← The Telepathy Tapes
The Telepathy Tapes
Talk Tracks Ep 9: The Science of Intuition: Consciousness, Intention, and the Edge of Reality
00:44:34
Inventor Adam Curry joins Ky to explore experiments that challenge what we know about the power of intuition and the hidden influence of human thought.
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:01]
Kai Dickens
Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks. In this series, we dive deeper into the revelations, challenges and unexpected truths from the Telepathy tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like psi abilities. If you haven't yet listened to season one of the Telepathy Tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non speakers and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't for long.
- [00:46]
Lowe's Advertisement
Member week is here at Lowe's. Don't miss your chance to get up to 40% off hundreds of items like paint, outdoor and home essentials and more. Shop our exclusive deals happening in store and online now through May 14th. Not a rewards member. Join for free today and get ready to save more Lowes we help you save Loyalty Programs subject to Terms and conditions details@lowe's.com terms subject to change.
- [01:14]
Indeed Advertisement
This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast and even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply in this episode.
- [01:45]
Kai Dickens
Of the Talk Tracks, I sit down with Adam Curry, an inventor, researcher and all around deep thinker who spent years exploring the edges of human consciousness and psi phenomena. We talk about wild but well documented experiments showing how our bodies might sense the future before it happens and how AI could actually help us understand what consciousness really is rather than becoming conscious itself. It's a fascinating mind bending chat that might just change the way you see reality.
- [02:11]
Interviewer
Well Adam, why don't you start by introducing yourself and how did you, you know, what are you doing in this space right now that might be of interest to people?
- [02:20]
Adam Curry
I'm Adam Curry. I'm something like an inventor, something like an armchair scientist, something like a psi and 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 and also thinking about the applications of or the implications of Sai to artificial intelligence and some of the deep questions surrounding AI systems.
- [02:54]
Kai Dickens
Wonderful.
- [02:55]
Interviewer
And, you know, it's always interesting to find out how people got into the.
- [02:59]
Kai Dickens
Field of psi research.
- [03:00]
Interviewer
Was there an event or moment in your life that made all of this seem possible and interesting to you?
- [03:07]
Adam Curry
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 Super Learning 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. 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 psi research program, which of course was really cool. 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, B, and to learn remote viewing. And you can be like my personal remote viewer. I started going to scientific conferences that were composed of people, so professional academics and others who are interested in the science of anomalous things. So telepathy and that whole world of unexplained things. 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.
- [04:40]
Interviewer
What a great story. I love it because it's really like your curiosity led you down this path from a single book. And I want to come back to story like, we'll come back to you in a second. But you brought up the research that's been ignored or kind of dismissed or not even looked at that is pretty conclusive or at least exciting. Are there any studies that have struck you that you've come across where you think, good grief, I wish everyone in the world could see this, or how is this not more out there? Or maybe it didn't even get published and you think that's a shame that you'd want to share.
- [05:11]
Adam Curry
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 presentiment studies or precognition studies. And these have been done for about the last 20 years. And it goes something like this. If you are a Psychology 101 student, one of the experiments that you often will do is, is looking at galvanic skin response, or like 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. And then what you see is this response to that where the skin conductivity increases when the provocative images shown. And so this is meant to kind of get at the sort of subconscious level of processing in the human being. 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. 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. 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. We wanted to put it in evolutionary terms. It makes perfect sense because it's an adaptive advantage. 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, you know, your survival or growth as an organism? There are other scholars who have shown that similar effects exist for animals. Alvarez showed that finches, little birds inside a cage, started to react more erratically and kind of fluttering around the cage prior to being shown an image of a snake, their natural predator. 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 presentiment responses being something like an evolutionary adaptive advantage.
- [07:51]
Interviewer
How would you define consciousness, Adam?
- [07:53]
Adam Curry
I appreciate the easy questions. So consciousness, to me, you know, 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. 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? 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. 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. 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 outp output of that, 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. 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 we could meas. To see if they could measure something like global consciousness. 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? 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. 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.
- [10:53]
Interviewer
You know, is it true that the random number generators not just kind of measure that meaning in the moment, but can. Can predict something like there's a precognition to this global consciousness in which we find ourselves. And especially, like maybe you can reference 9, 11.
- [11:09]
Adam Curry
And 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. So it was like there was a precognition, a presentiment of this event that was about to unfold. We've seen this in my work with random number generators as well. One of my projects, Entangled, 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 presentiment effects. 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. It's just. It's a very chaotic system, and the sensors aren't quite there yet. However, stories are a pleat 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. 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? 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 daos, 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. So these are the types of, like, far out, slightly ridiculous experiments that I'm interested in doing, but that characterizes any kind of moonshot project.
- [13:44]
Kai Dickens
This episode of the Telepathy Tapes is brought to you by Graza. My favorite new olive oil. It's fresh it's never blended and it comes from a single type of olive straight out of high end Spain, where over half of the world's olive oil is produced. And I love Graza due to this transparency and the single origin goodness. I mean, there's only one olive from one region, so there's no mysterious blends. That means a traceable fresher product without mixing in any lower grade or unknown oils. And they have these super fun squeeze and spray bottles so there's no more sticky, messy tin or drippy spout. You just aim, squeeze and go. Which is huge if you multitask while you cook. And there's three types for any task. The newest, which is called Frizzle, has a higher 490 degree smoke point, perfect for frying, crisping or grilling. There's sizzle at 410 degrees Fahrenheit, an everyday cooking oil for roasting, marinating and sauteing. And then Drizzle, which is what I use the most. It's a bold, punchy finishing oil you can sprinkle on salads or dip bread into or even top ice cream if you really know what's up. And if you're health conscious like me, you'll love that quality olive oil doesn't have to break the bank. Graza's extra virgin olive oils are loaded with those heart and brain friendly polyphenols. You can get 10% off of your first order on Graza's site. And I personally suggest getting the trio that's all three squeezy bottles, the Sizzle, Frizzle and Drizzle. So you're set for every style of cooking. So head to Graza co Graza and use the code tapes to get 10% off the trio which include Sizzle, Frizzle and Drizzle. And get Cookin on your next chef quality meal. That's G R A Z A code tapes for 10% off your order. Moms know that the hustle is real. With work, kids, errands and everything in between, there's rarely time to slow down, let alone figure out a ten step skincare routine like my daughter has. But no matter how busy life gets, your skin still deserves more than just basics. That's why I love today's sponsor, Oneskin. Their products are true multitaskers. They hydrate, protect and support your skin's long term health. And it's all thanks to their OS01 peptide. It targets the cells that accelerate the visible signs of aging, like wrinkles, thinning skin and a dry, dull complexion. One skin Supports the skin at a deeper level. So even if I'm running on fumes, at least my skin gets what it needs. Try their cleansers, moisturizers, sunscreens, or their new peptide scalp serum, because you know scalp health is skin health. And get 15% off with the code tapes at Oneskin Co. For moms who do it all now there's a skin routine that does it all too. I personally started using Oneskin because it actually improves the health of my skin. It's science backed, it's simple. And honestly, it's the first thing to make my skin feel stronger, not just softer. Oneskin is the world's first skin longevity company. By focusing on the cellular aspects of aging, Oneskin keeps your skin looking and acting younger for longer. For a limited time, you can try OneSkin for 15% off using the code tapes. When you check out at oneskin co. That's 15% off at oneskin Co. With code tapes, after your purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please let them know we sent you. Give your skin the scientifically proven gentle care it deserves with Oneskin. So what have you learned working with.
- [17:03]
Interviewer
Scientists like Dean Radin and Robert John, around the relationship between consciousness and physical reality?
- [17:09]
Adam Curry
Well, the one thing I've learned about the relationship between consciousness and physical reality is that it's not. It's not so easily reducible. We're kind of coming out of this morass of materialism, this sort of metaphysical framework that says that the only things that exist are physical things. And if it's not, if a phenomena is not currently explicable in terms of known physical things, then it's not real, it's an illusion. And that's almost certainly false. It's even kind of false, just logically. Like, if it's an illusion, what's experiencing the illusion? You know, like. 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. There's kind of a springtime happening in the world of consciousness right now. Led by philosophy departments in, 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. 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. I think there's a couple of very good theories that are emerging too. Hameroff and Penrose's ORK or is looking very interesting and bolt of that theory. 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 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. And the idea there with anesthesia is that the, 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. And just last year there was some modeling that showed that that's not, not quite true. Or at least it's, it's showing that the, the effects can persist far longer than originally thought.
- [20:01]
Interviewer
Yeah, that's. I mean, yeah, it's exciting to be alive right now and all that research is getting done. So, you know, you talked a little bit about intention. You know, I guess, you know, not to be repetitive, but I just think it's kind of important to drill in on this. Like how, how do you think intention or what has, you know, the research shown around intention and belief and how they impact the physical world? Because that's something I've run into even with the non speaking individuals and their, and their parents and teachers. We've talked about testing telepathy was how important it is to believe in that, to be able to see it. And they're like, scientists can come. Yeah, but it's best if it's scientists who believe them. And I was, I've always thought that was so. It always feels so suspect when you hear it. And then you. I would love for you to talk to. Is there a scientific basis for that?
- [20:47]
Adam Curry
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 sh 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's important, but there's a lot more to it. 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. Okay. It's a bit of a hand waving on my part because we don't really know what the subconscious is. 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. 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, I, I will be afraid if psi effects show up or I will be happy if psy 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. 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. 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. 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 experiment? I don't know. I think it's probably the first step though is just, just to be aware of these types of things being confounds in experiments. Intention is important. It's not the only thing going on.
- [23:24]
Interviewer
Though super interesting, it is quite a challenge to overcome that. So, but with that in mind, do you think that we can change an outcome in the past or future with our consciousness?
- [23:37]
Adam Curry
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. There has been work that has 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. 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. 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 or the present moment. And so if you think that you're influencing the past or the present, 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.
- [25:16]
Shopify Advertisement
Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs, but luckily there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku. And it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com specialoffer McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's.
- [25:48]
Lowe's Advertisement
I hope you're ready for the most dippable chicken in McDonald's history. Dip it in all the sauces. Dip it in that hot sauce in your bag. Dip it in your McFlurry. Your dip is your business McCrispy strips at McDonald's.
- [26:01]
American Express Advertisement
Make your next move with American Express business Platinum. Earn 5 times Membership Rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com and with a welcome offer of 150,000 points. After you spend $20,000 on purchases on the card within your first three months of membership, your business can soar to new heights. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum Amex Business Platinum built for business by American Express.
- [26:31]
Interviewer
Just moving on to the collective consciousness app a little bit, could you explain what that is and how it works and what role it's playing in the data collection process?
- [26:40]
Adam Curry
The collective consciousness app, or Entangled as it's called, is a. It's meant to be the next stage of psi research, or my interpretation of the next stage of psi research. It's a mobile app that you download and when you do that, you are connected to a stream of quantum bits. Just we've got a laser set up that's producing random numbers and we produce random numbers at a rate of 1 bit per second per user. So every user on the network is generating like 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. So let's say that we are 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 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 psi research in, in ways that have, have never been possible before in terms of its scale and in terms of its automation. 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, 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. So you want to, you want to somehow get into the subconscious mind or evoke that somehow. Right. And most sort of divination or psi practices are some form of trying to access information, the subconscious mind. Right. And then there are some people who are very good. Like, everybody has the capability. It seems to be intrinsic to consciousness itself. 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. 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.
- [29:22]
Interviewer
So what do you think is the next big breakthrough in consciousness research, and are we close to achieving it?
- [29:27]
Adam Curry
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. 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. And it was basically, if a machine 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 a number of different ways we're there, right? And if we're not there, then we're close. And at the same time, there's no reason to think that, you know, there's no good reason to think that the. That chatgpt actually has consciousness meaning. Is there subjectivity attendant to it? Does it have thoughts and feelings? I think that the answer is no currently. 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 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. So what I'm calling teach 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? Seems like, you know, seems like biological life itself has an adaptive advantage to respond to unpredictable future events. Well, maybe the machines do too. So can you develop a test that could evoke that. 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, 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. 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.
- [32:51]
Interviewer
You know, when you think maybe 50 years in the future, though, right? I mean, we've been, like, kind of, like, marred in materialism for so long. Do you think we truly are moving our way into a post materialist, you know, paradigm in terms of science and that, like, we'll look back in 50, 100 years and think of the, like, materialists hanging on with their fingernails right now will feel like flat Earthers.
- [33:13]
Adam Curry
Dean Radon 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. 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? 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. 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. Because the formative ideas for the next century, or however long the sort of like 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.
- [34:36]
Interviewer
I don't think I've asked you this. Can you talk about, like, what the mind lamp is and how it demonstrates mind matter interaction?
- [34:45]
Adam Curry
So the mind lamp is something that my friends and I, we have this little company called Sileron. It still exists and it came out of the PEAR lab. Mindlamp 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 there's an influence happening, could be chance, or it could be due to the influence of your consciousness, then it will, 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. 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? And they're like, oh, it's a mind lamp. Think of a color and they'll think of pink or something 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.
- [36:02]
Interviewer
That's funny though, that when people are being playful, it's More likely to work and when they get really serious about it, it's not as effective. Is that correct?
- [36:11]
Adam Curry
Yeah, I mean it's very much like any other skill. If you're trying too hard, you kind of fumble yourself. Uh, but if you're having fun, often you can enter, you enter flow more easily, to put it one way.
- [36:22]
Interviewer
So I mean I always get asked this, right? It's like, are there negative consequences to this? And you know, I know there's a lot of baseline in Julia Mossbridge and a lot of people talk about the basis of love or play like we were just talking about in inside abilities that they manifest best. And, and the non speakers will say this all the time. It, it works best with good vibes, right, or good energy or people that I love or that type of thing. But have you seen or have there ever been any studies around people using consciousness and intention to like win at gambling, you know, or other chance based activities?
- [36:54]
Adam Curry
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. 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 mal intentions.
- [37:31]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, I think one thing that has started to bubble up a lot in the consciousness world or the people studying consciousness is this idea that we live in some sort of simulation. You know, where do you fall on that and what does that mean for consciousness research if we do so the.
- [37:49]
Adam Curry
Simulation argument, which is, you know, the physical reality is something like a rendered video game, is very useful for understanding consciousness appropriately. Meaning, I think it's a, 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? It's like, yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about with consciousness. So I'm sympathetic to it from that point of view. I think that 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, you know, like a Video game would be composed of ones and zeros. The computer code really that's like quantized in the way that quantum physics is as well. 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. And I think I find that very, very empowering and like 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. 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.
- [39:15]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's weird. You know, there's been that research around. They were able to teleport, right? What was it? The small, like a, not a proton that. Anyway, that started making me thinking like, oh my gosh, is this going to be a reality one day where we can like beam our consciousness somewhere and travel and you know, play in that way? Which is so wild to think about.
- [39:39]
Adam Curry
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. And that could get us to the Jetsons world. You know, I, 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, you know, they're, 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.
- [40:26]
Interviewer
Totally, absolutely. Okay. And then, you know, if your work succeeds in connecting humanity to a deeper consciousness level, like what kind of societal transformations you hope to see.
- [40:37]
Adam Curry
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, 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. 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, problems of, of people not having enough. 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. Peer reviewed research selects that, that psychokinetic effects or precognition is, 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, it's something that changes you. You feel it right? You, you are, you are somehow changed by this. Either you understand the world more clearly or it helps dissolve just a little bit of illusion that existed in, inside of you. And it, it helps orient you to something, 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 the, I think is going on is that we're looking at those and we're sensing the truth in it. 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.
- [42:54]
Kai Dickens
That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks, but new episodes will now be released every other Sunday. So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones that knit together our reality. Please remember to stay kind, stay curious. And that being a true skeptic requires an open mind. Thank you to my amazing collaborators. Original music was created by Elizabeth pw. Original logo and cover art by Ben Kandora. Design the audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma, our amazing podcast coordinator, Jill Pesnik, the Telepathy Tapes coordinator in my right hand, Kathryn Ellis. And I'm Kai Dickens, your writer, creator and host. Thank you again for joining us.