Mind Detector

February 9, 2011 – 8:35 pm

I’m swamped again at work, with no time to write. So for this evening, just a provocative little tid-bit.

I had coffee very briefly today with my friend Salim Ismail, a remarkable fellow who was most recently the director of the Singularity University. I don’t get to see Salim very often, because he is always either hard at work out in California, or jetting around the world explaining the future to international conferences and heads of state. But we always try to have lunch or dinner or coffee whenever he’s in town, and I always find that even a brief chat with him is enormously stimulating. He’s a human dynamo, and he’s always up to something interesting.

Today our conversation revolved around the fascinating topic of consciousness research. By way of introducing the subject, Salim produced a curious little gadget, about the size of a smartphone, that turned out to be a quantum-mechanical random-event generator, developed by Princeton University’s “Engineering Anomalies Research” laboratory, and manufactured by a company called Psyleron — upon which he has cast an interested eye.

Have a look here.

Posted by Malcolm on at 8:35 pm, filed under Mind and Brain, Science. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

5 Comments

  1. Kevin Kim says

    Responds to the mind, eh? Sounds as if we’re on our way to developing the Firefox!

    Posted February 9, 2011 at 10:39 pm | Permalink
  2. TheBigHenry says

    I took a look, and the following paragraph of the Psyleron Overview page caught my eye [my emphasis added]:

    Why This Matters
    If the findings of the PEAR lab and dozens of other researchers are true, it implies that the nature of the physical world may be radically different from what is conventionally assumed. To accommodate the empirical results of this research, one must accept the possibility that mind and matter are not be entirely separable, and that consciousness may play an active part in shaping physical reality. There may be much more to reality that we realize, and we may access only a tiny fraction of our true potential.

    I think somebody should pay a little more attention to editing the online promo material for this company.

    Just sayin’ …

    Posted February 9, 2011 at 10:48 pm | Permalink
  3. JK says

    Well TheBigHenry, you did notice, “consciousness may play an active part in shaping physical reality.”

    The QWERTY keyboard is part of reality ain’t it?

    Posted February 10, 2011 at 12:23 am | Permalink
  4. TheBigHenry says

    It’s hard to tell what’s real anymore, JK …

    If I were you, (and by the way, I am) …

    Posted February 10, 2011 at 10:26 am | Permalink
  5. chris g says

    So what does it do? You push a button and it says either “1” or “0”?

    I thought I paid too much for my Nikes.

    Posted February 10, 2011 at 4:32 pm | Permalink

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