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JF: How did the Global Consciousness Project come into being?

RN: When I first encountered the possibility of working in this rather unusual field of consciousness studies it was because I saw an advertisement in one of the academic newspapers.

They have classified ads for jobs that people might be interested in. And a friend of mine, knowing that I was looking, gave me a page with three jobs circled and adjacent to one of those was an advertisement that said, we are looking for cognitive scientists interested in the lesser known aspects of perception.

And I thought, wow, maybe they're talking about the sense of smell or the haptic sense, or who knows what, but it turned out that they were talking about the sixth sense, or whatever you want to call it. The possibility that people can influence the world around them just by their intentions and their prayers and so on.

Anyway, I applied for that job and claimed that I was 100% sceptical and 100% open-minded. And I thought, if you don't mind the funny arithmetic, that's me. I still feel very much like that balance is healthy, maybe in a way that's what an open mind really is -  the ability to be both.

I did laboratory experiments with people intentionally changing the behaviour or changing the results from a random number generator (RNG) - sometimes called a random event generator (REG) but what it does is just that, it generates completely random sets of numbers. We conducted highly qualified, rigorous experiments for years with a huge number of people, most of whom didn't claim to be psychic or anything like that.

What we found was that if people were willing to pay attention and do the job of intending, for example, if I want to get high numbers now or low numbers, they could do that. Not always, and not necessarily with very much of a bias, but people were able to change the behaviour or the output from random number generators that were built to be truly random, so then we miniaturised everything. At the time, you're probably too young to remember, but there weren't laptops, so we just had to shrink all of our equipment so that we could take it out into the field to study.

Then we could go to a cathedral or a major ceremony, or we could go to an opera and record data while the whole opera was going on and predict when the opera reached its peak moment that had the audience captivated and everybody was focused, then we would see changes in the data. And we did. 

I traveled in Egypt with a group of people who were interested in visiting all the ancient temples and the chambers inside the pyramids and so on. I took data continuously, and I marked the beginning and the end of periods of time when we all were in what we think of as the heart of the temple and doing meditations, overtoning and chanting, trying to be Ancient Egyptians as best we could. The data from those kinds of experiments showed that when groups come together, they form a kind of group consciousness. While this group consciousness is operating, people aren’t thinking about their individual lives, in other words, they surrender individual consciousness momentarily in order to be part of a group.

The experiments that we did always predicted that when we have a coherent group, when we all resonate with each other and just forget the rest of the world and become this conscious group, the data would change. And again, we found that was the case. And so I began thinking about larger groups and ultimately the whole world as a kind of potential global consciousness.

I was influenced in this sort of thinking long before this experience by reading the works of French philosopher and palaeontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Beautiful poetic writing about the evolution of life, starting from particles and molecules, becoming organic cells and eventually complex gatherings of cells and then tiny animals and eventually us. And he said we think of ourselves and justifiably perhaps, as the pinnacle of evolution, as far as evolution has brought something in life. But he said that there's another stage - we're not finished yet. And that other stage would be to become what he called a noosphere. That's  like an atmosphere, but made of knowledge, of intelligence.

JF: I love the noosphere! I wonder what it would sound like - Musica Universalis maybe.

RN: I’m very interested in that. If we turned the data into music. The recipe, or I guess you would call it the score, since it's music, is for a grand chord that is slightly disharmonious because its random data that would be continuously presented for us to hear. And every now and then it would become so coherent it would turn into a glorious chord that we could think of as the sound of the universe.

That's my aspiration. Although I asked my brother who is a composer to do just that and he wouldn't do it because he believed that if it was random, you couldn’t call it music. I agree though, I think of the Music of the Spheres - actually, the Music of the Noospheres!

So back to Teilhard de Chardin. I read that in the early 1960s. And it was still in my mind when I was thinking about a global consciousness. So what would a global consciousness be like? It would be like a noosphere, it would be all of us coming together to become a kind of sheath, a protective layer of intelligence for the earth. A guiding intelligence for the whole planet.

At some point, all these ideas came together and I decided to put out a network of random number generators all around the world, in every country, if possible, and record data continuously.

What I was imagining was that sometimes as a planetary organism we'd come together if some really big event, maybe a great tragedy like a terrorist attack or maybe a great celebration like New Year's Eve, we would all come together and maybe we'd become a kind of coherent group through that experience.

That was really the hypothesis, that our random number generators spread around the world would show structure or would show changes just like the ones that we took to Egypt and measured group consciousness. I wanted to know how the numbers would change.

JF: What data sets were you using? Were you looking for a rise or fall within the numbers or more complex patterns?

RN: We did some testing to see what would be a good calculation. We took 60 random number generators and created a measure, which we call network variance. It's just a calculation at each second during an event that we think will bring people together. This can be done any time because the data are produced continuously at one trial per second all day, all week, all year long. Now it's more than 25 years that we've been taking this continuous data.

The calculation looks at the whole network, all of the individual devices generating their data in synchrony every second. We would calculate for each second, a measure that represented how much deviation from expectation there was across the whole network. That deviation from expectation we call variance.

A relatively straightforward calculation, although it's unique and it turns out that it's not just a measure of the variance, it's really mostly a measure of the correlation of these devices with each other, even though they're in Fiji, in Australia, in Europe, in the US and in China.

In spite of being thousands of miles apart, these devices become very slightly correlated during major events in the world. The actual methodology always specified that we would look at the whole network of random number generators, rather than readings from a specific one. So for example, with 9/11, we weren’t looking at New York, we were looking at the world. But we could look at individual devices, and interestingly, the largest deviations that day were in Brazil, 3000 miles from New York. The correlation across all the devices was powerful. And the network  stayed partially correlated for almost three days after the attack. It was one of the most striking moments in the database.

Everything we do is prediction based and what you are suggesting is a general prediction.  We have to make a specific one for each time we want to make a calculation. So for 9/11, we made a prediction based on previous experience with major terrorist attacks - in this case we used the embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 which shook the world because previously, embassies had been considered sanctuaries. Then later of course we had more incidents in the Middle East and so on.

With Princess Diana's death, we made a specific prediction of how the data would correlate and I asked friends with random number generators in the US, Europe and the UK to send me data from a six hour window on the day of the funeral. We didn’t have the Global Consciousness Project set up when she died. We saw correlations in the data with peak moments - the march toward the cathedral, eulogies and so on.

I was able to normalise everything to one standard and put all of  those traces together. And the result was a one in a hundred probability that we would see so much deviation by chance. So it was a pretty strong example of group, or global, consciousness and in many ways was the prototype for the Global Consciousness Project.

JF: Do you have a sort of doomsday clock/seismograph alerting you to spikes in data?

RN: Like a seismic data system? No, we pre-define a cluster of data that we will examine to see if there's any structure where there shouldn't be in a random database. So we are always making predictions and looking only at the pre-specified time windows, usually six hours or so. We never went through the data looking for spikes  to try to then identify what happened to cause that spike.

Although we do have a running calculation that shows up on the website as a ball or a globe of colour. The colour changes toward red when the data is more coherent and turns blue when we're losing cohesion, when the correlation becomes negative instead of positive. I suspect that there will be people running algorithms to calculate the instantaneous messaging  produced by the new network, which is called GCP 2.0. People have expectations that if there is a negative event, there will be a downward trend, or the opposite for a positive event, but really we are just looking at what is random and what is not random.

JF: Would you describe this phenomena of consciousness and the random number generators as existing in a quantum state, and the collective consciousness pulls the numbers into a specific collapse?

RN: What is extremely important for this work is that we have a truly random sequence of numbers which means they are labile and have an undefined, unpredictable future. And that's one of our major efforts in devising this technology, is that the sequence of numbers is truly random.

What that means is that the next trial, the next value that's gonna come up, the next one or zero is not determined. There's no predictability, as there's no chance, no possibility at all of predicting what the next element in the sequence will be, whether it be positive, negative, larger, smaller, and that's a criterion for random.

We use quantum level electronic processes to make these devices because they're exactly like that. Nobody knows. Nobody can predict what the next electron tunnelling event will be. Whether it will be large or small, many, a few. We just don't have any ability to do that because that future doesn't exist until it comes into being.

There is no future in a random sequence, and there is only that the sequence itself, the present. No decision is made until the collapse actually happens.

JF: Would it be possible to create a database of continuous parallel sequences of data that we could then compare with the history of the world, a data history and an event history, to view correlations over time. Perhaps then there would be some precognitive capabilities, when the data begins to behave strangely you know something is coming. Often psychics share the same precognitive visions or dreams. I’ve heard a few clairvoyants complain about always receiving random precognition about the death of celebrities they have no knowledge of or little interest in, but that is what is in the collective, the aether, because plenty of people are obsessed with celebrity. So it would make sense that these moments of group consciousness on a global scale also happen prior to an event.

RN: That's a very nice example and the parallel is quite strong. We have these events that we know about, that we've been looking at over all these years, but there's a whole lot else going on. I'm also impressed with these correlations of group thinking. Another example is that people are too interested in money. I have an economist friend in Stockholm who's been doing what amounts to something like trying to putting the Global Consciousness project data into the algorithms used to calculate whether you should buy or sell your stocks. And the fact is not only does it make sense, it actually works. My friend compared models using GCP data and other trading model algorithms and found that the models incorporating the GCP data are better by something like 3.5 or 4%.

JF: There is a trading strategy to buy on the full moon, when stocks tend to dip and sell on the new moon when they tend to be higher.

RN: In 2005 we were approached by someone we would call a quant - the kind of person who does huge quantitative model calculations with a hundred variables. In order to do the best they can, these people usually don't invest themselves. They tell investors how to invest. They get paid well for their good advice. He came to me and he said, I decided on a whim almost to see if astrological variables would add something to my hundred variable model. And he was blown away, they actually really did.

JF: In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas correlates major historical and astrological events and now we can use that information to make predictions about people’s behaviour - for example the astrological weather at the moment is similar to the time of the French Revolution.

RN: Yes exactly, I have come across that. So I said to him, you make some predictions and give me the starting time and the ending time for the data that I should look at according to your calculations from the astrological variables. I was sceptical, as always, but you know what happened? We got positive results. The first batch had five different predictions and the combined result was seen across all those five predictions. Which are very specified, no wiggle room. The probability is smaller than one in a hundred that the deviations were just chance fluctuations.

Still, we had to rule out a deviation by chance, so we did it again several months and a year later, and with another three predictions, and those also produced a positive outcome. It's perhaps the strangest event in the whole database.

JF: How do you think artificial intelligence and quantum computing might handle the GCP data?

RN: We're building a new project and there definitely will be artificial intelligence applications for that. I'll be very interested to see what comes up. In the meantime, anyone can access the data as it is open source. So if anyone wants to download it and run it through an AI programme they can.

Dean Radin, a friend and colleague who's been involved with this GCP forever, recently did some interesting experiments that showed what is happening is happening beyond the events that we specified, it’s much more universal. There’s something going on in a much more general way, which shows up in using a measure of multi-scale entropy. That means calculating entropy in the data, all the data using different scales, different fineness of focus. And when you do that, you discover that by comparison with random, truly random or scrambled data, the real data show little excesses of what we call negative entropy.

They show changes away from the randomness that the system is designed to produce, indicating that something is pushing it all. Not constantly, but often spotted throughout the whole database. Not just those moments when we know there was a big event, but something else was driving what I think of as a kind of coherent moment.

JF: What is the future for GCP, what would you like to see this data contributing to? 

RN: So I think the data establishes what I call global consciousness. Great events  actually change the data. Maybe it's something else, but the best guess I can make is that there really is something like a coherence among such a large number of people producing a kind of information influence, a kind of field of information that can be absorbed into the operation of these random number generators.

And nobody knows how, and I'm not sure anybody ever will know, but I think it’s possible that the random number generators have their own being, they are real things in the world and their data is real stuff. And that it somehow participates in the same kind of agreements that we make with each other or with ourselves.

When we're coherent internally, life is smooth. We have a flow. When a group is coherent it's a wonderful experience to participate in it. We can feel this experience but when we try to analyse it, we pull ourselves out of the experience, out of the group.  Random number generators are a nice tool because they allow us to look at something without bias. Basically, it is able to look at something like a group activity and ask if this is sufficiently coherent that I should respond?

JF: You mention the random event generators having their own agency as such, the argument beyond the Turing Test for AI is that it lacks human qualities like empathy, intuition and creativity. And if we are going to give more agency to AI, then it needs more capacity for these more right-brain qualities. For example, in a recent simulation AI blew up the control tower because it perceived the controllers in it to be interfering with its ability to do its job, or there is the trolley problem with driverless cars making calculations about who dies and who lives. Some argue that these aren’t decisions that should be made by logic alone, yet they are also deeply problematic responsibilities for a human to bear. One could argue that if global consciousness can influence data and machines - and in turn also AI - then the decisions of AI could embody the intuition, empathy and creativity of the collective consciousness of humans?

RN: AI, as we know it so far, is fully programmed and created out of human activities. So they know about all those moral dilemmas and philosophical questions because they know all the literature, they know everything we have ever written about. And so in some ways they would be as prepared as we are, if not more so,  to make that kind of moral decision using exactly the same criteria.

In the sense that the decisions that the AI comes to are also driven by our collective consciousness, we can hope that it would be. It would be a pretty nice next step, not an easy one to achieve. Although at the present time, we don't even know how human consciousness manages to do this.

JF: How do you go about setting the intention for the individual random number generators and how do you avoid confirmation bias?

RN: The way we talk about it, it is making an intention contract. For example, we are measuring people dying in a hospice. We set an intention contract for the random number generator to record the measure of consciousness in the space. As somebody transfers from their body and goes into another state of consciousness that we know nothing about, the hypothesis is that we would expect to see a change in data that is statistically significant at the time or near the time of death - as nobody has a really clear definition of when death occurs anyway. So this contract is about taking clean data through all of this human activity. The only way to avoid confirmation bias is through rigorous experiment.

Some people would expect the point of death to be entropic or on a negative trend, depending on the person, but our prediction would be that there is a coherent consciousness state whether it is a terrible tragedy or a delightful celebration. It isn’t about good or bad, happy or sad, it is about a coherent level of consciousness. Even within one person, you’re either chaotic or coherent and this is constantly changing.

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