Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  — Howard Carter, diary entry (November 26, 1922)

  I n the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past.

  As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention.

  It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences.

  The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation” 1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.

  In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die. It is a sublime, albeit melancholy, vision, one that not all people are capable of withstanding. Louise’s physicist husband, the father of their daughter, divorces her because he cannot accept her choice and her foreknowledge of its outcome.

  Precognition is seldom as clear as it is depicted in Arrival or “Story of Your Life,” for all the reasons we have explored throughout this book. Information refluxing from the future will always be largely oblique and unrecognizable, misunderstood, and more often forgotten completely until events transpire to make sense of or confirm it. But of all films that have been made about precognition, Arrival probably is closest to “getting it right,” and Louise Banks’ experience can serve as a useful template for understanding the unconscious and its looping relation to time, meaning, and causality. 2 Until unfolding events make sense of our anomalous experiences, any meaning we give them will be premature and will inevitably falsify them.

  As I argued, the main difference between precognition and what we usually think of as memory is that information from the Not Yet must lack meaning until precognized events come to pass. Unlike the past, the future does not speak a language we can recognize. Rich sensory experiences (such as where you were and what you were doing when you learned something new) provide the context for much of what we know from past experience, enabling us to place that information in our personal chronology and even providing rich associations that help recall facts and events—for instance the famous power of smells and places to evoke a recollection. Information from our future will by definition lack any context that could give it meaning or, in most cases, even allow us to recognize it as meaningful. Like finding letters in our mailbox with no return address, we might toss aside our strange dreams, visions, and weirdly non-sequitur passing thoughts as junk mail. If we do not discard them, we may make up inaccurate stories about where they came from (those source-monitoring errors).

  Additionally, precisely because precognitive information lacks sense when we receive it, and because the psyche abhors a vacuum of meaning, we may have already imposed some suitable (but false) framing on such experiences by the time confirmation arrives—further abetting the unseeing of their precognitive nature. If you already assume that a dream symbolically represents recent preoccupations, or unresolved wishes from childhood, or archetypes relevant to your individuation—or more likely, just assume dreams are the deranged product of the sleeping brain—why bother looking for any additional meaning in the dream, even when events unfold that oddly resemble its contents?

  The depth psychologies examined earlier, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology, were bold in their recognition that something about us transcends our ordinary understanding—that there is much more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. But if those traditions celebrated humanity’s mysterious richness, they also redirected our inquiry toward their founders’ favored past-oriented psychology or transpersonal metaphysics. 3 By insisting on a prescribed set of hermeneutic coordinates for our dreams and symptoms (the Oedipal situation; archetypes of the collective unconscious), Freud’s and Jung’s frameworks prematurely satisfied their own and their followers’ hunger for meaning and thereby falsified our true relation to time. Wishing into existence a dream life (and universe) already pre-saturated with meaning, we will never have the opportunity to discover, or even imagine, that we could sometimes be in the astonishing presence of wishes and thoughts we ourselves will consciously have at some later point down the road.

  Not waiting for meaning’s arrival—not waiting for the sugar to melt 4 —can come back to haunt us. With three decades of hindsight, the dream of Irma’s injection showed the 67-year-old Freud, obliquely and in a fashion he probably couldn’t accept, his belated, better-informed perspective on the turning point that led to him becoming the “answerer of riddles” celebrated by his colleagues. From that late vantage point, I suggested, he tried to wish away a nagging realization that he might have been wrong about dreams —at least, wrong in his rejection of their prophetic possibility. It was in the same stroke a reproach to himself for ignoring his friend Fliess’s warning about his smoking that, had he heeded it, might have averted what turned into 16 years of pain and drastically compromised quality of life. Again, at the time he had the dream, it was not a “warning” he could have heeded; but as an ordinary irrational mortal, he might naturally have blamed himself anyway for not treating it as a warning. It is our confused belief in free will and an open-ended universe subject to our shaping that naturally leads to such (possibly quite erroneous) retrospection. How entangled our neuroses and regrets are with our cosmology is a rich topic awaiting some future quantum psychoanalysis. 5

  The Unconscious of Matter

  Both the hermeneutic moment in the psychoanalytic clinic and the act of measurement in a physics lab create a state of knowing by giving meaning to what until then lacked it, in a way that has decisive effects for the object of knowledge—who, in the former case, is also a subject. 6 According to most mainstream descriptions of what happens in t
he double-slit experiment, the photon in its unmeasured state is a lot like an ambivalent neurotic, taking both paths simultaneously through two available slits because it cannot make up its mind or commit to taking one slit or the other. This ambivalence, literally a kind of self-interference, shapes the observed behavior of matter on a fundamental level. When the wavefunction “collapses” to something definite, it is like making that photon’s unconscious conscious. “Where it (the unconscious) was, there will I (the conscious ego) be,” in Freud’s famous phrase. Where the wave was, there the particle will be . The world of self-interfering wavefunctions is essentially the unconscious of matter.

  Richard Feynman’s “path-integral” (or “sum over histories”) approach to quantum problems is especially Freudian. Instead of viewing light as consisting of waves, he visualized a photon as a little ball taking every possible path through space to get to its destination; most “wild” paths destructively interfere, but those in the vicinity of the most efficient path reinforce each other, producing the ray-like behavior we observe. This is how he explained Fermat’s principle of least time, in his lectures published as QED : The path taken by the light ray is the last man standing, so to speak, after all other possible vectors cancel each other out. 7 In other words, it is just like the existing-yet-not-existing, agonistic virtual realm of the unconscious, where every possible motive and dark desire battles for supremacy without us ever being the wiser. Off-stage, perpetually unseen, is a bloody battlefield strewn with matter’s slain possibilities and intentions. (As James Gleick put it in his biography of Feynman: “The seemingly irrelevant paths are always lurking in the background, making their contributions, ready to make their presence felt in such phenomena as mirages and diffraction gratings” 8 —nature’s parapraxes and dreams, one might say.)

  Physicists have been more careful than psychoanalysts not to reify or hypostatize their metaphors—Feynman, for instance, did not assume that his signature path integrals were necessarily anything more than a mathematical predictive trick. (Thus, it is sometimes said that quantum physics really has no theory; the Copenhagen Interpretation is really an injunction not to interpret but just “shut up and calculate.” 9 ) But it is hard not to make assumptions about reality based on our metaphors, even mathematical ones. This is known in the social sciences and linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, another crucial touchstone for the scientists in “Story of Your Life”: The words and symbols we use affect how we think. We may not be able to unlock greater precognitive ability simply by learning a different kind of language, one with a nonlinear grammar. But it could be that it is our language of cause and effect that keeps us from seeing that those uncollapsed wavefunctions and “buried” unconsciouses don’t already exist as something off-stage or invisible. We need some new metaphors, and, again, a new “backwards” way of thinking, to see how factors relevant to the present may be spread out in time, in both directions.

  Over three centuries ago, Enlightenment physics and the natural philosophy and psychology that flowed from it walled off that whole half of time, entombing the Not Yet behind a thick stone barrier. Causes pushed from the past, and effects were theoretically predictable just from that pushing. The world subsequently forgot all about teleology, the quaint old idea that where we are going might exert some kind of complementary influence, pulling or nudging us in certain directions. Then a century ago, physicists realized there was something about matter’s behavior—a lot, in fact—that those pushing causes couldn’t tell them. Since then, a resignation to uncertainty has served as a Band-Aid, and made careers for brilliant mathematicians like Feynman, who refined quantum physics into the most powerful predictive theory ever created. Much of the technology we now take for granted depends on the startling accuracy of equations that predict matter’s statistically “random” behavior. But mysteries have remained. Basic problems remain insoluble (like reconciling quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of gravity, for instance). And with new technology that can zero in on ever smaller scales, the weirdness just gets weirder.

  A few bold explorers have realized that that whole half of time the Enlightenment walled off may hold part of the answer, and they have begun to pierce it with their drills. What is gleaming in their torchlight already is, as Howard Carter whispered when he peered for the first time into King Tut’s tomb, “wonderful.” With all due respect to a brilliant teacher, Feynman’s world of particles taking every possible path is an effortful, indeed “exhausting” picture of reality. 10 The retrocausal alternative offered by Yakir Aharonov, John Cramer, Huw Price, and others seems much more elegant, not to mention less wasteful of God’s effort. The path of light is the fastest possible simply because the destination has exerted its own backward influence—pulling the light ray taut , you might say. What looked like the “capricious” randomness of identical particles is really an inflection of particles’ behavior by their differing future histories. 11 The future may be an equal participant in determining the present moment.

  Again, it is not that measurement simply reveals something about already-existing reality that was hitherto unknown (the old-fashioned realist view) or that it causes some magical transition from waviness to definitiveness, helping the universe make up its mind, or even bringing it wholly into being. Rather, the measurement is partly responsible for shaping the particle’s previous history. A particle’s behavior is unpredictable, “uncertain,” before it is measured because the experimenter’s measurement will turn out to have been the missing piece of the puzzle of the particle’s behavior in the first place. Not only is it teleological; it makes the behavior of matter on a fundamental level tautological —time-looping.

  If the retrocausal interpretation does prevail, quantum physics may one day come to be characterized as a set of rules governing what can be known, when, and with what degree of certainty within a physical world that is already shaped by our present interpretations—a kind of hermeneutic engagement with the material past that is perpetually constructive of that past. The “entanglements of matter and meaning” 12 described by Karen Barad in her work may turn out to be the contours of space, time, and knowledge that constitute natural firewalls against paradox. In other words, forget “nonlocality”; what entanglement and its secret alter-ego uncertainty really reflect is the limits around the ability of intentional precognitive creatures to make meaning from noise prematurely . “Free will” may simply be what it feels like when fated beings make decisions under uncertainty, bounded by those firewalls.

  As Barad underscores, we cannot change an already-existing past—create a different timeline from the one we know. (How would we even know we had done so?) But there is so much we still don’t know or correctly understand about the past in the block universe we do inhabit that we can discover anew, at every moment, how our present choices were already included in and even actually shaped that past.

  The hermeneutic moment that seems to give rise to preceding dreams and symptoms in clinical contexts—at least in some very suggestive cases like Maggy Quarles van Ufford’s precognitive seduction of Jung or Herr P.’s “foresight/Forsyte” obsession—exactly mirrors what is being shown in physics laboratories, and thus suggests an interesting reframing of clinical causation to parallel the retrocausation paradigm in physics. When anomalies point toward new paradigms, those anomalies often become universal and expected features within the new worldview. Are the rare precognitive events caught inadvertently in the amber of clinical writing perhaps revealing a universal principle and not the exception? Again, could it be that neuroses, the secret saboteurs of happiness, might often be premonitory formations, back-acting echoes (or “prechoes”) of future realizations and epiphanies both traumatic and rewarding?

  The idea that the cure is the retroactive cause of the symptom and the interpretation the cause of the dream is not that far from what Jacques Lacan proposed already in the early 1950s. Lacan had departed from Freud’s resolutely past-centered way of picturing the psychoanalyt
ic project, emphasizing instead the performative dimension of human life—the ongoing making of meaning in speech and cultural interaction. The individual unconscious for Lacan was not some buried stratum whose contents sometimes pressed up, breaking the surface, like the ruins of Rome. It was part of an unfolding continuum resembling a Möbius strip, a geometrical object with a single surface. When you travel along it, you pass or overtake yourself before returning to your original starting point. Symptoms and dreams confronted in psychoanalysis reflect the traverse of this Möbius in time, and human life takes on a looping, self-overtaking character as a result. (In the 1960s, Lacan also became interested in the geometry of knots and objects like Klein bottles having a single surface, as models for what transpires in analysis.) And Lacan’s version of the “collective unconscious” was similarly both flat and looping: It was simply language , the Symbolic order, which precedes us and within which we struggle more or less successfully to find our place and our voice.

  With his flat ontology, Lacan saw that the apparent senselessness of a neurotic symptom or a bizarre dream is a real function of the fact that no meaning exists “in” it yet; its sense must emerge in lived acts of communication and interpretation. “What we see in the return of the repressed,” he wrote, “is the effaced signal of something which only takes on its value in the future, through its symbolic realization, its integration into the history of the subject.” 13 Once again, meaning must arrive —and that arrival will be seen to have had a decisive impact on what went before.