The Humanist Symposium

Tue, 01 May 2007 09:41:38 GMT

The first edition of the Humanist Symposium blog carnival has now been posted at Daylight Atheism.

I would encourage everyone reading this to get over there and take a look - there are some brilliant essays there, promoting humanism as a positive lifestyle and an answer to those who believe that people living life without religion are somehow 'missing out'. My own post of a couple of weeks ago, Why be good? is included there, which I find quite humbling considering the quality of thought and argument that can be found in the posts making up the carnival. I won't single out any as I think you should go there and take a look for yourself, and I must admit, I'm still working my way through them all! Suffice it to say, I think I will find a lot of inspiration there for future ramblings.

The EGG

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 14:14:49 GMT

I wasn't sure which category to place this under at first...

It is an interesting phenomenon that most people (my assumption) would agree with the statement that there is such a thing as consciousness. And yet, it is something completely intangible, a quality people possess that defies our ability to measure it directly. We can assess consciousness of individuals simply by observing their speech, their actions and reactions. It is something that we see as being completely internal, so if someone is deeply affected emotionally or intellectually by an event, we can know this only by their outward revelation.

The Global Consciousness Project is an attempt to view this idea from a different perspective - what if consciousness was a real and measurable force, which effected real and measurable change in the world?

The science behind the idea is not really complicated - the idea is that the consciousness of many people, by an as-yet undiscovered mechanism, reduces entropy, or in other words, enforces structure on the universe. This can be measured by analysis of data gathered from a large number of random number generators. The hypothesis (or at least part of it), is that during moments where events have occurred which affect large numbers of people, the resulting qualitative change in their consciousness will result in a (statistically significant) loss of randomness in the numbers these generators produce. Constantly monitoring these produces the ElectroGaiaGram (EGG) which should then reveal these momentary anomalies.

Personally, I'm not sure that there is any substance to it, just yet. But it is an intriguing idea - I think I will keep an eye on it...

Is there a dog?: Ideas

The Humanist Symposium

The first edition of the Humanist Symposium blog carnival has now been posted at Daylight Atheism.

The EGG

I wasn't sure which category to place this under at first...