Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  This would not make the mind “infinite,” the implicit and sometimes even explicit promise of those who claim psi phenomena must rule out a reductive, materialistic explanation for consciousness. 65 But even within a materialist framework, the mind would be vastly bigger, vastly longer , than we ordinarily suppose—and thus, indeed “transcendent.” 66

  What are the possibilities? How “long” could our minds really be? Might we even sometimes draw on the entirety of our brain’s computing power across our lifespan? We veer very far into speculation here, obviously, but some capacity to compute across long swathes of time would make sense of baffling experiences like dreams and artworks that seem prophetic of events years or decades in the individual’s future. It would also help clear up yet another mystery in the cognitive sciences: the oft-noted correlation between intelligence and longevity. There are some commonsensical explanations why smarter individuals tend to live longer, such as being better able to avoid dangers, as well as possible confounding factors like education and affluence. Yet these confounds have never been able to fully account for the correlation, and cognitive epidemiologists have argued that there must therefore be a strong genetic underpinning to this association. 67 But as yet, no specific gene variants have been identified that produce both smarts and long life. Obviously, as they say, “more research is needed.” But the idea that the brain could be a quantum computer drawing on its computing power over its whole history, or at least over significant swathes of that history, raises the intriguing possibility that longer lifespan might to some extent cause higher intelligence, by increasing the four-dimensional computing resources of the individual’s brain.

  It would be easy to test this hypothesis, in principle. One would simply test the intelligence or problem-solving ability of a group of identical animals (cloned mice reared in the same conditions, say) who are of the same age, and then subsequently “sacrifice” (as they euphemistically say in laboratories) a randomly selected half of the animals, allowing the remainder to live a full life—a kind of post-selection, in other words. If their brains are making computations drawing on the computing power of a whole mouse lifetime, the long-lived mice would be expected to have performed better on the problem-solving task than the short-lived ones. I only offer this as a Gedanken -animal-experiment, and assuredly no animals have been harmed in the creation of this book. But it is possible to go partway toward such an experiment simply by comparing the performance of mice who engage in learning or practice after they perform the assessed task with mice who don’t … but in that case, why use mice? The retroactive-facilitation-of-recall experiments conducted by Daryl Bem are precisely such a study in humans, and the results point to a real effect of subsequent learning on prior performance. 68

  In a 1974 meeting of physicists and parapsychologists in Geneva, Switzerland, the French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard—the one who first proposed that quantum entanglement might be explained retrocausally—described the train of thought that led to his own ultimate acceptance of the probable existence of something like precognition:

  My starting point … occurred in 1951 when I suddenly said to myself: If you truly believe in Minkowski’s space-time—and you know you have to—then you must think of the relationship between mind and matter not at one universal or Newtonian instant but in space-time . If, by the very necessity of relativistic covariance, matter is time extended as it is space extended, then, again by necessity, awareness in a broad sense must also be time extended. 69

  It is very much like an updated version of Charles Howard Hinton’s reasoning about the brain’s capacity for four-dimensional thought: Our brains are four-dimensional, so our awareness must be as well.

  If our awareness is four-dimensional, the mystery becomes: Why do we experience our experience as confined to that narrow cursor in our life’s timeline—the “single Newtonian instant,” as Costa de Beauregard puts it? It may have a lot to do with the mystery raised earlier: Why is it that efficient causes (the ones the “push” from the past) are so much more obvious and intuitively understood than final (teleological) ones? Does it boil down to some biologically determined preferential weighting of past experience over future ones in updating synaptic connections? Could it be partly a function of our cultural beliefs and expectations about causality and free will, acting as a kind of “restraining bolt” on our natural precognitive abilities? Could it even have to do with something as simple as the way sentences in our language unfold in a single direction (the premise of the movie Arrival —more on which later)? We’ll explore these and other possibilities, although I make no promises we’ll get to the bottom of it—plenty of greater minds than mine have tried and failed to crack the nut of time and its relation to consciousness. 70 But the tesseract brain offers, I think, an exciting new way of thinking about (or perhaps, hyperthinking about) these problems, as well helping explain why there are so many situations in which, despite our tendency to consciously inhabit that Newtonian instant, our unconscious seems to “know” more than it ought to be able to in a purely Newtonian, mechanistic world. Experiences like precognitive dreams point to a whole unknown part of our lives—our whole future—that we are interacting with, subtly and obliquely, and that is exerting an influence over our thoughts and behavior now, here in our future’s past.

  Some of the prophylaxis against knowing more about that future (instead of just feeling it) may have to do with the difficulties of source monitoring mentioned earlier. We might picture the 4-D tesseract brain as a long hall in a hotel, with information passing up and down it in both directions like guests—some are familiar faces from our past, whom we will greet and engage with, but there are also lots of unfamiliar faces, total strangers. We’ll tend to ignore, avoid, or even be suspicious of the latter, not having any reason to suspect that they may be from our own future. We may even make up untrue stories about their origins. Meanwhile, along the whole length of that hall, there is just a single window that opens onto the world beyond the body. This narrow temporal aperture of coordinated sensory experience serves as the singular focus of our engagement with external reality, and it gradually moves from one end of the hall to the other, as we move from childhood to old age. Given that even mainstream cognitive science agrees that this “now” is a fiction, then no matter how compellingly it arrests our attention, we should pay greater heed to those strangers coming down the hall—that is, pay more attention to the unfamiliar parts of what we may think of as our “inner” experience. Perhaps that way we can learn something about our 4-D nature, the shape of our cosmic wormlike life as it wends and twists its way through the glass block of Minkowski spacetime. It could really be that the now of our conscious experience bears a similar relationship to the entirety of our thought over life that a point of light from a magnifying glass bears to the sun projecting that light.

  As we bring this obligatory “nuts and bolts” section of the book to a close and leave behind all the physical and biological hand-waving, let me reiterate and underscore just the following idea, the controlling theme for the second half of this book: Whatever physical (or even nonphysical) mechanisms will eventually be found to explain our ability to access and be influenced by our future, much of what has been called “the unconscious” may instead be consciousness displaced in (or distributed across) time . Without at all realizing it, Freudian psychoanalysis may have always been a science of the truly weird, time-looping effects precognition produces in our lives.

  PART THREE

  Time’s Taboos

  Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scenes of our childhood.

  — Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

  8

  Sometimes a Causal Arrow Isn’t Just a Causal Arrow — Oedipus, Freud, and the Repression of Prophecy

  Of all the frameworks in which the need to
magically manipulate time can be discerned, the oedipal situation stands in a class by itself. The fixed, irreversible generation gap separating mother from son, father from daughter, becomes the symbol of all that is cruel and unalterable about fate .

  — Jule Eisenbud, Paranormal Foreknowledge (1982)

  T he thin membrane of the present, which seals off the knowable past from a future that by definition isn’t knowable (yet), is one of our most important conceptual boundaries. The anthropologist Mary Douglas showed in her classic 1966 study Purity and Danger that objects and phenomena that violate conceptual boundaries are not only distasteful but are even regarded as threatening. 1 Life-giving soil from out-of-doors (Nature), for instance, becomes dirt when tracked into the home (Culture), and especially neurotic souls may devote their lives to abolishing the latter. The ancient Hebrews regarded pigs as unclean because they had hooves, like ungulates, yet did not chew a cud—another category violation, around which a whole, notoriously fussy system of dietary regulations (the Book of Leviticus) was constructed. But every culture has such rules, and such fussiness, about its categories. And the rules governing where our knowledge comes from—or epistemology—matter as much to us as the rules governing what we can put on our plates.

  Any kind of retrocausation or precognition throws an epistemology founded totally on memory and inference into disarray, a bit like tracking the dirt of the future into the clean home of the present. (Boundary crossing, or liminality , characterizes most paranormal phenomena, in fact. 2 ) Consequently, skeptics who have not really looked at the evidence for precognition, who assume (because they do not know better) that physics regards it as impossible, or who feel especially threatened by epistemic violations, are quick to ridicule or ostracize those who try to fairly consider the topic. While there are good reasons to be skeptical of unusual or extraordinary claims, purely closed-minded reactions may have everything to do with deep-seated taboos about things that penetrate other things in a culturally non-sanctioned fashion.

  I’m speaking delicately here. We are about to dive headlong into the interesting messes time loops make of our lives, as well as into our strange psychodynamic investments in linear causality. We will see that heightened expression of precognitive ability is sometimes weirdly entangled with transgressions of sex, gender, and desire. It may be no accident that the shrill reactions of skeptics to ESP are so similar to the shrill reactions of cultural conservatives to alternative sexual practices and identities. Personalities who take comfort in a neat, orderly, well-defined world are bound to be threatened by causal arrows that pierce time in the wrong direction, or information that leaks in ways it shouldn’t. But the fact is, causality, like Nature herself, is not tidy. It does not obey our personal preferences, however fussy and prudish they may be.

  No story better displays the entanglement of sexual taboos and retrocausation than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King , the great tragedy about a royal heir who brings a curse on his city because he has accidentally usurped his father’s throne and married his own mother (oops!). How is this about retrocausation? The ancients reckoned historical time through generations—the ever-forward-moving structure of marriage and reproduction and royal succession. Kinship and kingship were for the Greeks more or less equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics for us: inexorable and irreversible, moving in a single direction, never flowing backwards, and always basically getting worse. Thus, Sophocles’ tragedy is really about a kind of time travel and the kind of calamity that could result from upsetting the usual causal order. You might say Sophocles was ancient Greece’s Ray Bradbury (or Philip K. Dick).

  Although the play itself centers on Oedipus’s downfall, the prophetic backstory would have been well-known to Sophocles’ audience, since it was based on an older myth. An oracle had warned King Laius of Thebes that he must not have a son, or he would die by his son’s hand and his son would marry his wife. So, when his wife Jocasta gave birth to a boy, he ordered her to kill the baby. Unable to do the deed herself, the queen had a servant take the infant to the wilderness and stake him out on the ground to die of exposure. Of course, when you delegate a grim task like that, it always fails, and in this case the infant was found by a shepherd and adopted and raised by the King of Corinth. And like father, like son: When the Delphic oracle prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother, the young man fled from the city where he grew up, Corinth, to make sure no harm came to his parents. He didn’t know they weren’t his real parents and that Corinth wasn’t his real hometown. In a chance encounter at a crossroads, Oedipus killed Laius, not knowing who the guy was, and then answered a Sphinx’s riddle to become king of Thebes … and husband of his real mother, Jocasta.

  The Greeks were way ahead of us in grasping that prophetic foresight is allowable and even expected in the tragic (read: thermodynamic) universe—it just needs to be oblique, and to operate in the shadows of our self-ignorance. And it inevitably produces what I have called time loops as a result. The fact that Oedipus’s transgression was prophesied and that he fulfilled the prophecy precisely by trying to evade it makes the events of the story a causal tautology. Tautologies are the ultimate no-nos for pedantic gatekeepers of classical logic—you don’t support a premise by appealing to the conclusion you’ve drawn from it. But this offense in the world of term papers and rhetoric is the opposite of the grandfather paradox that stands in the way of people seriously considering precognition. As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate .

  Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other.

  More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an
understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time. It so happens that Freud’s clinical writings are full of likely “Dunne dreams” as well as other precognitive anomalies that have gone largely or totally unnoticed for over a century because he was so successful at reframing these occurrences in other, less causally repugnant terms.

  I called Freud an ambivalent guide. Freud was open to paranormal phenomena, but he strictly rejected the possibility of precognition. Some seemingly precognitive phenomena he explained away as false memory—still the standard resort of modern skeptics—and some he explained by attributing extraordinary but not physically unthinkable sensory and inferential abilities to the unconscious. When those explanations wouldn’t work, Freud appealed to the psychical (but still non-time-defying) mainstay, telepathy. I suggest that all of these tactics were ways to deny, evade, or just paper over a possibility that was deeply threatening to him: that our fate may not be written in our past—the basic premise of his entire theory of human nature—so much as in our future.