Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  16 Braude, 1997, 239.

  17 Ibid., 241.

  18 Ibid., 243.

  19 See Dossey, 2009.

  20 Kripal, 2014, 366. W. Somerset Maugham’s short 1933 tale “An Appointment in Samarra” (allegedly based on an old Mesopotamian legend) is a famous example of the same ironic logic: A terrified servant borrows his master’s horse to flee to another town, Samarra, after encountering Death, who gestures threateningly at him in the local Baghdad bazaar. Later, the master goes to the bazaar himself, sees Death, and asks why he made a threatening gesture to his servant. Death replies: “That was not a threatening gesture … it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra” (quoted in Žižek, 1989, 58).

  21 See, e.g., Dossey, 2009; Feather & Schmicker, 2005; Rhine, 1961.

  22 Rhine, 1961.

  23 See for instance Dossey, 2009; Marwaha & May, 2016; Targ, 2004.

  24 Feather & Schmicker, 2005.

  25 Braude, 1997. See also Eisenbud, 1982, who makes a similar argument.

  26 Also, appealing to possible, alterable futures ultimately forecloses any possibility of studying precognition scientifically. As long as you can say of a putative precognitive dream that doesn’t come true that, “well, it was a possibility that didn’t come to pass,” then you really are beyond the pale of science. By that reasoning, any random thought could be precognition of an alternative future.

  27 Braude, 1997; Carpenter, 2012; Radin, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2018.

  28 Eisenbud, 1982.

  29 See e.g., May, 2015.

  30 The psychoanalyst and parapsychologist Jule Eisenbud, who was generally open to PK as an explanation and even favored it over retrocausation, keenly noted that if our unconscious wishes were really that powerful, none of us would have survived our childhoods (Eisenbud, 1982).

  31 In term’s of Sonali Bhatt Marwaha and Edwin May’s “multiphasic theory” (Marwaha & May, 2015), this would put the “physics domain” fully within the “neuroscience domain,” rather than retaining them as separate and distinct. As I will describe later, the new field of quantum biology is raising many exciting possibilities in this regard.

  32 The possibility that mind or some aspect of it exists independently of the body is part of most religious traditions, and it has obvious appeal. If consciousness can fly free of the body, for instance while asleep, it raises the possibility that it might survive the death of the body too. Survival of bodily death is the ultimate hope that arguably biases everyone in one way or another, whatever their stated philosophical or scientific position, yet science may never be able to address that question. Whatever the ultimate fate of Dunne’s consciousness after his death, I argue that his dream experiences were tied to his lived, embodied experience. (For a discussion of the spiritual uses readers found for Dunne’s ideas, see White, 2018).

  33 Feinberg, 1975.

  34 Jon Taylor (Taylor, 2007, 2014) also makes this argument.

  35 See, e.g., Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977); Warcollier, 2001(1948).

  36 Feinberg, 1975. Admittedly, it would be hard to prove this is universally true: How would the individual ever know if they had precognized something after their death? This is of course to leave aside speculations about obtaining precognitive information from one’s spirit in the afterlife; I am also leaving aside the question of historical prophets like Nostradamus, who are claimed to have foretold events occurring long after their deaths. Many such “prophecies” are too ambiguous to really evaluate and their provenance is too uncertain.

  37 It is precisely such tracers that could be used to test the “precognition-only” hypothesis for ESP—that is, manipulating feedback in telepathy or remote viewing experiments by adding fictitious details to a target or omitting salient details (Feinberg, 1975). Other than studies simply controlling the presence/absence or intensity of feedback (e.g., May et al., 1996), I am not aware of studies that have actively deceived participants about “what it was” they were viewing, which could be used to identify the information channel operative.

  38 Takeuchi et al., 2014.

  39 See Carington, 1946; Carpenter, 2012.

  40 Carpenter, 2012.

  41 Wargo, 2015e.

  42 Llewellyn, 2013.

  43 Dunne, 1952(1927); Kripal, 2010; See also Carpenter, 2012; Taylor, 2014.

  44 Foer, 2011; Yates, 1996(1966).

  45 Llewellyn, 2013; Wargo, 2010.

  46 Wargo, 2016c. Like time slips, some ghost encounters could involve precognizing subsequent exposure to an interesting/unsettling story about an event such as a violent death that occurred in a specific location.

  47 Buonomano, 2017.

  48 Ramachandran et al., 2016; see also Buonomano, 2017.

  49 Loftus et al., 1995.

  50 Taylor, 2007, 2014.

  51 Loftus et al., 1995.

  52 Buonomano, 2017, 172.

  53 Silberer, 1959(1909); Mavromatis, 1987.

  54 Friedman et al., 1990.

  55 Echeverria et al., 1991.

  56 Dobyns, 2006, 276. Dobyns does not favor the block-universe interpretation, however; he argues that retrocausation can be accommodated within a more open-ended view of future (and even past) history.

  6. Destination: Pong (or, How to Build a QuantumTM Future Detector)

  1 Kaiser, 2011, 99.

  2 Levi-Strauss, 1966.

  3 Barad, 2007. For highly readable descriptions of the double slit and other basic experiments in quantum physics, see also Herbert, 1985.

  4 Barad, 2007. As Barad describes, the weirdness even goes deeper: The experimenter does not actually have to collect the “which path” information—just the physical possibility of doing so is enough to change the behavior of the particles being measured. It suggests a complex entanglement between the “agencies of observation” and the object being observed (the photon).

  5 See Herbert, 1985.

  6 Barad, 2007.

  7 See Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2011; Stapp, 2011.

  8 Barad, 2007.

  9 Herbert, 1985; Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2011; Stapp, 2011.

  10 Barad, 2007; Zurek, 2009.

  11 Sheehan, 2015.

  12 See Price, 1996.

  13 Cramer, 2006; Price, 1996.

  14 Quoted in Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2011, 212-213.

  15 Price, 1996, 2012; Price & Wharton, 2015, 2016; see also McRae, 2017.

  16 Price & Wharton, 2015, 2016.

  17 Price & Wharton, 2016.

  18 Dixon et al., 2009. A hundredfold amplification may sound like a lot, but it was an extremely tiny deflection of the mirror—a few hundred quadrillionths of a radian.

  19 The retrocausal implications of the Dixon et al. (2009) experiment are discussed in Merali, 2010, and Popescu, 2009.

  20 Musser, 2014.

  21 Stapp, 2011.

  22 Feynman, 1985; Gleick, 1993.

  23 Aharonov et al., 2017.

  24 Price, 1996.

  25 Aharonov & Tollaksen, 2007, 3.

  26 Merali, 2010; see also Shoup, 2015.

  27 Barad, 2007.

  28 Scully et al., 1991; Barad, 2007.

  29 Barad, 2007, 315.

  30 Barad does not privilege any particular “human” locus as a decisive part of “spacetimemattering”—she sees her project as radically post-humanist in the tradition of feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway. She could be contrasted with political scientist Alexander Wendt, who applies the popular consciousness-centric interpretation of quantum mechanics to social theory in his book Quantum Mind and Social Science (Wendt, 2015).

  31 Price & Wharton, 2015, 7.

  32 Price, 1996; Price & Wharton, 2015. Many have pointed out that randomness or “quantum uncertainty” cannot offer anything like free will. It’s just that mainstream interpretations of quantum physics do not appear to foreclose it with the same finality that the block universe does. In the block universe, as York H. Dobyns puts it, “all of space and time must take on the i
mmutability of the past” (Dobyns, 2006, 274).

  33 See for instance Aharonov et al, 2015; Merali, 2010.

  34 Becker, 2018.

  35 Ball, 2017; Chiribella et al., 2009; Castro-Ruiz et al., 2018; Oreshkov et al., 2012; Rubino et al., 2017.

  36 Vedral, 2018.

  37 Palus, 2017.

  38 Gleick, 2012.

  39 Barad, 2007.

  40 Lloyd, 2006.

  41 Gleick, 2012.

  42 Lloyd, 2006.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Gleick, 2012.

  45 On the interesting question of whether the user of information, the meaning-maker, needs to be conscious (or in any way human-like), see Barad, 2007.

  46 Kaiser, 2011.

  47 Remember what I said though about a healthy knowledge ecosystem de pending on error. While the natural excitement of hippie physicists to maybe use entanglement for faster-than-light communication proved a pipe dream, their work and their mistakes directly paved the way for some incredibly exciting technical applications that are only recently coming to fruition. One is quantum cryptography : Entanglement can work like a wax seal on a regular, slower-than-light message, revealing a third party’s effort to read the message (Ibid.).

  48 Barad, 2007. This was demonstrated in “which-path” versions of the double-slit experiment. In 1979, two physicists at the University of Texas at Austin, William Wootters and Wojciech Zurek, found that the interference pattern on the screen was not too badly washed out even when there was near-certain (but not completely certain) information about which slit each photon had traversed.

  49 Kaiser, 2011.

  50 See Moldoveanu, 2010.

  51 Tamblyn, 2017.

  52 Lloyd et al., 2010. For an explanation of Lloyd’s proposal, see Moldoveanu, 2010; Zyga, 2010, 2011.

  53 Moldoveanu, 2010.

  54 Lloyd et al., 2011, 3.

  55 Lloyd’s is only one among several proposals for creating closed timelike curves; see Moldoveanu, 2010, for discussion.

  56 Zyga, 2015.

  57 Asmundsson, 2017.

  58 Moskvitch, 2018.

  59 Ball, 2017; Chiribella et al., 2009; Castro-Ruiz et al., 2018; Oreshkov et al., 2012; Rubino et al., 2017.

  60 Procopio et al., 2015.

  7. A New Era of Hyperthought—From Precognitive Bacteria to Our Tesseract Brain

  1 L’Engle, 2007(1962). Mrs. Who and her strange companions Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Which are clearly descendants of Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” from Macbeth (see Chapter 9), as well as being a clear inspiration for the Time Lords in Doctor Who , which debuted on the BBC the year after L’Engle’s story was published.

  2 See White, 2018.

  3 Hinton, 1888, 99.

  4 Ibid., 49.

  5 See, e.g., Dunne, 1955, 70.

  6 More recently, MIT physicist Jeremy England has argued that entropy inevitably produces lifelike physical properties, and thus life itself in many cases—a radically counterintuitive idea (see Wolchover, 2014).

  7 Jantsch, 1980.

  8 See Davies, 2013; Walker & Davies, 2017.

  9 Bergson, 1944(1907).

  10 Koestler, 1972. Kammerer’s seriality influenced Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity, which represented an attempt to supplement physical causation with meaning as the glue connecting events (see Chapter 11).

  11 Sheldrake, 2009.

  12 See Dunne & Jahn, 2017.

  13 Sheldrake, 2012. The term “promissory materialism” was originally used in this context by the philosopher of science Karl Popper.

  14 Di Corpo & Vannini, 2015.

  15 Philosophy Bites , 2012.

  16 Davies, 2004.

  17 McFadden & Al-Khalili, 2014.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Quantum computing theorist Seth Lloyd and others are examining how to use the natural quantum tunneling properties of viruses to design an efficient energy-transport system that could lead to more efficient and cheaper solar cells (Chandler, 2015).

  20 See also Sheehan (2015), who speculates on the possibility of living systems peering into their future by subverting the second law of thermodynamics.

  21 For example: If a move to the left sends an “I survived” message back a fraction of a second in time, for example by causing some detectable perturbation or deviation in one group of measured particles, whereas a move to the right causes no such a deviation, and if the organism is wired to automatically favor the option with the deviation, then this system—multiple precognitive circuits or time eyes linked together to guide behavior—will tend to produce “the correct answer” at a greater than statistically random frequency. The time eye could thus also be called a right-answer detector .

  22 Craddock et al., 2012.

  23 Volk, 2018.

  24 Hameroff, 1998.

  25 Craddock et al., 2014.

  26 Margulis, 2001.

  27 Margulis, 1999; Margulis & Sagan, 1986.

  28 Jantsch, 1980.

  29 Ramón y Cajal, 1989, 363.

  30 NPR , 2013.

  31 Kelly et al., 2010.

  32 Sheldrake, 2012.

  33 Grosso, 2015; Kripal, 2017.

  34 Kripal, 2017.

  35 Kastrup, 2015; Kelly et al., 2010.

  36 The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for instance, sees the question of consciousness as the mysterious Real of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, a kind of spectral presence that returns or persists precisely to the extent that reductive materialist neuroscience tries to exclude or marginalize it (Žižek, 2006b). More comfortable with the philosophical idiom of “subjectivity,” Žižek has advanced an ontology that has come to be called “transcendental materialism,” in which subjectivity emerges from fundamental instabilities in the material world (which he argues is really insubstantial, per mainstream quantum physics), but is not reducible to the latter (Žižek, 2013).

  37 Atmanspacher et al., 2004.

  38 Brainerd et al., 2013.

  39 Wendt, 2015.

  40 Penrose, 1994.

  41 Hameroff & Penrose, 2014.

  42 Physicist Henry Stapp (Stapp, 2011, 2015) has also focused on these cellular pores as the sites where consciousness takes charge of the brain. He does not view consciousness as a product of brain quantum processes but as a kind of “experimenter,” steering the brain’s activity by making observations (i.e., measurements) of the quantum behavior of calcium ions traveling through ion channels.

  43 Walker, 1970; see also Hansen, 2001; Walker, 2000.

  44 In their survey of the emerging field of quantum biology, Life on the Edge , Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili (McFadden & Al-Khalili, 2014) pro pose that the answer to quantum consciousness may lie with the brain’s electromagnetic field. That field may couple to quantum-coherent (entangled) ions moving through ion channels and thereby synchronize them, enabling the “binding” of multiple cortical processes.

  45 Chalmers, 1995.

  46 Dent, 2017.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Adamatzky, 2017.

  49 My “time eye” should thus not be confused with the “psychic retina” proposed by Edwin May and Joseph G. Depp (May & Depp, 2015), which would be a receiver of information traveling to the brain from external future events.

  50 Feinberg, 1975.

  51 Taylor, 2007, 2014.

  52 This suggests some role for subcortical circuits that handle learning from rewarding experiences and the formation of habits based on them. It is another reason why conditioning processes like those described by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow may be important for understanding our ability to “post-select” on future rewards.

  53 Wargo, 2016a.

  54 McFadden & Al-Khalili, 2014.

  55 A physicist named Matthew Fisher, for instance, has discovered that phosphorus atoms bound in clusters around calcium ions (called “Posner clusters”) may retain their coherence, even in the brain, for hours or days at a time; he proposes that the spin of these phosphorus atoms may serve as qubits in the brain’s quantum c
omputer (Fisher, 2015; Ouellette, 2016).

  56 Andreae & Burrone, 2018.

  57 Although I am proposing a different mechanism based on post-selection, the idea that precognition focuses on rewards is not that different from how precognition is explained in the “syntropy” theory of di Corpo and Vannini (2015). They suggest that in humans and other sentient organisms, emotion acts as a signal current from future attractors: Love is a signal of being on a harmonious, life-conducive path, whereas anxiety signals deviation from it. Thought, by the same token, reflects signals from the past, based on learning and experience. See also Taylor, 2014.

  58 For a summary of Libet’s discoveries, see Libet, 2004.

  59 Ibid.

  60 Wegner, 2002.

  61 Ramachandran, 2011.

  62 Clark, 2016.

  63 Wolf, 1989, 1998. See also Penrose, 1994; Wendt, 2015. Physicist Henry Stapp (Stapp, 2015) has proposed that Libet’s findings reflect consciousness collapsing the wavefunction of readiness potentials in the nervous system, thereby giving the illusion that action precedes consciousness rather than vice versa.

  64 Buonomano, 2017.

  65 See e.g., Dossey, 2013; Dunne, 1952(1927); Targ, 2004.

  66 See Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017.

  67 Deary et al., 2012.

  68 Bem, 2011.

  69 Costa de Beauregard, 1975, 92.

  70 Dean Buonomano’s Your Brain Is a Time Machine (Buonomano, 2017) is a good summary of the topic.

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

  1 Douglas, 1966.

  2 George Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal (Hansen, 2001) is a comprehensive study of the liminal nature of paranormal and parapsychological topics and the taboos that surround them.

  3 Jones, 1955, 14.

  4 Rudnytsky, 1987, 6.

  5 Anzieu, 1986.

  6 Freud, 1965(1899).

  7 1899 was also the year Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published, although “A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled” was not included in that text. It has been appended to some later editions.

  8 Freud, 1974(1899), 49.

  9 Ibid., 50.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid., 49. Frau B.’s acceptance of her doctor’s account seems to reflect the same kind of deference to (usually male) authority that has often allowed skeptical reframings of anomalous experience to prevail without challenge. She may have either altered her own beliefs about the matter, or just kept silent about them—there is no way to know.