to render them into conventional scientific parlance. Over thepast quarter century, their program has amassed empirical dataand assembled coordinated conceptual frameworks in an at-tempt to create a contemporary “science of the subjective.” Theplatform for this effort has been a modern engineering sciencelaboratorythatutilizesequipmentandanalyticalmethodologiesdrawn from conventional information processing technology,wherein increasingly sensitive and delicately poised devices andsystems have become the core of its research and practice, andpainstaking effort has routinely been deployed to insulate themfrom environmental artifacts.Despite the extensive precautions usually taken to protectcontemporary information processing equipment from elec-tromagnetic, thermal, acoustical, or cosmic disturbances, verylittle concern has been given to possible influences associatedwith the states of mind of its human operators. Late in the1970s, an undergraduate independent research projectbrought this possibility to the attention of one of the authors(RJ), an aerospace engineer and applied physicist who at thetime was serving as Dean of the School of Engineering andApplied Science of Princeton University. This project hadbeen stimulated by the earlier work of physicist HelmutSchmidt, who had conducted experiments suggesting thatdevices involving random physical processes could be influ-enced solely by the subjective intentions of their human op-erators.
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Recognizing the potential implications of suchanomalous effects for the integrity of the burgeoning infor-mation technology, the Dean established a modest researchprogram to probe such anomalous human/machine interac-tions more systematically. Shortly thereafter, the first author (BD), a developmental psychologist with degrees in psychol-ogy and the humanities, joined this program as LaboratoryManager, bringing with her a background in remote percep-tion research.
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The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Re-search (PEAR) laboratory then found a home in a small suiteof basement rooms in the engineering school complex thatpreviously had served as a storage area, where it resides to thepresent day.From its inception, the PEAR program has faced an array of pragmatic obstacles that have challenged its implementationand subsequent operations. These have included obtaining therequisite financial and administrative support, confronting therejection and ridicule of academic colleagues, developing ade-quate methodological protocols, and determining appropriateanalytical strategies for representing and interpreting the anom-alous phenomena. Surmounting each of these hurdles has con-tributed a critical chapter to PEAR’s history, but comprehensivedepiction of any one of them would require a narrative wellbeyond the scope of this paper.
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Thus, we will simply pass over the first two issues by noting that all of the program’s fundinghas been derived through generous gifts from visionary philan-thropists and foundations; that ongoing administrative and col-legial objections have been overcome by periodic invocation of academia’s sacred tenet of freedom of inquiry; and that continu-ing attacks from skeptical colleagues have been deflected byassiduousattentiontohighscholarlystandards,afocusonlearn-ingratherthanproving,athickskin,andasenseofhumor.Moregermane to our purpose here is an attempt to summarize theevolution of PEAR’s empirical and theoretical progress over thecourse of its 26-year dialogue with the wind.
CONCEPTS, CONTEXTS, AND CAVEATS
Any investigation of the role of human consciousness in physi-cal reality needs first to define what is meant by the term “con-sciousness.” It is worth recalling that at the time the PEAR pro-gram was undertaken, consciousness was rarely recognized as avalid topic for scientific study, even in the field of psychology.Although it has subsequently become more accepted, material-istic premises have led to assumptions that it is merely an epi-phenomenon of the human brain function and its associatedneurophysiology, and that eventual understanding of thesephysiological processes will ultimately reveal the mind’s struc-ture and function. Consequently, most recent studies of con-sciousness have been limited to those domains of cognition,sensory perception, language, or other spheres where relativelywell-understood relationships between these processes and their associated brain functions prevail. In so doing, the less tangiblesubjective aspects of experience, such as intuition, emotion, or instinct, have tended to be neglected.In contrast, PEAR has defined consciousness in a muchbroader sense, to subsume all categories of personal experiencewithout presumptions of specific psychological or physiologicalmechanisms. In this view, it encompasses all dimensions of per-sonal identity, or “self,” that can be distinguished from externalcircumstances and influences that consciousness perceives to be“not-self,” with the separation between the two regarded as sub- jective and situation specific. While this definition is admittedlyimprecise, it is also relatively unencumbered by mechanisticassumptions, and leaves room for the self to reveal its experi-ences on its own terms. Regardless of how one may choose tocharacterize it, it is generally accepted that what is commonlyreferredtoas“intention”or“volition”isapropertyofconscious-ness rather than of the physical world, and PEAR’s basic exper-imental protocols treat this as a primary variable, while objec-tively specifiable physical parameters are held as constant aspossible.It is also pertinent to clarify our position on scientific meth-odology. Here, too, we need to soften some of the rigid tenets of contemporary science, such as pure objectivity, deterministiccausality, and strict replicability. Rather, we return to the mostfundamental premise of the scientific process as originally pos-tulated by Francis Bacon, which we have re-termed, somewhatwhimsically, the “scientific two-step.”
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It enjoins that scholarlyadvancement must move forward on the two feet of “experi-ment” — an observation or measurement performed under con-trolled conditions to acquire information about a natural effector process; and “theory” — a stated model, principle, or formal-ismtoexplain,correlate,orpredicttheobservationalexperience,each constructively informing the other in a productive forwardmarch toward new knowledge. This two-step dynamic of scienceis, of course, simply a particularly disciplined form of the morecommon, albeit less deliberate process employed by the con-scious human mind in establishing, ordering, and interpretingits personal experiences and forming models thereof.What is at issue for our PEAR program and similar scholarlyenterprises is how broadly one construes the designs of the ex-
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EXPLORE May/June 2007, Vol. 3, No. 3 Consciousness, Information & Living Systems
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