Agylen

I inaugurate the newly added Skepticism category of this weblog with a post about the Global Consciousness Project and its Black Box:

According to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

Those who know me well would undoubtedly characterize me as a rationalist skeptic and a die-hard reductionist. And as such, I should probably conclude that the Global Consciousness Project only reveals human foolishness.

Nonetheless, I have a nagging feeling that this Black Box merits more thourough investigation that a simple shrug-off. If — and it's a big if — there's something real here, it has probably to do with some sort of quantum effect.

Since I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, I have been convinced that the human mind cannot be reduced to a mechanical process, to say nothing of a Turing machine — and so much for AI. So, if quantum mechanics are at work in the black box's random number generator, which is certainly possible, we might have established a connection, if not an explanation.

It's a tenuous connection, at best, and more experiments will need to be carried out to ascertain whether there's even a phenomenon to be studied, or if it's only self-deception at work. But, for once, I am keeping an open mind.