by Eric Wargo
The reason is the impossible complexity of causation. Even if a butterfly’s flutter in Peking now can be a contributor to a storm in New York next month, the idea of somehow using that one butterfly to predict or divine New York’s weather is unthinkable, because too many other butterflies, and seagulls, and individual photons warming individual molecules in the world’s oceans also contributed to the storm. The causal antecedents of that storm are basically infinite in number. How could information about that incredibly complex event reflux back in time in any coherent way, for instance to one individual’s head? Events like storms—and when you zoom in, even oft-prophesied calamities like plane crashes and terrorist attacks—are both hard to define and also very much like the martyr St. Sebastian, with whom Michael Richards identified in his seemingly precognitive sculpture of 9/11: They are pincussions of causal arrows . That sad-eyed, multiply pincushioned young man could be called the patron saint of complex causation, and he is for some critics the main thing standing in the way of accepting any form of foreknowledge not based on simple inference from sense data.
University of Maryland philosopher and parapsychologist Stephen E. Braude, a skeptic when it comes to retrocausal accounts of precognition, describes the problem:
Any causal connection we identify will always be part of a larger causal nexus spreading indefinitely into the past and future. The particular causal connections we find worthwhile to single out are individuated, on pragmatic grounds, out of an intrinsically seamless web of happening running from earlier to later and leading to and away from events we relate causally. And from out of that web we can distinguish many different causal lines, some converging toward the individual events and others spreading out from them. 16
Braude argues that alleged precognitive experiences do not play fair if retrocausation is understood to be just a mirror image of “clockwise” classical causation, as is commonly assumed by its advocates. If causes can somehow project backward, then we ought to see the same kind of complex retro-causation determining precognitive experiences. Yet in a precognitive experience such as an alleged precognitive dream, Braude sees no sense that there are multiple causal arrows from multiple future events converging on the dream; the dream seems to be “of” a singular future occurrence. Nor does Braude see evidence that such dreams have radiating repercussions farther back in time, prior to the dream. In short, “retrocausal connections seem to stand out like a sore thumb on any causal map.” 17 He adds: “No other sort of putative causal connection lacks an extensive surrounding causal history running temporally in the same direction.” 18
Arguments about prescience and its possible pitfalls often turn on ideal-typical thought experiments having the same structure as stories about time travel paradoxes. For instance, what if you received a premonition of a terrorist attack and alerted the authorities? If they averted the attack, from what future would your premonition have been sent? But in fact, precognition seldom if ever works so cleanly in the real world. “Prophetic” dreams and visions typically have a much more ambiguous, vague character. For instance, as uncannily precise as they seemed to be, David Mandell’s or Elizabeth Krohn’s precognitive dreams of news reports about disasters still lacked enough specificity about when or where the events were going to occur to use them to avert those outcomes. And premonitions are very often more oblique than that, or else they correspond to future events in unexpected and ironic ways. Failure to heed premonitions—either out of an overriding personal skepticism, fear of looking foolish, or simple failure to pay attention—is also a common pattern in the literature on this subject, as is “fulfilling” a premonition precisely in the effort to prevent it. 19
Jeffrey Kripal relates a striking example of the latter type that was told to him by an academic colleague. The woman had sent her four-year-old boy to a petting zoo in the care of their nanny; at 10:06 AM she had a sudden vision of her son screaming in his car seat and the car filling with white smoke. She immediately phoned her nanny and told her to drive home immediately, and slowly. It was an uneventful trip home … but the boy was disappointed that he did not get to pet the animals as he’d been promised. So the next day the woman decided to take him back to the petting zoo herself. On the way, another car made a sharp turn on the highway ahead and crashed into them. No one was hurt—the airbags deployed—but the boy was screaming in the back seat, and just as in her vision, the car was full of “white smoke”—powder from the deployed airbags. It happened at 10:08 AM—24 hours and two minutes after the woman’s premonitory vision. Kripal underscores that the premonition was actually self-fulfilling: “by preventing the child from a full visit at the zoo … the mother actually helped cause the future event to happen (since the child now wanted to return).” 20
What, then, of the “foreseen calamities prevented” that are a perennial favorite kind of anecdote in books on precognition? 21 In her 1961 book Hidden Channels of the Mind , ESP pioneer Louisa Rhine describes cases in which an individual, suddenly aware of a déjà vu feeling or a remembered dream, narrowly averted some catastrophe. For example, a mother in Washington State reported a vivid dream in which her baby was crushed to death by a chandelier that had been hanging over the crib in their nursery. In the dream, she saw herself and her husband standing amid the wreckage, with the clock on the baby’s dresser reading 4:35. Defying her husband’s plea to just ignore the dream and go back to sleep, the worried mother rose and got their baby and brought her into their bed. Two hours later, the couple and their baby were awakened by a loud crash. She rose and rushed to the nursery, followed by her husband. “There, where the baby would have been lying, was the chandelier in the crib. They looked at each other and then at the clock. It stood at 4:35.” 22 Since the woman evidently “used” her dream to protect her baby from harm, from what future did her premonition of the child being crushed come? Does such a dream challenge the Minkowski block universe?
Some who accept retrocausation get around the issues of paradox and associated questions of free will by suggesting that premonitions like this show us probabilities that are potentially alterable through our choices, not an etched-in-stone (or glass) future reality. 23 This is an idea that goes along with the popular “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics attributed to physicist Hugh Everett in the late 1950s: the idea that at every decision point in nature, physical systems take multiple paths and thus endlessly proliferate new, alternative universes. According to such an interpretation, the woman’s dream of her crushed child may have accurately showed her an event in a possible future, “a timeline not taken.” J. B. Rhine thought that there may be a trade-off between the level of detail of a premonitory or precognitive vision and the amenability of the foreseen outcome to being altered. 24 Rhine was no doubt thinking of the analogous trade-off in quantum physics between an experimenter’s level of certainty in a measurement and the extent to which the experimenter’s probing interferes with the system being observed (more on which later).
A retrocausation skeptic might instead propose that the woman’s premonition of her baby being crushed could have been an unconsciously drawn inference based on clairvoyantly gathered awareness of causal arrows converging on the imminent fall of the chandelier, or even that the chandelier’s fall could have been psychically caused by the mother. Braude argues that what seems like information reaching a person from the future may really be a kind of psi-augmented inference, gathering information about the various causal antecedents of those events via clairvoyance or telepathy; he is also open to the possibility that the individual’s own unconscious psychokinetic (PK) influence on events may contribute to outcomes that seem to have been simply foreseen. 25 In such an interpretation, linear causality is preserved, but by appeal to a wider (and ill-defined) array of psychic abilities, sometimes called “super psi.” Those who refuse any form of psi on principle may suggest instead that an inference was made by the mother’s unconscious mind, based on having subliminally registered a loose fitting in the c
handelier the day before. As we will see later in this book, the super-abilities of the unconscious mind were an explanatory refuge for Sigmund Freud on many occasions when his own life and his clinical work seemed to supply evidence for some kind of anomalous knowing of imminent events.
None of these compromises or alternatives are very satisfying. Precognizing possible futures might be plausible when an event is imminent, but what about highly specific events more distant in time? Outcomes apparently foreseen years or decades beforehand—and there are plenty of such cases—seem to defy all sense in a butterfly-effect universe where every small decision should lead to a completely different future. One imagines that even a single Swallowtail or Fritillary caught or not caught by Nabokov over the course of his life of butterfly collecting could have led to a different future that did not include writing Lolita or Harris and Kubrick Pictures buying the film rights. 26 Psi-augmented inference of future events based on their antecedents in the present is similarly implausible when a foreseen event involves something “random” like another driver making an unpredictable sudden turn a day in the future, let alone events of virtually any kind at longer temporal remove. Moreover, how could either psi-mediated inference or the unconscious mind’s subliminal acuity account for the temporal coincidences in both Kripal’s and Rhine’s examples—the time of day being the same for the first mother’s vision and the accident the next day, or the time on the clock being exactly right in the mother’s chandelier dream?
The PK argument has problems of its own, even if we admit that thoughts or intentions (either conscious or unconscious) can be causal other than through the usual medium of willed human action. It is a vast question that goes well beyond the scope of this book, but ample experimental data do seem to support the existence of some kinds of PK. 27 An “active hypothesis” to explain ostensible precognition may also include the non-paranormal ability of individuals to unconsciously orchestrate or arrange events to fulfill their own “prophecies.” 28 However, invoking an unconscious mental ability to orchestrate complex events like plane crashes or other disasters is hardly believable—and in any case is far less parsimonious than the precognitive alternative. In fact, as we will see later, there are several reasons it will be easier to mistake precognition for something like PK (or some supra-personal organizing principle like Jung’s synchronicity) than vice versa. 29 Those “force fields” around precognition that I mentioned are quite strong, and they are powered by deep-rooted taboos. In any case, does it really help us to imagine—and is it really believable—that the mothers in the two examples might have psychically or otherwise caused the calamities that nearly claimed their children? 30
The argument I am making in this book is that we precognize actual futures, and do so through a real, retrocausal mechanism—and moreover, that we do it all the time. The various objections to retrocausal accounts—including the seeming paradoxes—turn out to be butterflies that have been blown to hurricane proportions because of longstanding misunderstandings about just where (in space) informational time travel is occurring. The search for precognition in the physics of cause and effect as they apply to real occurrences like storms and plane crashes and fender benders “out in the world” is, I argue, to look in the wrong place. 31
Premory
We really need to go back to Dunne and take seriously the distinction he drew on the basis of his own dream investigations—between objective physical events, embedded in their seamless web of complexly interacting mechanical causes and effects, and the very different phenomenological landscape of cause and effect that characterizes consciousness and especially memory . Braude is correct that in the world of classical, Newtonian physics there are no events that have only isolated, singular causes staggered in time with no subsequent downstream effects, but there are plenty of such phenomena in our experience. A recollection is an experience whose array of immediate neural causes and downstream behavioral sequelae may well be hidden from our awareness, or simply imperceptible, but it bears a distinct, direct, and coherent relationship to another experience distant—perhaps even many years distant—in time. And when it passes, it may be very hard to discern its effects on subsequent events or even on subsequent thoughts and behaviors until a similar recollection surfaces again.
For instance, as I write this, I am recalling a fender bender I got into about a decade ago in the parking lot of the Trader Joe’s grocery store in Bethesda, Maryland. My recollection takes the form of a visual-sensory “reliving”: a sense of the place, the sounds and feel of the collision, and so on. Between that event and my memory of it today, that experience had been “stored” as an unrealized possibility of connections across my brain. I didn’t dwell on the accident after I exchanged insurance information with the other driver—no one was hurt, and we both went on with our lives. But lo and behold, today I can somewhat vividly summon the scene in my mind’s eye (with some mix of accuracy and likely error), re-experiencing the brief shock, the feel of the impact, anger at myself for not looking more carefully in my blind spot, and other associated emotions. And in turn, once I’m done thinking about it, this recollection’s effect on my future behavior will be subtle at most—maybe just a slight heightened alertness next time I’m in that parking lot. It might seem to some outside observer of my brain, God’s fMRI, that that recollection, that memory, simply vanished again without further effect, like a storm that had dissipated.
We saw how, by bringing the same forensic sensibility to his precognitive dreams that he brought to investigating a fatal crash of an experimental monoplane, Dunne was able to show that it was the future occasion of his own learning of events that he was precognizing, not the events themselves. Many of Dunne’s readers have been thrown by his somewhat non-sequitur conclusion, that part of our consciousness transcends the physical body; but as I argued, his Serialism theory never cohered with his core dataset, which consisted of dreams of events in his embodied future. 32 That in turn points to precognition’s rootedness in the brain, as literally what Gerald Feinberg called a “memory of things future.” 33 Various mechanisms have been proposed for how this might work, which we will come back to. But whatever the mechanism(s), precognitive (and other ESP) experiences as reported in life and lab do bear striking similarities to memory and memory-related phenomena. 34 Drawings made in telepathy experiments or in remote viewing exercises, for example, often look like sketches that could easily have been made after a brief, barely remembered or only subliminally registered glimpse at the target stimulus. 35 The most parsimonious explanation—and as we will see, one that no longer flies in the face of scientific understandings of causation—is that the brain really, somehow, communicates with itself across its history. I am arguing that precognition is just memory in reverse, or what we might for convenience call premory .
A basic principle of memory, one that is so obvious as to be almost not worth mentioning, is its rootedness in our own lived experience. I don’t remember your childhood, or my wife’s childhood—I remember my own. Insofar as I know about my wife’s childhood, it is only from being told about it at some point. My knowledge about historical or world events like the Cretaceous period or Watergate is similarly traceable to books and movies and TV shows I have been exposed to in my lifetime, like Jurassic Park and All the President’s Men . The experiences of Dunne and many others suggest that premory is exactly similar to memory in this respect: We precognize things that will happen in our own lives or things we are destined to learn about, rather than events as such that may remain outside our direct experience. 36 This fact becomes evident, ironically enough, when the future information source about some distant event contains errors or omissions and the precognitive experience corresponds to those deviations from reality—the “tracers” mentioned earlier. 37
An important, more specific principle about memory is one that was described already by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 19th century: that it operates on the principle of association —that is
, connections among disparate ideas and experiences. For instance, when I hear the word “butterfly,” my thoughts may go in several directions—to Vladimir Nabokov and his novels, for example, or to James Gleick’s Chaos and the butterfly in Peking, or even to the Taoist sage Zhuangzi, who famously didn’t know, when he dreamed about a butterfly, whether in fact his waking life was really the dream of that butterfly. (In fact, for years, I vaguely confused or conflated Gleick’s Chinese butterfly with Zuangzi’s—raising the question whether it was really Zhuangzi who caused the storm in New York!) Associations are like the wires or channels of memory. The strength of particular associations is determined in part by how strongly events in our lives reinforce them (through conditioning processes like those mentioned earlier); they change over time and seem to correlate with the strengths of synaptic connections between neurons. 38 The brain has a special appetite for making connections that are not logical, and this paradoxically makes memory strong and makes learned information (semantic memory) and autobiographical events (episodic memories) easily accessed by multiple pathways, multiple linkages in the brain.
Precognition and other ostensible ESP phenomena have also long been observed to operate on associative principles. 39 The ability to make broad and counterintuitive associations (remote associates ) is one measure of creativity, which is a trait associated with ESP ability. 40 And precognitive dreams seem to build associations between past experiences and future ones, as well as using metaphor and other tropes like puns, which could also be thought of as kinds of association. 41 Association is the inner logic of Freud’s “primary process” thinking, as we will see in Part Three, and this dovetails interestingly with recent research about memory consolidation during sleep and dreaming. Dreaming is coming to be understood as a process possibly intrinsic to the formation of new mnemonic associations, the brain’s metabolism of the recent past by integrating new experiences into long-term memory in an associative manner. 42 I will argue that dreams may do the same thing with our future experiences.