"A Modular Model of Mind/Matter Manifestations (M5)" (1)

This model adjusts a probable fallacy in PEAR's approach to the mind-matter effect. Many experiments presumed that consciousness interacts with its environment through some anomalous channel, parallel to the "obvious" channel of the body. This was likely an artifact of popular psychology, which believes the mind is reducible to the brain, and to electrochemical processes only. Re-examining their data, PEAR found several inconsistencies with the presumption that mind-matter affects are reducible solely to the brain's attention on something in the environment:

1) Direct feedback in REG experiments does not usually improve operator abilities. Since feedback improves attention, attention can't be the only culprit.

2). Indirect feedback results in stronger effect sizes. FieldREG, for example, has produced stronger anomalies in general. Typically in FieldREG, no one is giving the REG any direct attention at all.

3). Statistically, there seems to be little correspondence between the degree of operator attention, and their results. Some of the best results have been generated by the least attentive operators.

4). Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) techniques show that aside from pure intention, subjective factors like anecdotal "resonance" with the REG, and cooperation among plural operators, are important to effect sizes than feedback schemes.

5). "Signature" characteristics are present in REG data, which operators never intended to generate.

The evidence suggests that mind-matter effects occur in more shadowy regions of the mental and physical worlds. To depict this, PEAR created the M5 model, which ascribes "modules" to both the understood, and the anomalous, aspects of the mind and the world.

The understood realm of the mind is termed the conscious module; its anomalous counterpart is the unconscious module. The understood realm of the physical world is termed the tangible module; and its anomalous counterpart is the intangible module. These are familiar terms and familiar concepts.

Like "The Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness," M5 theorizes reality as a process that emerges from a dialogue between consciousness and its environment. M5 takes this further, to suggest that reality emerges from the two because the mental and material worlds merge into indistinguishability at their deepest levels.

We are all accustomed to our conscious aspects interacting with the tangible world. We see and hear tangible people, objects, and processes that interact, in turn, with our conscious selves. But as we descend in these realms, we reach levels of unconscious and intangible existence that we understand less and less. This increased indistinguishability between mind and matter provide the avenues for "psi" effects such as psychokinesis or psychic functioning.

Toward indistinguishability, unconscious and intangible existence is not only tolerated, but exploited to allow anomalous functioning, which then works its way back up into the conscious and tangible realms. Metaphorically, this process is similar to an electron existing in an all-encompassing wavelike superposition, which collapses into particle reality with the need for greater tangibility or conscious discretion.

(1) http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/m5.pdf