Why do you bring this up?

For what it's worth my impression is that while there exist people who have genuinely benefited from the book; a very large majority of the interest expressed in the book is almost purely signaling.

There are 2600 people signed up for the Reddit Godel Escher Bach group.

In fact this talk and the others in the same series have been transcribed and published as a book: “The character of physical law”; here is a direct pdf link.

Religion had a grip on 99.5% or more of humanity until 1900,

Is this true? How could one know?

Short answer: Yes, CT is falsifiable. Here's how to see this. Take a look at the example CT chart. By following the procedures stated in the Theory and Practice document, you can produce and check a CT chart like the example chart. Once you've checked the chart, you can make predictions using CT and the CT chart. From the example chart, for instance, we can see that the person sometimes plays video games and tries to improve and sometimes plays video games while not trying to improve. From the chart and CT, we can predict: "If the person comes to believe that he stably has the ability to be cool, as he conceives of coolness, then he will stop playing video games while not trying to improve." We would measure belief here primarily by the person's belief reports. So we have a concrete procedure that yields specific predictions. In this case, if the person followed various recommendations designed to increase his ability to be cool, ended up reporting that he stably had the ability to be cool, but still reported playing video games while not trying to improve, CT would be falsified.

Longer answer: In practice, almost any specific theory can be rendered consistent with the data by adding epicycles, positing hidden entities, and so forth. Instead of falsifying most theories, then, what happens is this: You encounter some recalcitrant data. You add some epicycles to your theory. You encounter more recalcitrant data. You posit some hidden entities. Eventually, though, the global theory that includes your theory becomes less elegant than the global theory that rejects your theory. So, you switch to the global theory that rejects your theory and you discard your specific theory. In practice with CT, so far we haven't had to add many epicycles or posit many hidden entities. In particular, we haven't had the experience of having to frequently change what we think a person's intrinsic goods are. If we found that we kept having to revise our views about a person's intrinsic goods (especially if the old posited intrinsic goods were not instrumentally useful for achieving the new posited intrinsic goods), this would be a serious warning sign.

Speaking more generally, we're following particular procedures, as described in the CT Theory and Practice document. We expect to achieve particular results. If in a relatively short time frame we find that we can't, that will provide evidence against the claim "CT is useful for achieving result X". For example, I've been able to work for more than 13 hours a day, with only occasional days off, for more than two years. I attribute this to CT and I expect we'll be able to replicate this. If we end up not being able to, that'll be obvious to us and everyone else.

Thanks for raising the issue of falsifiability. I'm going to add it to our CT FAQ.

More references to Cannabis research.

Hard to come by because of the legal restrictions. The best sources I have seen:

Altered States of Consciousness edited by Charles Tart, 1969, Wiley.

Pharmako/Poeia by Dale Pendell, 1995, Mercury House.

They include pros and cons although it is obvious both guys are at least a little more pro than con. From Pendell's book: "Smoking it occasionally makes you wise; smoking it a lot turns you into a donkey." (p.199)

neural irregularities as pink noise, which is also called 1/f noise

A few minutes of fooling around with a color tool will show you that the spectrum of pink is flat (white) with a notch at the green and the 1/f spectrum is brown, nothing at all resembling pink. The misnomer of pink to label 1/f seems to come from a misconception that flat + a pole at red is pink (it's not--it's red) and 1/f (it's not--it's flat with a pole at red).

It is a pity this idea has gotten so much traction into the English language as it is so horribly wrong. It's like one of those things that Pauli would describe as "not even wrong."

90%? I think you need to read some Nate Silver. (Also, existing prediction.)

The Super Bowl will not be Packers over Patriots in February 2012.

P=~.8 (80%)