Dean Radin on Global Consciousness Project 2.0

From 1998 to the present, the Global Consciousness Project has monitored a worldwide network of random event generators, producing a vast database for investigations of whether focused human attention causes deviations from statistically expected randomness. For details of the history, methodology, and results of the project, see my review of Project founder Roger D. Nelson’s 2019 book, Connected: The Emergence of Global Consciousness.

The design of the Global Consciousness Project was strongly influenced by the computing and communication technology of the late 1990s. The random event generators available at the time interfaced to computers via a serial port, requiring an always-on computer to record and timestamp the data. Data storage was expensive and limited, requiring compression of data to just the essentials, discarding the raw data in which additional information might have been found, and many potential participants at the time had dial-up connections to the Internet, which required the software to support “dial-and-drop” connections where data would be stored locally and then transmitted to the Project database opportunistically while connected to the Internet.

The Global Consciousness Project 2.0 aims to update the architecture of the project for the Roaring Twenties. Key to this is the NextGen RNG, an updated random event generator with integrated interface to the Internet.


The device has an on-board processor and Ethernet interface, and may be connected to the Project network simply by plugging it into an Internet router, switch, or modem: no computer is required. The RNG incorporates automatic self-tests to detect failures in the Zener diode based randomness sources, includes a status display to report problems, and has firmware that can be updated remotely as required.

In this interview, Dean Radin discusses the goals and status of the project and his expectations for rolling it out over the next year.

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Here is an interview with Roger Nelson, founder of the original Global Consciousness Project, about the origin and results of the project and prospects for the 2.0 network.

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The late Dick Shoup and the late Tom Etter were rather upset with the way Radin disrupted their mission thence funding for Boundary Institute from Federico Faggin – which was to develop the tools based on The Laws of Form with which to address imaginary logic and over a century’s worth of empirical evidence of the paranormal. While the empirical work has a lot of merit, one must keep in mind that the paranormal research is a ghetto when it comes to formalizing classes of theories in such a way as to guide empirical investments to decide between those theories. When Radin breezed through Boundary on his way to IONS, he took with him the funding that might have gone for that theoretic work – theoretic work that could have had a major impact on advancing understanding of the paranormal as well as circuit design.

PS: I am not entirely objective here since I had provided Tom Etter (an attendee of the seminal 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop) with support at HP to bridge his work from Interval Research to Boundary Institute. My focus was more modest though. I merely wanted to revolutionize programming languages by going back to Principia Mathematica’s fourth volume so I could incorporate units and dimensions of quantities as an inevitable consequence of Russell’s Relation Arithmetic.

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