Mr_Mushrooms said:

Interesting stuff.  It looks like that research may clear up a little of the confusion surrounding human consciousness and its interaction with the physical world.

Perhaps it is just the tip of an iceberg.

---

Yup, that's exactly what I thought.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic

muhurgle said:

It would be kinda cool if there was something to this. But as far as I know, nobody has managed to reproduce their results (the human/machine anomalies).

Also, there are some parts of their works which doesnt sound very convincing. Even though 'consciousness' isn't a well defined or well understood concept, they draw the conclusion that these effects are somehow linked to 'human consciousness'. At the same time they also say that "These random devices also respond to group activities of larger numbers of people, even when they are unaware of the machine's presence.".

Assuming that it is in fact a real measureable effect, it seems to me that if they get a response from people who aren't even aware of the machine, it isn't necessarily linked to 'consciousness'. So that they still use consciousness to explain this sounds a bit dubious.

There's another quote (in http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/correlations.pdf) that is strange:

"Experiments performed by operators far removed from the devices, or exerting their intentions at times other than that of device operation, yield results of comparable scale and character to those of the local, on-time experiments. Such remote, off-time results have been demonstrated on all of the random sources."

Coupled with the first quote (or even by itself), this seems to invalidate the whole experiment. They get the same results at times the operators are NOT exerting their intentions. And they get results when people are unaware of the device. How can they then attribute that the device responds to anything?

---