The Selection Effect

I met the author of this stimulating book about how the mind shapes reality over dinner at the science of consciousness conference in Interlaken. He is one of the pioneers in the development of work with random event generators and in the process discovered a great deal about the functioning of his own mind. He tells his own adventurous story of trying to make sense of the relationship between mind and brain and the nature of intention and causality in what he calls the selection effect where the mind tries to influence the behaviour of a machine. In this respect, he develops the notion of a mental regulator around expectation, violation of a norm and an attempt at correcting the deviation. This leads him to understand two meanings of the word 'should' in terms of prediction on the one hand and values on the other. Experiments tend to go well in a state of flow, freedom and openness but this is easily interrupted in a self-reinforcing loop of fear that modifies the expectation. A shift from ego into what he calls the connected self is aligned with good performance and this whole process is correlated with the notion of an observer-dependent reality overlaid with (or within) the 'mirror maze' of mind. This leads him to postulate that the brain may be derived from the mind and the mind may be all there is.

The author draws a number of life lessons from his work with random event generators. He notes that there is always a purpose behind intention, that we need a balance between courage and vulnerability and to develop empathy as a result - possibly through surrender and letting go. He finds that models are limited and need to be managed, and space must be made for 'allowing moments.' Life may oblige the ego to surrender and give up, and it is just in these moments that freedom and flow appear. We are coming to question received truths and searching for new frames of reference. An interesting theme that comes up towards the end is the generalisation of the decline effect found in parapsychological experiments to science more generally in terms of the replication crisis. A study of 100 psychology experiments showed that 62% did not hold up to replication - a criticism often levelled by psychologists at parapsychologists. There may be some kind of psychofeedback going on here so we can benefit from the development of self-aware thinking beyond the fast and slow modes of Daniel Kahneman. It looks like we need to take a leaf out of quantum physics to apply observer-dependent reality to all fields of intellectual endeavour - for instance as manifested in the experimenter effect, and culturally our embeddedness in webs of meaning. So the author ends up finding out much more about the processes of his own mind than he had initially expected, and readers can follow his adventure and see how this applies to their own minds.