Are You Ready to Hack Consciousness?

For many years, "consciousness research" was avoided in academic circles, as freshly minted neuroscience PhDs competed for grant money that was mostly tied to products that could be monetized in the future. Then artificial intelligence studies changed tack, people started to wonder how to make machines sentient, and bio-mimicry entered the fray.

Of course, everyone hit on the same thorny problem: how do we first define human consciousness? Surely we need to understand that before we build machines that think. So—in that vein—do you fancy participating in the largest experiment to date of detecting human consciousness, its origins, and effects?

If you're up for it, apply for the closed beta test of Entangled, an app designed to capture, analyze, and share human consciousness research.

To help explain what that actually means, we met up with Entangled creator Adam M. Curry, who discussed life, the universe, and why Random Number Generators might be the key connecting humans and computers in new ways. Here's a portion from our conversation.

I think you're the first person I've met who has an asteroid named after them. How did that come about?
When I was 17, I won a science competition for an invention that converted electro-gravitational phenomena into signals [that can help forecast seismic events, like earthquakes]. MIT's CERES program provided that asteroid prize. (Laughs) Let's just hope the 'Adam Curry Asteroid' isn't one involved in a Near Earth Collision in the future.

Your advisors on Entangled include Princeton's Dean Emeritus Dr. Robert Jahn, whom you met while interning at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program (PEAR), and Pixar co-founder Loren Carpenter. I guess I'm trying to portray you as someone on the serious peer-reviewed side of science as opposed to, well, you know.
I appreciate it, thanks for that.

So let's get right to it, what is Entangled? And why now?
Okay, great. Entangled is a mobile app that explores the boundaries between consciousness and physical reality. It's designed to be a fun exploration into some of the deepest questions we can ask: What is the nature of our mind? Are thoughts things? How deeply are we connected to one another?

Consciousness is a hot topic right now; areas like A.I. are forcing us to ask these questions if we're going to move forward. And basically the answer boils down to whether or not consciousness is just an illusion of the brain, or if it's something more fundamental to the fabric of reality. Localized by—but not restricted to—the brain. One way to test that is by looking for tiny correlations between mind and matter that the illusion model can't explain. So that's what Entangled does. It's like a crowdsourced investigation into mind-matter interaction, where each phone is a node in a giant network.

Can you explain how Entangled uses Random Number Generators?
We use RNGs to test for those mind-matter interactions. RNGs are based on sampling noise in the physical world and converting that into random 1s and 0s. Some use electron tunneling, a quantum effect that produces the bits. In Entangled, we're sampling insignificant bits from hardware in the phone. So the idea is that those bits can behave less randomly when consciousness interacts with that system, which could imply that consciousness has an informational influence beyond the brain, however small.

What's your timing on all this?
The alpha came back from our dev team on Oct. 15, and we hope to open up the closed beta to our waitlist in time for New Years.

So, to put it simply, you'll have thousands of people in the closed beta who run Entangled in the background of their phone recording 1s and 0s, and when a statistically significant 'blip' happens amongst enough users' RNG output, you'll record when and where it took place?
Right. We're looking for statistical mean shifts that correlate to events that polarize world attention, like PEAR did with The Global Consciousness Project around hurricanes, earthquakes and—most noticeably—spikes that happened within its RNGs dotted around the globe at the same time as 9/11.

PEAR had less than 100 RNGs around the globe; you might well have 10,000 just for your beta. Isn't this the largest experiment to date?
The proliferation of mobile devices now has made Entangled possible. That's why we're living in an exciting age for this type of experimentation.

What exactly are you trying to prove with Entangled?
I just think it's important to ask the questions we're asking. I think the hardcore reductionist view of reality is breaking down, and that consciousness needs to be front and center in both our updated physics and our future technology.

Are we going into connected minds 'Borg' territory?
(Pauses) Um. Well, we'd like to examine whether there is a such a thing as the collective unconscious.

This is going to be fun.
We hope so.

Is Entangled an extension of the Quantified Self movement?
Absolutely, but it's taking it further in what we're trying to measure. So, let's say there's a significant spike in your local area [among app users], you'll see it as a heat map and get a push notification.

A more sophisticated scientific version of when an earthquake rocks us during the night in L.A. and everyone wakes up and freaks out on Twitter?
Exactly. And if a 'collective unconscious' is real, can Entangled actually predict those earthquakes? We can explore that with the app.

Can it prove which of us are pre-cogs?
If that's the terminology you like to use. We can, on that train of thought, ask users to opt-in to experiments, so, on a certain day and time, we can do a 'mass attention' experiment and see what happens.

Let's stay practical. You mention Entangled is open source, so there will be APIs that others can use for their own apps, taking consciousness data as an ongoing stream. Give us some examples of how 3rd party developers can use it.
Architects could use the live stream for responsive environments by plugging into our platform. And, of course A.I. researchers could use it as a model of human behavior while building out artificial consciousness. For now, we're into gathering empirical data in a large-scale experiment that no one has managed to do before. My goal is to build the consciousness layer of the Internet.

A fine and lofty goal. Do you ever get a chance to step back and think, as a geek, the stuff we absorbed from sci-fi movies and comic books, is almost here?
Being in touch with the future before it arrives is amazing.

See you inside the beta. I'm #8371.