Turning Inner Experience Into Data with Adam Curry
First-Person Science is a live monthly series exploring one of the hardest open questions in science... consciousness itself:
August 14
Turning Inner Experience Into Data with Adam Curry
Can the most private thing we experience - our own awareness - become a subject of rigorous science?
In this discussion, inventor and consciousness researcher Adam M. Curry traces a personal journey from teenage inventions and the Princeton PEAR lab to the creation of Entangled, a mobile app that turns smartphones into quantum random number generators and invites thousands of users to participate in the world’s largest mind-matter interaction experiment. Along the way, he makes the case for “First Person Science”: an empirical approach to subjective experience that treats consciousness not as a mystery to explain away, but as a variable to measure, correlate, and harness collectively.
You'll discover:
• From Lab to Pocket: How decades of RNG research at Princeton’s PEAR lab, the Global Consciousness Project, and IONS paved the way for a scalable, participatory platform • Mind-matter interaction, not brain-computer interface: the critical distinction between measuring brain signals (conventionally explained) and testing for consciousness-driven correlations in quantum systems (not yet explained).
• How Entangled.org Works: Each phone connects to a stream of quantum-generated random bits; the subconscious, not conscious attention, is hypothesized to “vote” on questions, with results analyzed statistically across hourly blocks.
• The Global Experiment: Current applications including earthquake correlation studies with 7,000+ participants, mass meditation research, and the provocative question of whether a collective subconscious could function as a new kind of intelligence.
• An Invitation: Why everyone carrying a smartphone could be both sensor and participant in a planetary-scale inquiry into the nature of consciousness.
About First-Person Science:
For centuries, science has excelled at studying the world from the outside. But consciousness presents a unique challenge: the observer is part of the system being studied.
First-Person Science explores how subjective experience can be investigated with scientific rigor. How do we move from a single personal experience (N=1) to millions of observations (N=1 million)? Can the researcher ever be completely separated from the experiment? How do we study consciousness without leaving consciousness out of the equation?
Join us for a conversation at the frontier of consciousness research.
Sinead Whelehan (Director of Communications) and Stacey Murphy (Director of Operations) guide the conversation and draw out the most important questions emerging from the work.
This event is hosted by the Center for the Unification of Science and Consciousness (CUSAC), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2018 by Tom Campbell, a former NASA and Department of Defense physicist.