Psi Research, Human Consciousness, and Noosphere

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The Margins of Reality, the Global Consciousness Project and the Noopshere

In the 1990′s researchers at Princeton launched the PEAR (The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research ) program to investigate the role of consciousness in the physical universe. The book that resulted from this research, The Margins of Reality, presents statistical data backing up the idea that the intentions of a human observer can affect random numbers. In other words, because of the presence of a human systems that should be behaving randomly stop behaving randomly and actually become ordered. This research evolved into The Global Consciousness Project, which uses random number generators–on days such as 9/11, the dates of celebrity deaths, and in general on days when certain events will attract the attention of millions of people–to document the effects of large scale human consciousness on random systems. The Project goes further to propose a global mind, a conjoined force of matter, energy, and consciousness, that some refer to as the noosphere.

INSCOM, Project Stargate, and Remote Viewing

If you’ve seen the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats or watched any number of conspiracy documentaries about covert government research projects you might be familiar with the concept of paranormal military programs. There is, in fact, a very real track record of the U.S military testing remote viewing and telepathy on civilians and for use as interrogation techniques in the War on Terror. One of the most documented of these programs was called Project Stargate, which lasted from the early 70′s to the mid-90′s. Project Stargate experimented with clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, and remote viewing in order to gather military intelligence and assist with covert missions.

Retroactive Precognition

In January of 2011 Dr. Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University wrote a controversial paper called “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect” in which he described a series experiments he conducted seeking to prove precognition. More specifically, Bem presented evidence that future events can affect present cognition. Working off the premise that there are “anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms”, Bem tested 1,000 college students for their ability to correctly intuit random information. In one study, Bem conducted a reverse memory test, having his subjects categorize random words that they would later commit to memory. Bem’s results showed that the students were more likely to recall words in the present if they later memorized them.

Ganzfeld tests

Ganzfield tests are parapsychology techniques which are used to test people for ESP powers. They typically involve various levels of sensory deprivation. For example, a normal Ganzfield test might feature a subject, the ‘receiver’, sitting in a chair with halved ping pong balls over his/her eyes and red light shining over them while listening to white or pink noise on headphones. Meanwhile the ‘sender’, another person in a separate location, chooses a concept, a picture, an idea, etc., and attempts to transmit that target into the mind of the ‘receiver’. During this session, the receiver speaks out loud, describing what he or she sees. With the incorporation of more contemporary tools, such as automated computer systems, researchers who use the ganzfield method continue to report statistically significant paranormal anomalies.

-Jake Anderson

Philip K. Dick: Explorer of an Uncertain Reality

author Philip K. Dick published 44 novels

Of contemporary science fiction (SF) writers, one of the most interesting is the late Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), although there is some question whether Dick, strictly speaking, wrote science fiction at all. Certainly he had little concern for Vernian accuracy on hardware; sometimes he seems to have a contempt for it. Still, he used the conventions of SF, and in the minds of most critics he greatly enriched the genre.

In his prolific career, he worked through many of the conventions and themes of SF, but finally his work always had a personal stamp. His favorite subject matter is the alternate universe fiction, although it usually seems that the alternate universe is essentially his means of exploring the slipperiness of reality, even the burden of reality. In whatever version of reality we find ourselves in Dick’s work, one feature is consistent: the future is as sleazy as the present. The future does have the gleaming chrome and steel that we anticipate, but it also has unswept streets and cluttered hallways of everyday reality. One does not escape the dreariness of life in the future; the problems of life are with you in all versions of reality.


One of the earliest of Dick’s novels, Eye in the Sky (1957), illustrates his special method. It is crude by the standards of his later work, and has signs of having been hastily written. (We suspect, though, that even some of his best work was hastily written. Fast writing was long a fact of life for anybody who wanted to make a full-time living as a SF writer. Writers didn’t get paid much for each book, so they had to write a lot of them.)

Eye in the Sky depicts a nuclear plant accident that causes eight people who were on a plant tour to experience a new and special relationship with reality. The characters discover that they experience, in turn, existence in each others’ minds. First, all the characters must live in the mind of a religious fanatic, and reality in that world
corresponds accordingly. Angels swarm in the sky, and in the middle is a giant eye (thus the title), presumably belonging to God, watching everything. The characters move
through the mind of a Victorian prude, a psychotic, a Russian Communist, and so on. The important aspect of this novel isn’t the idea so much as it is the technique. In a Dick
novel, you aren’t just told that you are in an alternate reality; you experience and feel that reality.

Another dimension of his career was his ability to build a personal vision out of the gamut of SF themes and conventions. For example, in The Martian Time-Slip (1964), he writes a novel in the Mars tradition, complete with canals and an ancient civilization. But we know that the story is uniquely his when we find the canals lined with suburban-like housing developments and bored housewives carrying on affairs with traveling salesmen.


Dr. Bloodmoney: Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) is a post-nuclear war novel, but one that has a bizarrely cheerful ending. In Dick’s vision of post-holocaust existence, even the mutated life forms come happily out of the sewers to join the panorama of life.

The Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) is in the galactic tradition, but it is evolved far beyond Asimov’s galactic empires. In Dick’s version of the future, pottery has become so rare that any handmade pot is worth preserving, and a pottery repairman travels the galaxy fixing them. The novel is obviously a put on, but so well done that we accept and enjoy it.

Some of Dick’s other adaptions of traditional SF include The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, (1964) about time travel; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, 1974 (technologically enforced political dystopia); and The Unteleported Man, 1966 (interstellar travel by “gates”). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969) deals with artificial life (portions of-the novel were the basis for the movie Blade Runner).

One of his major novels, Ubik (1969), is so unusual that it defies conventional description. Set in what is presumably the near-future, Ubik starts as a satire on paranormal powers, as the novel introduces telepaths, parakineticists, resurrectors, animators, and others, all available for hire through an agency. Next, the novel seems to show Dick’s light regard for conventional SF, as a group of paranormals are sent to the moon to protect a starship project—an absurd development, given the near-future setting.


The novel takes yet another turn after the paranormals, sabotaged in their mission, start to experience strange events—reality starts to wither around them (these scenes can only be appreciated by reading them). We assume that he is working with the same technique as in Eye in the Sky—the characters seem to exist within the reality of somebody’s mind.

Then what is at first a surprise ending suggests an even more radical perspective in the novel.

The novel has been interpreted as everything from a satire on capitalism to a criticism of the limitations of the bourgeois novel.

The rest of this article is devoted to another of Dick’s acknowledged masterpieces, The Man In the High Castle (1962), a work that is unlike anything else he wrote (a strong statement, considering the variety of his work). It is his only alternate universe story in which he so closely extrapolates from a clearly defined historical period (the decades before and after World War II. It is also a very tightly constructed novel, not always one of Dick’s virtues.



The Man in the High Castle is set in a world in which the U.S. lost World War II. Nazi conquerors occupy the east coast, while the Japanese occupy the west coast. In the middle, serving as a buffer between the conquering powers, is the PSA (the Pacific States of America), the last home of free Americans. At the most obvious level, the novel explores the traits of the occupying powers. The Nazis are the monsters we know them to be, but the Japanese turn out to be relatively benign masters. They did not, as one American character says, “build ovens” (referring to the mass extermination in the Nazi concentration camps).

But the novel is about many other things, and is open to multiple interpretations. We may see the novel as an analysis of the mind-set that produces technological innovation. In this version of history, set in 1962, technological development is well ahead of the timetable in our “real” world. Not only have the Nazis colonized the moon, they have already reached Mars.

Dick presents a runaway technology that is a product of fascistic, masculine thinking–a thinking that refuses to take an ecological perspective into consideration. The Nazis are clearly on a path to self-destruction, which, if unaltered, will result in the destruction of the entire globe. But Dick’s criticism of runaway Nazi technology is, by indirection, a criticism of runaway American technology.


At the center of the action is Operation Dandelion, the plan that the Nazis have for a nuclear strike on the Japanese home islands. The Nazis in their paranoia are unwilling to share world power with anyone else. In a surprising way, though, Operation Dandelion is an observation on the reality that we know. Even while we share with the characters a horror of the planned nuclear strike, we can’t help but remember that Americans, in our reality, in fact carried out something quite like Operation Dandelion. There has been only one nuclear war, and Americans fought and won it.

From yet another direction, the novel is about art. Some of the characters of the novel are themselves reading a novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts a version of history in which the Japanese and Germans do not win the war. Considered subversive, the book is forbidden in the Nazi zone, although the Japanese tolerate it. The author, Hawthorne Abendsen, reportedly lives in a highly fortified home (the “high castle” of the title) within the Pacific American States, and is the target of a Nazi assassination attempt.

It is tempting to assume that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is about our world, thus giving the novel a total symmetry. That is, we read a novel about an alternate world in which the people are reading about our world. But this is not the case. The alternate world setting in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy depicts yet a third reality. Dick is very skillful in planting mysteries that keep the reader speculating.


The novel may also be about the scientific assumptions that underlie our thinking. As we pointed out previously, the book may be seen as having a basis in quantum theory rather than space-time physics. But Dick does not attempt to use that terminology. He presents his scientific assumptions through the behavior of his characters. Several characters seem not to rely on cause-effect logic (what we might see as space-time logic) for making careful decisions. Instead, they refer to the I Ching, a book in Chinese culture used for divination. The I Ching is related to a concept of “synchronicity,” which sees the oneness of all events, and the relation of individual subjectivity to those events. Thus a random cast of dice can, for the person doing the casting, assist in predicting his or her future.

The cast of the dice is part of the oneness of all, and can help us predict seemingly unrelated future events.

-Steve Anderson