by Eric Wargo
In any case, it is fun to speculate that one or more of the possibilities proposed might, decades down the road, lead to the development of a real precognitive circuit. Given human nature, whoever builds the first one will probably use it to make a killing by predicting micro-fluctuations in the stock market. If miniaturized enough, though, such technology could serve as the basis for security systems, safety features in vehicles, and medical devices, among other applications. It would not provide a reliable fore-warning of preventable outcomes, for the same reason it may never be possible to create a “psychic early warning system” to prevent things like terrorist attacks (if, as I argue, precognition is of actual, not just possible, futures). Or, the error or noise quotient would escalate as the possibility of “bilking” a pre-detected outcome increased. But such a circuit could detect an inevitable imminent event and trigger a preparatory response in advance. In certain circumstances, even a forewarning of a second, or a fraction of a second, could provide a decisive margin to initiate a preparatory response—such as triggering the deployment of an airbag in advance of an imminent collision.
And, of course, there is the scary/awesome thought of “precognitive AI.” But before we get too frightened about precognitive Terminators hunting down the remnants of humanity in some post-apocalyptic waste, peering into the future to anticipate their quarry’s every move, we should realize that precognition may actually be intrinsic to what we think of as intelligence. If that’s the case, nature has a few-billion-year head start on building a future detector. Spoiler alert: You may already be equipped with one of these devices.
7
A New Era of Hyperthought — From Precognitive Bacteria to Our Tesseract Brain
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time” (1946)
I n Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time , 13-year-old Meg Murry, along with her telepathic little brother and a classmate, travel to a series of distant planets via a fold in the fabric of the universe called a tesseract . They are trying to find and rescue their missing scientist father, who happened to be researching precisely such higher-dimensional possibilities when he vanished months earlier. In a memorable scene, “Mrs. Who,” one of three librarian-like spinsters who understand higher-dimensional cosmology and use tesseracts to get around, demonstrates the principle to the schoolkids by holding her robe out flat and drawing it together, showing how such a “wrinkle” can bring distant points together and make a hypothetical insect’s traverse of her robe much shorter. 1 The concept paved the way for newer concepts like wormholes as shortcuts through space and time. But such higher-dimensional doorways (or at least the idea of them) have a surprisingly long history.
The fourth dimension, as we saw earlier, was catnip to thinking Victorians. 2 Tesseracts were originally the brainchild of a British mathematician named Charles Howard Hinton. In his 1888 book A New Era of Thought , Hinton coined that term to refer to a four-dimensional version of a cube (also called a “hypercube”). Hinton’s fourth dimension (like that of Edward A. Abbott in Flatland ) remained an added spatial dimension, not the dimension of time—again, it was H. G. Wells who made that further leap—but Hinton saw that our human ability to conceive of higher dimensions and manipulate them in our imagination reflected the likelihood that our brains somehow partook of this higher dimensionality. “We must be really four-dimensional creatures,” he wrote, “or we could not think about four dimensions.” 3
As is irresistible and probably unavoidable when you’re trying to blow your readers’ minds with a speculative new idea and also justify it scientifically, Hinton engaged in a little bit of hand-waving to show how this might be possible. He proposed that it was the brain’s computational units, what he called “brain molecules,” that behaved in this four-D way and enabled our contemplation of higher dimensions:
It may be that these brain molecules have the power of four-dimensional movement, and that they can go through four-dimensional movements and form four-dimensional structures. …
And these movements and structures would be apprehended by the consciousness along with the other movements and structures, and would seem as real as the others—but would have no correspondence in the external world.
They would be thoughts and imaginations, not observations of external facts. 4
Sometimes, hand-waving that looks like drowning is really saying hello to a future the rest of us cannot yet see. Hinton’s “brain molecules” able to perform four-dimensional gymnastics sound whimsical, but a growing number of researchers think the brain could have real quantum computational properties. And if the retrocausal hypothesis gaining ground in physics is right, those properties could even be time-defying. Although it remains speculative at this point—and thus, yes, hand-wavy—it is not unthinkable that the brain may turn out to be something like a squishy, pinkish-gray tesseract—a roughly six-inch-in-diameter information tunnel through time, corresponding more or less to what J. W. Dunne called a person’s “brain line.” 5 Moreover, its super-dimensional abilities, if real, will likely turn out to be based, as Hinton presciently intuited back in 1888, on molecular structures that the brain’s cells share with distant bacterial ancestors of all complex organisms on our planet.
Scientists and philosophers have long sought to understand how order, and specifically life, could ever have emerged within a universe governed by the physical laws formulated during the Enlightenment. Classical physics, with its totally determinative, forward-in-time, billiard-ball causation, not only required sweeping anomalies like prophecy under the rug, it also replaced the order and beauty of God’s creation with a bleak mechanistic universe forever slouching toward cold chaos. The second law of thermodynamics insists that everything is, on the whole, cooling off and descending into disorder. This produced a seeming paradox: How could a natural world governed by entropy produce systems that bind energy, replicate themselves, and create ever more complex forms? What principle in the ever-more-disordered universe allows things like seashells, eyes, brains, or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?
Beginning in the middle of the last century, scientists like Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Russian chemist Ilya Prigogine, and American mathematician-meteorologist Edward Lorenz applied new scientific and mathematical tools to model the emergence of complex systems within the traditional regime of thermodynamics. According to Prigogine’s idea of “dissipative structures” (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1977), systems become orderly by exporting (dissipating) entropy itself. In this way, they generate complex emergent forms, including the complex forms of animal and plant life. 6 In the 1970s, Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued that these same basic principles underlie the regularities of social existence too, up to and including the cultural symbol systems used by humans to encode meaningful information and guide our behavior. 7 Today, quantum information theory, discussed in the last chapter, is also being applied to study the emergence of complex systems. 8
Yet, voices on the margins of mainstream science have again and again felt that, to really explain the “balance within imbalance” of the cosmos, the miraculous rise of life and mind, there must be some as-yet-undiscovered anti-entropic force or principle to supplement the mechanistic laws formulated in the Enlightenment. Vitalism was a popular idea in the Victorian era, for instance. Around the turn of the century, Henri Bergson proposed the existence of an elan vital , a life force, as the missing X-factor. 9 A couple decades later, the Lamarckian biologist Paul Kammerer argued for “seriality” as a kind of convergence on meaningful order. 10 In the 1980s, the maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed that complexity and extraordinary convergences in nature (including psi phenomena) could be explained by a “resonance” among forms. Morphic resonance , he argued, is a kind of active non-material
memory and causative principle all of its own. 11 Today, some researchers are proposing that consciousness is a fundamental organizing principle in nature, perhaps even driving life and complexity. 12
The problem with these anti-materialist alternatives, of course, is that (almost by definition) they cannot supply any underlying physical mechanism, and thus most mainstream scientists will call them hand-wavy (if not worse epithets). Sheldrake’s formative causation, for example, cannot explain how or why forms impose themselves on matter at a distance. While he has accused neuroscience of “promissory materialism” in its assurances that consciousness will eventually have a materialist, brain-based explanation, his theory of morphic resonance is also promissory in that it lacks any existing basis in physics as we know it—it too rests on future discoveries. 13 A more basic problem may be the question of how forms could be defined objectively, independent of some “comparing” God-like observer that decides what counts as a form in the first place. In other words, what is it that causes two spatial (or temporal) arrangements of things, be it seashells, strands of DNA, or patterns of brain activity dictating the behavior of a mouse, to count as formally similar?
Rather than imagine hard-to-define consciousness or invisible morphic fields driving the emergence of life, a simpler answer is liable to come from retrocausation, the ability of future states of systems to influence prior states. This possibility was already floated in the middle of the 20th century, in fact, by a mathematician named Luigi Fantappiè. Fantappiè proposed a retrocausal principle drawing systems toward complexity, coherence, and order, which he named syntropy . Two Italian psychologists, Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini, have lately resurrected this idea, drawing on research in physics and parapsychology to support Fantappiè’s theory. 14 They propose that future nodes of convergence and harmony, or “attractors”—a concept borrowed from Edward Lorenz’s work in chaos theory—exert a pull on the past, and they describe some physical mechanisms that may facilitate this. Water itself, they suggest, may provide a physical basis for the pull toward order. On the molecular level, the unique properties of hydrogen bonds (the “hydrogen bridge” discovered by physicist Wolfgang Pauli) make water especially suitable to serve as the basis for the emergence of complex, self-organizing biological systems out of the entropic, prebiological matrix. In animals and humans, di Corpo and Vannini argue, syntropy expresses itself as precognition and presentiment; the emotion of love, they argue, is basically a syntropic signal drawing individuals toward meaningful convergences in their future.
The idea that some kind of retrocausation may explain life, order, and complexity is no longer only being discussed on the scientific fringes. Huw Price has tentatively speculated that some form of primitive precognition may have been a force in evolution. 15 And Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies has suggested that it might turn out to be post-selection , applied to the vast quantum computer that is the universe, that will explain the rise of life from lifeless matter:
Perhaps living systems have the property of being post-selective, and thus greatly enhance the probability of the system ‘discovering’ the living state? Indeed, this might even form the basis of a definition of the living state, and would inject an element of ‘teleology without teleology’ into the description of living systems. 16
A Time Eye
Erwin Schrödinger speculated about quantum mechanics’ possible role in biology in a 1944 book, What Is Life? , which inspired James D. Watson and Francis Crick in their hunt for a molecular basis of the genetic code. But while Schrödinger’s book gave a fore-taste, the quantum biology revolution really didn’t begin until the first decade of this century, when a process called quantum tunneling was found to be essential to photosynthesis. 17 When photons strike magnesium atoms in chlorophyll molecules, they release energy in the form of free electrons. These liberated electrons find the shortest route to the reaction center of a plant cell by tunneling—also known as taking a “quantum walk”—through the cytoplasm. A quantum walk is usually explained using the language of superposition: By remaining in a wavelike unmeasured state, particles can pass through solid physical barriers or expeditiously find their way to distant points in space by taking multiple paths simultaneously. An alternative, retrocausal way of looking at it is that the particle’s path may be partly determined by the interaction at its destination—that same business of a particle “knowing” where it is going in advance. Biologist Graham Fleming, in announcing the dependence of photosynthesis on quantum mechanics in a 2007 Nature article, suggested that plants are quantum computers because of this phenomenon. (Remember that, at the quantum level, any manipulation to produce an effect—that is, cause something—can also be described as performing a computation.)
Since then, quantum processes have been confirmed in other biological systems. Tunneling has been discovered to be essential to the catalytic action of enzymes, for example; and entanglement turns out to be the answer to the longstanding mystery of bird navigation. A pair of entangled electrons in the retinas of migratory birds enables them to “see” the angle of a magnetic field in relation to the Earth’s surface, making them sensitive to latitude. 18 Some researchers have proposed that quantum processes may be involved in the sense of smell, which depends on an acute ability to detect the difference between structurally identical molecules whose only difference is their quantum vibration. 19 These functions undoubtedly represent just the tip of the iceberg of quantum behavior in living systems, and as we will see, there is currently a kind of gold rush to discover quantum processes in the brain that may help explain consciousness.
According to some retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics, we are awash in information from the future—every physical interaction, including in our bodies, is conditioned or inflected by what will happen to every interacting particle next . The reason we are mostly unaware of this fact is that we lack the context for interpreting that inflection—a cipher turning that information into something meaningful. Information at the quantum level remains noise—seemingly probabilistic or random—unless there is a suitable apparatus for measuring and comparing different groups of particles whose next interactions can be predicted with some degree of reliability. Since it is now possible to design an experimental apparatus to measure retrocausal effects via post-selection, there seemingly are exceptions to the rule that information from the future is always or only noise. In the previous chapter, I described some possible avenues for building a “future detector”—one that uses a technique called weak measurement, others that use serial entanglement of particles or perhaps a matrix of entangled qubits (as would be found in an artificial quantum computer) to decipher information in the past correlated with a future state of the system. These methods would use post-selection to impose a constraint on the outcome, such that a prior “readout” of information correlated to a future “input” can give meaningful insight about that future state (and at the same time, prevent paradox).
As the “chaotician” Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) famously says in Jurassic Park , “life will find a way.” It stands to reason that if it is possible to detect the future in laboratories, then life too would have found a way to use post-selection to tell the difference between particles that will receive a predicted later measurement from those that won’t be—in other words, to evolve a quantum-biological future detector. 20
To see how such a thing might work, we can use the analogy of a simple eye. Some single-celled organisms like the euglena possess photoreceptors that can distinguish light from dark, but the simplest eyes in more complex animals like planarian worms consist of a patch of photoreceptive cells at the base of a shallow pit. For reasons that will be clear later, let’s picture a simple eye as a pit on the upper surface of the animal, with light flowing down from above. There is very little that a simple photoreceptor array can determine about the environment overhead. It can tell the organism about the presence of light and its intensity or frequency and perhaps roug
hly its direction, and it can tell when it is in shadow, but it cannot image the environment or tell the animal exactly what is casting that shadow or how far away it is. (This is analogous in spatial terms to how the back-flowing influence of future interactions is interpreted by us in the present as randomness or chance—it appears as a kind of noise that, at most, can be quantified in the form of probability.)
But what happens when you set those photoreceptors inside a deeper recess that is mostly enclosed except for a small pupil-like opening? Evolution did this multiple times—it’s the intermediate stage on the way to a proper eye. Even in the absence of a lens to enhance the photon-gathering capacity, a narrow aperture acts as a pinhole camera to project an image onto the photoreceptive cells. All the sudden, you have the ability to capture a picture, a re-presentation, of what is outside in the environment, such as a predator circling a few inches above. In other words, when you constrain the in-falling light, you actually gain much more usable or meaningful information about the outside world even though you have eliminated most of that light in the process. Photographers understand this as the inverse relationship between aperture (f-stop) and depth of field: The sharpness of the image, and the amount of the scene that can be in focus, increases as the aperture narrows. This is exactly like a spatial analogue of post-selection. The pupil, the aperture in an optical eye, acts as a selector of light rays in space; by admitting only a small bundle of rays, it generates much more coherent information about energetic events unfolding beyond it (you might call the pupil a “far-selector”).
In contrast, the basic pre-sense enabled by intracellular quantum computing would be a temporal sense, a time eye , which amounts to an ability to gather information about outcomes ahead of the organism in its future rather than objects at some distance away in space. To create a time eye, evolution would have needed to create a system that is able to tell the difference between two or more groups of otherwise identical particles that will receive different measurements later. This requires the system to have a potential “measuring presence” at two points in time, not just one, the same way a primitive eye requires bodily tissue at two different distances from the external “seen” object (i.e., the retina and the aperture or pupil). That is no problem: In the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, organisms are continuous in time, wormlike beings that have beginnings, middles, and ends, like stories, just as they have extension in space. Thus, we are now talking about a kind of “sensory apparatus” that “points” along the direction of the organism’s world line through the glass block—that is, along the time axis instead of along a spatial axis like an eye.