please become a registered user of EDTN. It is free and will make it easier for you to receive the information you need. See the benefits of registration, or: 
Register Now 	
/search

Search EDTN and the Top 100 Electronics Sites