Despite the small scale of the observed consciousness-related anomalies, they could be functionally devastating to many types of contemporary information processing systems, especially those relying on random reference signals.. or to any other technical scenarios where the emotions, attitudes, or purposes of human operators may intensify and deepen their interactions with the controlling devices and processes.. As cutting-edge nanotechnology and quantum computing move into even more delicately poised information processors, protection against such consciousness-related interference could become increasingly relevant..
15m trailer for "The Pear Proposition" DVD review of the project that ran from 1979 to 2007. It was founded by professor Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, https://player.vimeo.com/video/4359545
"PEAR conducted formal studies on two primary subject areas, psychokinesis (PK) and remote viewing"
...
"PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility.[16] In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[13] An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results.[9]"
I think articles like the OP destroy the meaning of words like rigor. If the work was even remotely reproducible we'd see a gold rush that puts AI to shame.
nakamoto_damacy 37 minutes ago [-]
Between 1987 and 1988, I was obsessed with recording an anomaly with my first programmable Casio calculator that had an RND function. At the ripe age of 15, I took a bus to a warehouse-like building in some London suburb that had advertised the calculator in some computer magazine. I had saved up 100+ pounds and the calculator was 98 pounds plus VAT. I came home and opened the box and started reading the manual. All the sudden I fixated on some logical issue that can arise based on its instruction set. I have no recollection why, but I knew if that I could crash the calculator if I forced an undecidable state. Sure enough, when I ran it, it would wipe out what I had stored in memory and the LCD would go blank. Nothing unusual about that, I had simply managed to break it. I was fond of breaking things. After some time, I decided to make it more fun so I made it crash only if the random value 0.153 came up (I used the RND function inside the loop) and for fun I started recording the times it took before it crashed. Out of shear boredom and fascination with the power I had to crash the calculator, I started daring it to crash by thinking out loud (but in my head still, like an inner voice) the number 0.153. I convinced myself that I have ESP of some kind because the more I concentrated on that number the faster the calculator seemed to crash. I tabulated the times over a two year period (in a notepad that I ended up shredding and throwing in the trash because I thought I was going crazy.) My data revealed an anomaly in the correlation between the frequency of saying the magic number in my head (nothing special about the number) and the time it took for the calculator to crash.
Personally, I don't believe in the "anomaly". However. I still can't explain it. I mean it's not like my mind could interface with CMOS or that the calculator was fed off some quantum number generator or even an analog source. It was a deterministic pseudorandom number generator.
Yet, I spent two years of my teenage years obsessed with the experiment and the results. LOL.
https://noosphere.princeton.edu/gcpdot/
"PEAR conducted formal studies on two primary subject areas, psychokinesis (PK) and remote viewing" ... "PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility.[16] In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[13] An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results.[9]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalie...
Personally, I don't believe in the "anomaly". However. I still can't explain it. I mean it's not like my mind could interface with CMOS or that the calculator was fed off some quantum number generator or even an analog source. It was a deterministic pseudorandom number generator.
Yet, I spent two years of my teenage years obsessed with the experiment and the results. LOL.