cat tsc2026/abstract.txt

BURSTS, NOT MEAN SHIFTS

Testing the temporal-burst hypothesis with an immersive hardware-RNG platform, plus a sealed confirmatory follow-up.

The Science of Consciousness 2026 · Session THU-2: Mental Causation and the Function of Consciousness

Thursday 15 October 2026 · Dockside Room

Authors: Mason Ulrika Borchard (Valdosta State University; Ionosphere Laboratories), Danielle Caputi (Ionosphere Laboratories), Timothy Beach (The Aegix Linux Project; Ionosphere Laboratories).

Materials & Open Data

Conference Talk Deck (17 slides) the 15-minute presentation delivered at TSC 2026
Master Reference Deck (32 slides) complete archival deck with exhaustive methodological and diagnostic slides
Corpus Analysis Report (79 runs) full SEED=0 physical hardware audit and circular-shift permutation report
Pre-Commitment Registry 68 SHA-256 schedule hash commitments, audit disclosures, and protocol specifications

The Hypothesis, Stated Precisely

A burst is a single 60-second period in which the bit-count deviation reaches |z| ≥ 1.96.

The claim under test is that bursts cluster in time while a participant's attention is aesthetically absorbed by the feedback loop, rather than shifting the cumulative mean.

Historical micro-PK experiments tested signed cumulative drift (Σz / √N). If effects are episodic, bi-directional, or phase-canceling, cumulative means regress to null as N grows. Ionosphere tests unsigned dispersion (|z|) and tail exceedance rates evaluated against stationary circular-shift permutation null distributions (Harris 2024).

The Apparatus: Closed Feedback Loop

Ionosphere is a room-scale installation powered by physical entropy from an avalanche-noise hardware RNG (ubld.it TrueRNG v3) passing through a deterministic 20:8 Galois-field firmware whitener.

The bitstream directly modulates a 192-rod chime chandelier and a 1,000+ addressable LED grid. Rather than staring at a computer monitor or peripheral "gray box" (the primary failure mode diagnosed in PortREG 3-lab consortium trials), the operator sits inside an immersive environment where order and coherence emerge naturally from noise.

Lineage & Precedents

1. FieldREG (Nelson et al. 1996, 1998) Academic conferences are documented nulls: Tucson II (1996) p = 0.387; all academic pooled p = 0.960.
2. PortREG (Jahn et al. 2000) 3-lab consortium preregistered replication failed (Z = 0.596 vs 3.809); diagnosed boredom and screen fatigue.
3. Photonic QRNG (Maier & Dechamps 2018, 2021) Apparent micro-PK anomalies in >12,000 operators dissolved when tested against empirical same-device surrogates.
4. Ionosphere (2026) Replaces passive peripheral targets with room-scale immersion; tests dispersion (|z|) and stationary circular shifts.

Exploratory Evidence & The Confirmatory Turn

Three initial exploratory deployments were conducted in 2025/2026:

Autumn Lights Festival (4 days, 3,222 periods) Aggregate-null (4.28% bursts). Coincidental arrival of meditators coincided with peak anomaly (z = 3.31, uncorrected p < 0.001).
NYE 2025/2026 (Attended vs Hidden Unit) Both units aggregate-null. Inverted feedback rewarded noise, motivating geometric redesign.
July 4 Paired Run (TrueRNG vs PRNG Control) 9 focus windows yielded 10.3% bursts vs 3.9% base (p = 0.007 by circular shift; PRNG flat at p = 0.54).

Why we could not stop there: Post-hoc timing and uncounted multiplicity mean exploratory p-values cannot establish an effect. The only scientifically defensible path was to seal a follow-up: locking window schedules via SHA-256 hashes prior to data collection.

The Control Ladder & Pooled Interim Results

79 valid runs analyzed across four arms (2026-06-27 to 2026-10-05):

Stratum / Arm	Runs	In-Win	Base	Enrichment Δ	Shift p
Human Solo (Full Confirmatory Arm)	36	4,923	5,911	+0.0314	p = 0.0062
Human Solo (Calibration Gate-Passing Subset)	25	3,353	4,014	+0.0124	p = 0.2278
Matched PRNG Scheduled Controls	2	300	408	+0.1413	p = 0.0224
Exploratory LLM (claude-fable-5, 5 overnight runs)	5	785	725	-0.0350	p = 0.7990

The methodological takeaway:

The pooled attended arm is small and positive; the pooled PRNG control is larger; the control that would discriminate between those two has not run. We are not claiming an effect; we are showing a platform that can falsify one.

Falsification Criteria

Declared in advance so conclusions cannot be renegotiated post-hoc:

1. Against the Hypothesis: Failure of the primary contrast at planned confirmatory N, followed by powered independent multi-site replications that fail, falsifies the operational burst hypothesis.

2. Against the Apparatus: If 15–20 unattended same-device hardware runs with active schedules reproduce in-window deviations at human rates, the effect is an environmental or machine artifact.

3. Against Interim Findings: If accumulated human sessions regress toward baseline expectation as sample size grows, the interim signal was random fluctuation.