Adam Curry
Appearances
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Curry, it's kind of interesting because, again, there's more whining and moaning and groaning from NPR. I also have This Week in Trump. I got some Scott Horton stuff. Scott Horton's stuff is interesting.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
You want to do Scott Horton? Now, Scott, this is on a podcast. This is Scott Horton, who's a writer. He did this book called Provoked. And Scott, he's a, he's a lefty, but he's a Trump's, he voted for Trump because he got, he says he's a, and he's done a lot of books. You can look him up.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
On Amazon. But he's he votes for Trump because he thinks the left is doing nothing but lying to him. And he sees it as such an insult. He has to vote for Trump, even though he hates him.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Libertarian. Oh, yeah. That's what he calls himself. OK. Yeah. Libertarian by any libertarian. Yes, he's a libertarian technically. And he was one of those libertarian. You know, I was everyone was a libertarian once in their life.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Or or they don't. I don't know what, you know, looking back on it, I have no idea what a libertarian is supposed to be. It's like they want to legalize drugs and people should be free to have sex with whoever they want. All right. So let's pause it right there.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
He might be. I don't watch CNN. So let's listen to here. So he's got a lot of tidbits that are interesting. And this is him on on Kushner.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Our take on this is from the get-go, is from the intelligence side, which is that we run Israel. They don't run us. Exactly. Exactly. And once you get past this, like this guy just, oh, he's a spy for Israel, blah, blah, blah. That's bull crap.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
But if you want to believe that because you're a libertarian writer, even though you don't even notice what you're writing, for example, the book you just came out with, which was provoked. Or if you're on Mastodon.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Yeah. The book about provoked is about how we provoked the Russians to take over Ukraine. It's got all the stuff we've talked about on this show for years. You know, the Maidan, the whole thing.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
And so, yes, exactly. And so the way these guys don't have they don't know who they think the. tails wagging the dog. Well, no, no, the dog is wagging the tail. So let's get over that. But okay. You can think what you want.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
think from this guy that thinks a little more he's irked about uh woodward who is a another spy agent a spy spook yes pause it and i thought this was worth bob woodward came from naval intelligence and as a young man in his 20s was given the watergate story
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
And then listening to and this is Scott provoked on Woodward is a two parter.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Can you like maybe focus a little more instead of, you know, yammering like that, but okay. So the second part of it, he explains a little more in detail, but then there's a kind of a kicker about Amazon taking his commentary off the site.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Since day one. Since legacy, not legacy of ashes, but family of secrets.
Part Of The Problem
Trump's Delivering on His Promises
Which was brought out that Bob Woodward came out of, that was Navy intelligence, I think. Yeah. And he's basically a...
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Biology might not be producing it, but it is decoding it somehow. It's maybe allowing it to shine through. A classic metaphor is something like a television set. If you're only looking at the screen of the TV, you think that the programming is being produced by the pixels on the TV, but the information's coming from invisible TV signals in the sky.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And also thinking about the applications of or the implications of Psy to artificial intelligence and some of the deep questions surrounding AI systems.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I think there's a couple of very good theories that are emerging, too. Hameroff and Penrose's ORCO-R is looking very interesting.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and Sir Roger Penrose is a physicist. It might be a little scary for people to know that we don't really know how anesthesia works. We know that it works, but we don't really know how, or at least it's up for debate still. And so...
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Hameroff suggested that these physical structures in the cells called microtubules could actually be or function as some sort of quantum device, something that is, because of its structure and shape, capable of connecting the cell to the fabric of the cosmos through quantum entanglement.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And the idea there with anesthesia is that the anesthesia somehow attenuates the ability of the microtubules to function. which acts as a dimmer switch to consciousness. So the human is still alive, but the lights upstairs go out. It's really quite elegant. And the primary criticism to that until recently has been that the body is too warm and wet for quantum effects to persist long enough.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And just last year, there was some modeling that showed that that's not quite true, or at least it's showing that the effects can persist far longer than originally thought.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
There's a deeper dimension to intention. Intention is something that is conscious. You're aware of it. But it doesn't seem that that's what's really driving the ship. And by driving the ship, I mean, let's say that getting an effect on a random number generator or getting some sort of psi effect, telepathy or otherwise. Intention is important, but there's a lot more to it.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
You have to go down a level or two deeper than intention into the realm of the subconscious mind. And what I mean by subconscious is the part of our psyche that exists and is operating things, but of which we're not or very rarely aware. consciously. And it's a bit of a hand-waving on my part because we don't really know what the subconscious is.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I personally believe that it is the subconscious that is connected somehow to the fabric of physical reality. In other words, it is somehow in the domain of the subconscious through which the information processing of psi or telepathy or PK is happening, and it bubbles up to the conscious mind. So in that subconscious realm, you also have deep-seated beliefs.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And those deep-seated beliefs can be things like, I want Psy to be real or I don't want Psy to be real. I will be afraid if Psy effects show up. Or I will be happy if psi effects show up, or psi is totally normal, or telepathy is totally normal, or, you know, these types of deep-seated psychological things of which we may or may not even be aware.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And this, I believe, is where it's sort of the determining factor for whether or not the anomalous effects show up. One is meaning and the other is sort of like deep psychology stuff. So one might set an intention, which is good. But the question is, is that intention actually aligned with deeper parts of your psyche? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
When I was 15, I needed a job, and I ended up going to a bookstore, and I saw this book kind of pulled out of the section of books, and it was Superlearning by, I think, Sheila Ostrander and Nancy Schroeder. And I thought this book was cool. It was all about how to accelerate your learning. So I read this book and I looked at what else the authors had written.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
That's something to sort of be aware of, work to do. The problem gets trickier too when you're talking about doing scientific investigations because the experimenters also have a subconscious mind and also have internalized belief systems and also have meaning surrounding the outcome of events and so forth.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And that can become confounds too in their ability to do things like proof studies, replications. It works both ways. So I don't know what to do about that. How do you shield against something like deep-seated belief systems having an effect on the outcome of the experiment or meaning having an effect on the outcome of the experiment? I don't know.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I think it's probably the first step, though, is just to be aware of these types of things being confounds in experiments. Intention is important. It's not the only thing going on, though.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Well, it seems like we can change outcomes with our consciousness somehow, outcomes in the physical world. So we can change them in the present according to the pair work and others. We look at the random number generator research, outcomes change. Can we change things in the past? Maybe. Or in the future, maybe. And here's what I mean by that.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
There has been work that has involved generating random number generator data, not looking at it, no one looks at it, waiting for a few weeks, and then having somebody, from the point of view of the future, send their intention to the quote-unquote past to affect it. And it shows up as a significant effect. And same with the future. So you can kind of do these time-delayed things.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Similar stuff in the remote viewing canon. If you think about it, this is like Adam being like weirdly metaphysical. I've never seen the future and I've never actually seen the past. I've only ever experienced and lived in the present moment. So the past is something like an idea of the past that exists in the present moment. and that is consistent to the future.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So it's a consistent history to the present moment. And the future is like a probability of the present moment. It could be anything, but it's most likely going to be what's most probable, right? It's guessable. So we have consistent histories and we have probable futures on either side of the present moment. And so if you think that you're influencing the past or the present,
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Maybe you're actually just influencing one of those two things in the present moment. You're changing the consistent history and you're changing the probable future.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And I saw that in the late 70s, they had written a book called Psychic Discoveries from Behind the Iron Curtain. So these were two journalists that were, you know, kind of doing what you're doing, but a long, long time ago in the Psy research stuff. And so I read that and learned about remote viewing and this whole Psy research program, which, of course, was really cool.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
A few weeks later, I met a friend's dad and he started bringing up remote viewing to me. And I said, I know about that. I just read this book about it. And he said, great. How about you come work for me this summer? Your job will be A, to learn and teach yourself to code and manage my website and to learn remote viewing. And you can be like my personal remote viewer.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
The Collective Consciousness app, or Entangled as it's called, is a, it's meant to be the next stage of sci research or my interpretation of the next stage of sci research. It's a mobile app that you download. And when you do that, you're connected to a stream of quantum bits. We've got a laser setup that's producing random numbers.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And we produce random numbers at a rate of one bit per second per user. So every user on the network is flipping a quantum bit once per second, 24-7. All of this data is collected. in a way that allows us to ask questions, to pose questions to each user, and get answers. And the answers come in the form of the bits that are flipped by the users.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So let's say that we're interested in predicting an earthquake. Will there be a large earthquake happening tomorrow? Well, you can, with Entangled, you can pose that question to each user and say, if you think that there will be an earthquake tomorrow, flip the first bit of each hour. And then what we do is we collect that.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And if there's a significant effect one way or the other, we register that as a yes or no prediction. So in this way, we can advance SCI research in ways that have never been possible before in terms of its scale and in terms of its automation.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Now, this is sort of my attempt to bake into the research a couple of key findings that we've learned over the decades, or at least that I've come to believe over the decades. And that is that consciousness has access to information across time and space. That's thing one. Thing two is that it's all or mostly subconscious.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So you want to somehow get into the subconscious mind or evoke that somehow, right? And most sort of divination or side practices are some form of trying to access information, the subconscious mind, right? And then there are some people who are very good. Everybody has the capability. It seems to be intrinsic to consciousness itself.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Some people are very good, and I think that my opinion is that most people are good some of the time, and that feedback is important. So if you put all of that together, what you end up with is something like Entangled or the Collective Consciousness app. It's actually, it's kind of like a protocol for doing psi research or for attempting to access information across time and space.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And it's all automated by this computer system. It's an automated way of using random number generation, posing questions and providing feedback to the user and measuring this statistically. That is what seems to be like the way to get useful or actionable insights about the future in ways that can help us accelerate discoveries.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I believe that it's going to come from AI, but not in the way that people think. So the popular idea right now is that AI is on a path to becoming conscious, right? Developing sentience. And then it's anyone's guess what happens. I disagree with that. I think that AI is on a path of showing us what consciousness is not. And what I mean by that is it reveals the mystery of what consciousness is.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I started going to scientific conferences that were composed of people, you know, sort of professional academics and others who are interested in the science of anomalous things. So telepathy and that whole world of unexplained things.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
It helps show how we humans and animals and insects and how biological life is special. Listeners will be familiar with something called the Turing test. The Turing test was developed 70 years ago, and it was supposed to be a benchmark to determine where we are in the stage of AI progress.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And it is basically if a machine or like an AI is capable of simulating human behavior and fooling a person into not knowing the difference between interacting with an authentic human and interacting with an AI. then it satisfied the Turing test. Now, we're there. In a number of different ways, we're there, right? And if we're not there, then we're close.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And at the same time, there's no reason to think that, you know, there's no good reason to think that the chat GPT actually has consciousness. Meaning, is there subjectivity attendant to it? Does it have thoughts and feelings? I think that the answer is no currently.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
But the problem is that as these AI systems become more and more like us, just in terms of resembling us, we have absolutely no way of knowing if it is conscious or not. In other words, what is there for us to know about whether or not this is a convincing simulation of a real person or actually the real thing? And we have no idea. We have no way of testing that.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
What I've been working on for a few years is a proposition to solving that. The Turing test was the test for the last 70 years. Will it be the test for the next 70 years? And I think the answer is no. And I propose that we look towards parapsychology to develop the next test.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So what I'm calling T is basically an approach to evaluating machines and AI in terms of their ability to do telepathy, to respond to the future. Remember how we were talking about the anomalous presentiment response? It seems like biological life itself has an adaptive advantage to respond to unpredictable future events. Well, maybe the machines do too.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So can you develop a test that could evoke that possibility or assess that potential in the machine? Meaning if the AI or the machine reacts to an unpredictable future event in a way that is meaningful to it, meaning there's some sort of incentive structure, penalty or reward system, something like that, and it performs at a level equivalent to what we know of humans,
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Well, then it's demonstrated something really interesting. You can have all of the computer processing power in the world, but if you can't operate telepathically like basic humans and animals can, then you're not yet sharing in that divine spark that makes us special.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And was blown away because I found that there were remarkable people from very prestigious universities who had basically hit upon a treasure trove of exciting things. And so that kind of gave me purpose.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
But if we can develop a test that's sensitive to that, you know, a new heuristic for the new century, then we can start to this path of knowing ontologically what's really going on with the machines as they approach something like consciousness.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Dean Radin has a funny take on this. He says, first they ignore you, then they fight you, and then they say, you were right and I knew it all along. I guess what's happening is the incentive structure is changing for scientists. There's this great phrase in the Bitcoin world that says everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve. So Bitcoin's been around for a long time, right?
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And in the very beginning, if you were early, like if you're really innovative, you had the opportunity to buy it cheap. However, if you didn't read the white paper and you didn't understand it and you dismissed it or maybe you even attacked it, you said it's magic internet money, it'll never work, all these things.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Basically, there's an opportunity cost there for arrogance and for being too close-minded. And I think something like that is true for anomalies research in general. There's an opportunity cost for ignoring this stuff, but there's also an incentive structure for the innovative people, particularly in the academic world, to pick this stuff up.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Because the formative ideas for the next century, or however long the next phase is going to be, are developing now. There's immense opportunities for new discoveries and for new ideas and theories. And I think that's happening in the academic world right now. And we're replacing this sort of like moribund, anachronistic perspective on the world with something much more exciting.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So the mind lamp is something that my friends and I, we have this little company called Cyleron. It still exists and it came out of the Pear Lab. A mind lamp is a light that is sort of like a desk lamp and it can change its color based on what the random number generator inside is doing. So it glows a normal white color when statistically there's no anomalies. However, if it detects that
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
there's an influence happening, could be chance or it could be due to the influence of your consciousness, then it will start to change a color and it will randomly pick what color to change to. So what you can do is you can think, I want to change it to blue now from white. And then you execute whatever strategy you'd like to try to influence the thing and watch it turn whatever color it becomes.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So we've been making mind lamps for, I don't know, 13, 14 years or something like that. And it really does work, particularly the first few times that people do it when they're approaching it playfully. And they'll come up to it and they say, what's this? Like, oh, it's a mind lamp. Think of a color. And they'll think of pink or something.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And then it'll turn pink over the course of 10 or 20 seconds. And of course, they'll be a little bit blown away and have a lot of questions. How did you do that? It's like, oh, I don't know.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Yeah, I mean, it's very much like any other skill. If you're trying too hard, you kind of fumble yourself. But if you're having fun, often you enter flow more easily, to put it one way.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So the way that I come down on that is it's probably like your ability to to do something, quote unquote, negative with Psy is probably mitigated by how you relate to it. Meaning if you think that that is bad, you ain't going to do it most likely.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
But if you're pretty much neutral to these things, or maybe if you have some sort of positive association to a particular outcome, you're likely going to get it. So kind of like what we were discussing before, the anomalies accumulate around meaningfulness in the experiment. That's true as well for somebody that might have malintentions. Yeah, it's so interesting.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So the simulation argument, which is, you know, that physical reality is something like a rendered video game, is very useful for understanding consciousness appropriately. Meaning, I think it's an analogy that people understand. Oh, you mean I'm playing the video game character, but I'm real on the other side of the video game. Yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about with consciousness.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So I'm sympathetic to it from that point of view. I think it's kind of like not really falsifiable. And an advanced enough video game would be the same as the kind of physics that we're seeing of the world anyway, presumably. A video game would be composed of ones and zeros, the computer code. Really, that's quantized in the way that quantum physics is as well.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So maybe you're talking about the same thing. One thing that I do like about the simulation argument, I think this is like my best. It's really positive in the sense that it suggests that you can do things that you don't think that you can do. You're kind of maybe limited by your own belief systems or maybe by some sort of like consensus belief system in which you currently find yourself.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And I think I find that very, very empowering and very playful. If you think that you might be in a simulation or you live in the matrix, the next question is how do you wake up from the matrix or how do you bend the rules? It's always good for people to ask themselves that.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I think you don't want to be, whether or not this is real or a simulation, I don't think you want to be totally bought into it. Not too much.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Interesting cousins. And those cousins are things like UAP research or spontaneous remission or energy systems. All of these really cool things that there's some reason to think that there's something there, right? And that by exploring them, we might be on the precipice of uncovering advanced new amazing technologies and a pathway for understanding the mechanisms behind these things finally.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I'll tell you about one class of experiments that is particularly exciting to me right now. So these are a class of experiments that you could call pre-sentiment studies or pre-cognition studies. And these have been done for about the last 20 years, and it goes something like this.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And that could get us to the Jetsons world. I think it's no accident that the consciousness research stuff is often brought up in relation to the UAP stuff. It's because they're cousins in the anomalies, but I think it's maybe in order to explain either of them, you're going to need to think about reality a little bit differently. Totally.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I've grappled with that question. Here's why. Because at some level, I think we all know that it's important, but why? And that why is, I mean, the knee-jerk responses are, well, if people knew they were all connected to each other, the world would be a better place. Like we treat each other differently. Would we? I would hope so. I think that it's maybe a couple of things.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
One is anomalies are clues. And by following the threads of these clues, the consciousness stuff and all the other anomalies, it's going to lead to technology breakthroughs, which is going to lead to peace. Because I believe that It's a solution out of a lot of the problems that the world faces, problems of scarcity, problems of ill health, of people not having enough.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I think that we need those types of new breakthrough scientific ideas and breakthrough technologies to get us over the hump and that the world is more peaceful as a result. The second thing is I think that there's kind of a distinction you could draw between facts and truth. Facts would be, for example, peer-reviewed research suggests that telepathy is real.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Peer-reviewed research selects that psychokinetic effects or precognition is real and so forth. Those are facts. But truth has this meaning dimension to it. Truth, I think, is how you react to those facts. It's something that changes you. You feel it, right? You are somehow changed by this.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Either you understand the world more clearly, or it helps dissolve just a little bit of illusion that existed inside of you. And it helps orient you to something new and powerful. We can feel it. And so what these frontier scientists are doing is they're producing facts. And what I think is going on is that we're looking at those and we're sensing the truth in it.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
If you're a Psychology 101 student, one of the experiments that you often will do is looking at galvanic skin response or subconscious reactions that are measurable to stimuli. So you would attach some kind of measurement device to a subject's finger, and then you would randomly show images, some of which are meant to be scary or provocative.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
We're reacting to the truth in it. And what to do about it is up to each individual. It's how does that change you? How do you react differently to that? How does that affect your value system or your decision making or where you choose to spend your time or focus or what you advocate for? And that's not for me to decide for individuals. It can't be. That's to be experienced by each person.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And then what you see is this response to that, where the skin conductivity increases when the provocative image is shown. And so this is meant to kind of get at the sort of subconscious level of processing in the human being.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Well, for the last 20 years, there's been a very interesting twist on that that some scholars have shown, and that's measuring the body's reaction in the seconds prior to being shown a provocative image.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So these images are chosen by a random number generator, meaning that it can't be determined, and the participants are showing a highly statistically significant reaction to a shocking stimuli before it's being shown. So it's a very simple experiment.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
It's very elegant, but it, I think, reveals an important dimension to our own biology and psychology, which is this attenuation to the immediate future. If we wanted to put it in evolutionary terms, it makes perfect sense because it's an adaptive advantage.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
What could be more adaptive and evolutionary advantageous than reacting subconsciously in the moments before a threat is presented, or making decisions that somehow enable your survival or growth as an organism? There are other scholars who have shown that similar effects exist for animals.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Alvarez showed that finches, little birds inside a cage, started to react more radically and kind of fluttering around the cage prior to being shown an image of a snake, their natural predator.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
There was another one concerning earthworms where they looked at the behavior of earthworms in the soil just before sending sound vibrations through a big speaker through the soil and found that the earthworms started to move around prior to that. So in my opinion, this is kind of pointing to anomalous pre-sentiment responses being something like an evolutionary adaptive advantage.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I appreciate the easy questions. So consciousness to me, it means different things to different people. To myself, I think of it as the nature of the first person perspective. So for example, there is something called what it's like to be Adam. I'm having an experience of being me. I have intentions. I have emotions. I can see colors. I have different tastes and senses.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And that whole subjective world is my consciousness. And there's also something called what it's like to be Kai. So what that is and where it comes from is the big question. So to me, what is consciousness is to answer that, you have to answer those two questions. What is it and where does it come from?
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
There's a category of experiments with random number generators that I think can help people understand the mystery of consciousness. In this experiment you have a physical random number generator and this machine is producing a random string of ones and zeros. You collect enough of this and you see that sure enough there's a 50-50 distribution of ones and zeros.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Usually these are interpretations of something intrinsically random like quantum events. And then you ask a participant to attempt to influence the output of that random number generator in one direction or another using only their intention. So they might pick more ones or they might pick more zeros. And then you collect the output of that.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And at the end of the trial, you see statistically what happened. Was there more ones or more zeros? Well, You can do this many times, as many labs have, and you find that there is an anomalous relationship between the intention of the operator and the output of the random number generator.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So most famously, this experiment was done at the Princeton Pair Lab by the then dean of the engineering school, Robert John. That project led to something called the Global Consciousness Project, which was this idea of spreading random number generators around the world to see if they could measure something like global consciousness.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And this experiment is interesting to me because it gets to the heart of what consciousness is, meaning we don't know, but it's doing things that's telling us something about it ontologically. If consciousness was just an illusion produced by the brain, Why does it have this apparent influence relationship with something outside of the brain?
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
How in the world could it affect something outside of the body? Okay, well then, if it is affecting something outside of the body, maybe consciousness is, like many people are starting to suspect, something more intrinsic to the fabric of the physical universe.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And if that's true, then that means a number of things, one of which is you can possibly build new technologies or explore this type of effect in ways that you never thought possible. So much of the work that I've been doing, all of which is super playful, has been let's build random number generators into different types of things and see if we can show effects that are due to consciousness.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
There seems to be this precognitive or predictive quality to working with random number generators. The famous case, of course, is September 11th. So the global consciousness random number generators started to show an effect a few hours before the first plane struck. It was like there was a precognition, a presentiment of this event that was about to unfold.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
We've seen this in my work with random number generators as well. One of my projects in Tangled is a mobile app that people can download that connects them to a quantum random number generator that's running for them 24-7. The purpose of this is to both advance the research in terms of psi, but also to explore the idea that we might be able to tap into pre-sentiment effects.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So in other words, can we retrieve information about the future by tapping into collective consciousness following some sort of standardized protocol? So what do you mean, Adam, by accessing information across time and space and predicting the future? Well, here's some examples of experiments that we're running right now. We currently really don't have a good way of predicting earthquakes.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
It's a very chaotic system and the sensors aren't quite there yet. However, stories are replete of animals and even people having precognitive dreams of large natural disasters and earthquakes. So maybe we can tap into that intuition using random number generators and Entangled to see if we can get effects that specifically are correlated with earthquakes and therefore make forecasts.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Another would be, let's say that you wanted to accelerate a discovery, accelerate some important scientific discovery. And you were looking for some sort of cancer cure. And it's a cancer that might involve a particular gene, but there's 10,000 gene candidates. And where do you look?
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Well, maybe what you could do is feed those 10,000 gene candidates into the entangled network, have global consciousness or collective consciousness sort of douse which ones are related to the cancer that you're looking for, and point those investigators in the direction of where to look, and in so doing, perhaps accelerate the discoveries.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
So these are the types of far-out, slightly ridiculous experiments that I'm interested in doing, but... You know, that characterizes any kind of moonshot project.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
I'm Adam Curry. I'm something like an inventor, something like an armchair scientist, something like a science consciousness researcher. And I've been involved in exploring particularly psychokinesis, telepathy, and so forth for about 20 years. My current focus is a project called Entangled, which you can think of as a kind of way to advance or democratize psi research.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
Well, the one thing I've learned about the relationship between consciousness and physical reality is that it's not so easily reducible. We're kind of coming out of this morass of reality. materialism, this sort of metaphysical framework that says that the only things that exist are physical things.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
And if a phenomenon is not currently explicable in terms of known physical things, then it's not real, it's an illusion. That's almost certainly false. It's even kind of false just logically. If it's an illusion, what's experiencing the illusion? So it implies the existence of the thing that it's trying to argue against. The world has really come around to that in the last 10 years.
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
There's kind of a springtime happening in the world of consciousness right now, led by philosophy departments in universities around the world. There's dozens of theories on the nature of consciousness. The ones that seem to be sticking around are something like consciousness is somehow fundamental and biology is involved in some sort of dialogue with it.