Testing the Field Nature of Consciousness: A Pilot Test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers are exploring consciousness as a field permeating the world around us, rather than just a feature of human experience. If consciousness is a field, then one should be able to affect others by acting from the field of consciousness. This study used a random-assignment, double-blind design to probe effects of nine students practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique on the subjective experiences and physiological patterns of another student also practicing Transcendental Meditation. For 12 recording sessions, the group (sender) either practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique or read a textbook. When the group was meditating, the individual (receiver) reported more settled meditation experiences, and they exhibited higher alpha EEG power, a correlate of deep meditation experiences. Effect sizes for all measures were large. This was a pilot study to identify markers of field effects of consciousness. Future research could replicate these findings with a larger sample size, modify the distance between the sender and receiver, explore EEG synchrony between the senders and the receiver, called hyperscanning or collective neuroscience, and explore differential effects between friends, family, and strangers to test social influences. This design could meaningful probe the nature of consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".