Consciousness Research Program / Working Hypothesis 0.1
Cardiac Field and Social Interaction
What is established, what remains open, and how to test whether cardiac magnetic-field measurements add information about social interaction.
01 / The proposition
A broad intuition becomes five separable claims.
The purpose of registration is not to make the proposition sound more certain. It is to expose exactly where evidence ends and a new experiment would have to begin.
Different physiological and emotional states produce different patterns in cardiac electrical activity and may produce measurably different properties in the associated magnetic field. The open question is whether any such field characteristics add explanatory value to social interaction after ordinary pathways are controlled.
02 / Claim ladder
The claims do not share one evidence status.
Moving down the ladder requires new measurement and stronger controls. An earlier rung cannot be used as proof of a later one.
State differentiation
Internal physiological and emotional states alter measurable cardiac electrical and autonomic patterns.
External field
Cardiac magnetic activity can be measured outside the body with sufficiently sensitive instrumentation.
Social covariance
Physiological signals can covary during interaction, but synchrony depends on context and does not name its mechanism.
Incremental value
Magnetic-field features may—or may not—explain social outcomes after sensory, behavioral, autonomic, and contextual variables are modeled.
Direct mediation
No current evidence establishes that the cardiac magnetic field directly transmits socially meaningful information between people.
The necessary boundary
Measurable cardiac magnetism ≠ interpersonal magnetic influence.
Detecting a field outside one body establishes a measurement target. It does not establish that another body detects it, that it changes another person's physiology, or that it carries socially meaningful content.
03 / Staged research path
Use the least exotic sufficient explanation first.
The program becomes more expensive and inferentially fragile at each stage. Progression requires preregistered thresholds and a reason the earlier model is insufficient.
Within-person mapping
Measure ECG, respiration, electrodermal activity, movement, and time-locked subjective state across repeated conditions.
Controlled dyads
Measure two people simultaneously while varying interaction, sensory access, task, relationship, and distance.
Residual test
Ask whether a reproducible relation remains after behavioral, sensory, autonomic, environmental, and analytical confounds are modeled.
Magnetic measurement
Introduce magnetocardiography only if a residual justifies testing whether field features provide incremental predictive value.
04 / Archive + evidence
The archive can generate hypotheses. It cannot make them true.
Longitudinal records can identify recurring state descriptions, correction behavior, temporal order, and candidate variables. They cannot establish causality, field mediation, or population-level generality.