Time Loops by Eric Wargo
Consider Mark Twain's prophetic dream of his brother's death.[i] Notice the dream is, more precisely, of Twain's own experience of his brother's death: his attendance of the corpse at the Memphis Exchange, down to details of the casket (metal, propped on two chairs), the brother's dress (a suit lent from Twain), and a bouquet of roses placed on the chest.
If precog is of my own future experiences, then it's a local phenomenon. My mind need not astral travel to the target event, nor telepathically receive thru the ether; it need simply peek ahead to its own mundane learning of the event, keeping to my head.
Credit for this key insight goes to J.W. Dunne, who found "tracers" in his precog dreams—misrepresentations of the objective future that he forensically traced to his own future misreadings of those events.[ii] If you dream of 4000 dead in a volcanic eruption, when the fact is that 40,000 die—and if you wake to misread the news as 4000 DEAD IN VOLCANIC ERUPTION (or, you correctly read a misprinted headline), you've precognized your imperfect learning of the calamity; you didn't clairvoy that calamity itself.
The precognitive brain would be somewhat time-symmetric, reaching into our past via memory, and to our future via "premory". My memory of groping for glasses in my handbag is the effect of that groping; similarly, my premory of a book cover I'm about to notice in an airport bookstall is an effect of that future noticing. A key asymmetry is that my memory doesn't reach back to affect the experience remembered, yet my premory can affect the premoried experience. Indeed the premory could be causally necessary for that experience: one reason my eyes dwell on the airport book is it's oddly familiar, so I'm curious—even if my premory was but a subconscious flash, like the millisecond primers deployed in Psych labs.
I precognize the book because I'll look at it, and I'll look at it because I precognized it—this is the "Loop" in Time Loops, the timey-wimey, weird & winding heart of precog which Wargo concedes might have some readers getting off his train early. Yet a causal tautology is no impossible contradiction, and Nature may not conform to our linear expectations.
The Physics may allow it
Precognition involves retro-causation: future info affecting the present self. But given the Minkowski Block Universe, given time-symmetric interpretations of quantum mechanics, retro-causation isn't alien to Physics, and has some intriguing evidence. A 2009 experiment by John Howell at the University of Rochester suggests that the measurement of light affects its history: photons aimed at a floating mirror displace the mirror more if measured after the deflection. Accumulating experiments like this may be vindicating Einstein's famous repudiation of intrinsic uncertainty:
What seemed for all the world like randomness—blind chance—may really be the previously unseen influence of particles’ future histories on their present behavior. Retrocausation, in other words.
"Hidden variable" interpretations of quantum weirdness have long hung around as minority alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wargo wonders, following physicist Yakir Aharonov and others, if the hidden variable, the big X in all the quantum weirdness, may be the future.
Precog, a useful adaptation
To align precog with Biology, first note it would be useful to the organism. If physics allows info to flow from the future, then life may have eked an adaptation to exploit this.
Quantum Biology was speculative some decades ago, but now it's a sub-field. Just as photons find the shortest route to their destination (Fermat's Principle), in photosynthetic quantum tunneling, electrons find the shortest route thru the cytoplasm to the reaction center of the plant. For each case, one might explain the particle's efficient pathmaking via quantum superposition: in a wave-like state, the quantum explores many paths at once, so discovers the most efficient path. Yet is this more, or less, parsimonious than a retro-causal take, where the particle's path is "partly determined by the reaction at its destination"?
Howell's Rochester set-up could be modified into a future detector, notices Wargo: by tying some real-world outcome to the second measurement—a jump in Apple stock, say—we could prognosticate, at the time of the first measurement, that the jump is coming. Granted, photons are a bad practical choice of measured target: too fast to give us "any useful temporal window" between the first and second measurements. Yet if a future detector can be lab-made, it's not implausible that life already found a way.
The brain's "time eye" could be like the visual eye—our "space eye"—which measures incoming light twice: once at the pupil pinhole, where most incoming light is deselected, then at the retina which receives the constrained beam. This double measuring, a filtering then receiving, allows a structured representation of the external world. (All structure, all statuary, requires carving.) Of course, the time eye would be weirder: its "first" selection, the filtering selection, is the "post-selection" ahead in time, allowing constrained, meaningful info to reflux back to the present.
As in the Howell-style future-scope, neural post-selection would be triggered by some vital real-world event, giving the organism an orienting advantage. Prime among such events would be the organism's survival: a message from the future is
one that necessarily indicates a course of action that survived long enough to send that message back—like a little breadcrumb trail from the organism’s future self, or a note at a crossroads weirdly in its own handwriting, saying “come this way.”
The more primitive time eyes might operate beneath awareness and take peeks only millisecs ahead to help coordinate our perceptions with each other—laggy pain with speedy vision, for example—and with the external world. We'd experience such tight presentiment not as numinous peeks beyond the present, but as a natural and continuous synching with the present.[iii]
If the brain really is a quantum future detector—or perhaps, trillions of quantum future detectors networked classically—then effective motor action might be initiated partly from a position displaced slightly ahead in an organism’s timeline, when the success of the action is already confirmed. Such a model would offer another way of thinking about skillful performance in sports or martial arts, for example, not to mention intuition, creative insight, and inspiration.
The Psi literature often magically invokes "quantum entanglement" to explain telepathy and clairvoyance, but Wargo notes that entanglement does not seem to operate at the scale of brains and bodies, of envelopes and Zener cards. Yet it might operate in the microstructures of a single brain. Neuronal microtubules may not solve the hard problem of consciousness, but are a promising locus of cellular quantum computation, of shaping axon terminals and dendrites so that "signaling at synapses may be potentiated or enhanced if they are going to be signaling in the future (and vice versa if they won’t be)."
Yes, Wargo's links between physics, biology, and psychology are often hand-wavy, but that's fine when the waver acknowledges the hand-waving, like Scott's "epistemic status" warnings at the top of some ACX posts. When groping thru the dark we need to wave a bit, and sometimes hand-waving is "saying hello to a future the rest of us cannot yet see."
The Parapsychology
The famous/infamous Daryl Bem experiments in presentiment, summed in his 2011 paper "Feeling the Future", forced the Choice in academic Psychology: either the discipline's experimental standards are low, or presentiment is real. Psychology largely chose the former, initiating its "replication crisis."
Wargo argues that Bem's experiments are sound, and notes they've been replicated in many labs.[iv] Indeed the Psych lab, Wargo contends, has yielded much evidence for psychic ability—of high significance, low effect, typically—including decades of work at the Duke University Center for Parapsychology (the place that gave us the terms parapsychology and ESP), and the Stanford Research Institute's Pentagon-funded explorations of "remote viewing", or clairvoyance.
He notes, however, that no transmission of info or energy between telepaths, or between a clairvoyant and the remotely viewed target, has ever been discerned. Also, psychic effectiveness does not diminish with distance, or when subjects are bound within a Faraday cage. Yet if telepathy & clairvoyance are actually precognition, and what is precognized is the precognizer's own future experiences, then no psychic waves should be found emanating beyond the relevant skull.
Crucial for Wargo's reduction of Psi's varia to precog is that Psi subjects typically receive some kind of feedback on their attempts: minimally, they are rewarded with the confirmation that they had a psychic hit. Apparent telepathy could thus "merely" be the psychic precognizing their future reward: their learning the answer, thus also learning they're successful, special—the sort of meaningful experience the mind might orient toward.
When merely linguistic feedback is given for "remote viewings" of hidden drawings, the hits seem based on the idea of the target drawing, rather than the specific drawing. That is, when the Answer Booklet of the Future consists of generalized abstract descriptions of the target drawings ("a hand"), the psychics' sketched hands are in various poses & angles bearing little compositional correlation to the target image. In contrast, when the feedback is visually richer—in some SRI experiments, psi subjects were taken to the target location after they'd completed their remote drawings—the drawings were based on "sketchy visual impressions during the task, with no sense of the meaning or identity of the object / location." Thus their drawings showed a greater graphic match, though still "sketchy".
These discrepancies in the participants' hits seem like Dunne's tracers: they may indicate premories of a future learning experience with the target.
Sort of Foreseen
To simply sum the inter-Science links: quantum physics may be retro-causal, and the Brain may compute quantumly. Ergo the brain may have retro-causal ability. The brain may be a 4D tesseract that reaches into its past and future to guide the organism's present behavior. Foreseen rewarding experiences could orient the organism toward those experiences, if only the bittersweet reward of confirming "but I survived" a foreseen disaster.
Well, sort of foreseen: we typically don't realize we foresaw till the foreseen event happens, if ever. For one, a precog dream, like all dreams, is occluded in puns, symbols, and other associations. Second, precog is graphically rendered from our existent mental furniture, in a bricolage of memory's bits: a dream may dramatize a coming car crash by splicing in your inner stock of car crash images. Third, premory lacks the rich context of memory, so is rarely recognized as premory. My mental flash of riding a red tricycle around my old hood is accepted as memory, even if I don't remember that tricycle. But a flash of bicycling thru Beijing is anomalous if I've not yet been to Beijing, so I dismiss it as imaginative noise.
Some occlusion is required, logically: we can't receive info from the future in a form that would preclude that future from happening. The precognition can't motivate the precognizer to avoid that event, thus never precognize it.
Yes, there's this tension in Wargo's account: precognition is naturally selected because it gives the organism valuable info, yet that info must be so hidden that we only recognize it, if ever, once the precognized event has transpired. For the millisecond-scale synching of the nervous system & environment, the precog need not be recognized as precog to be useful. But for longer-term precog, like young Nabokov's dream, in 1916, of his fortune restored in 1959, the biophysics is much hand-wavier, and the value of the dream harder to discern. Perhaps the dream gives Nabokov hope through the decades, it feeds his writerly ambition, thus helps to fulfill the prophecy? The fortune is in fact returned to him with the sale of Lolita's film rights to Harris-Kubrick Pictures, so needed him to work for it.
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.
Yet why would that dream in particular motivate Nabokov, above all the noisy polyphony of dreamlife? Perhaps their loopiness endows prophetic dreams with an aura that impresses us, even when we don't know they're prophetic. They are eerie, bearing from our future the confidence of confirmed fulfilment. Nabokov's dream comes from 1959, so "already" knows his fortune is restored. His dream-uncle, who speaks the good news in 1916, has an epistemic authority Nabokov can't quite dismiss in his day life.
Precog & Psychoanalysis
Wargo is indebted to psychoanalysis for its systematic study of dreams, for its serious attempt to discern the dream's meaning for the dreamer. The Freudian recognition that this meaning comes coded in associational logic is central to Wargo's own reading of precog dreams.
Yet Freud, with his focus on the patient's history as the storehouse of meaning, and Jung, with his atemporal amnion of the Collective Unconscious, have each overlooked the Future.
Freud
In 1895, Freud dreams the central dream of The Interpretation of Dreams, a dream that yields, under his analysis, a key to all dreams. The dream centers on his impromptu oral examination of "Irma" (his pseudonym for Anna Hammerschlag, a friend and recent patient), which Freud interprets as deflection of his anxieties around his professional treatment of her. (To rather simplify.)
Wargo argues that the dream makes more sense as precog of Freud's brutal battle with mouth cancer, diagnosed in 1923. The dream's leucous inner cheek, the scabbing, the glimpse of turbinal bone through the removed palate—these all match Freud's own clinical presentation as the cancer works its way into his head. In 1895, Freud transposes his premonitions of the 1923 medical trauma onto dream-Anna. Anxieties in the dream about a dirty syringe used on dream-Anna implicate his toxic cigar habit, which he'd long been warned about. The grim medical proclamation that "It's really only your fault", spoke by the dreamer to dream-Anna, "was really a kind of self-reproach", says Wargo.
Freud is thus a tragical Oedipus, who misreads a prophecy by not recognizing it as prophecy. Indeed he misreads prophecy more generally by ignoring the precognitive in his theory of dreams. His Irma/Anna dream carries anxieties over mistreatment of a patient; was this premonition of his feelings after the 1923 diagnosis, when he'd surely have realized, Wargo says, that Psychoanalysis had misled us all about the content of dreams?
Jung
A patient describes last night's dream, in which she receives a golden scarab beetle, an exquisite jewellery piece. As she narrates, Jung hears a tapping behind: it's a shiny green-gold beetle, a Euro relation of the Egyptian one, butting at the window. Jung opens the window, cups the creature in his hand, and brings it to her: "Here's your scarab" he pronounces.
The moment is a breakthrough in the patient's treatment, eroding her resistance to the non-rational, and pivotal in Jung's career, the central "specimen" of his synchronicity theory and confirmation of his status as therapeutic shaman.
Here we find three conjoined events: [i] her dream of the scarab; [ii] her describing it in therapy, synchronous with [iii] the beetle's arrival at Jung's window. Yet a beetle or something else of archetypal affinity is bound to knock at Jung's window now and then. That she dreamt it, and was narrating just as it knocked, can be explained through precog: her dream anticipated the beetle's arrival, as did her narration, which she subconsiously timed to coincide with that arrival. The convergence is loopy-weird, but nothing so mysterious as synchronicity: it's "merely" precog taking advantage of the beetle's tapping.
In general, when a putative synchronicity consists of a psychological datum plus its later reiteration in the external world, precog may be a simpler explanation than synchronicity, since it requires only the precognizer's brain and the external event, not the vague ontology of the Jungian collective unconsciousness & archetypes.
Imagine that you dream of your childhood pal Danny, and the next day he phones you just as you're passing a pedestrian in a t-shirt with Kubrick's The Shining on it, showing Danny Torrance wide-eyed at the horror. The last time you'd seen friend-Danny was in a basement sleepover where you sneak-viewed a Pay TV feed of The Shining. You're stopped in your tracks, astounded.
Let's say you then notice you're at Main Street & Danny Place.
Wargo's theory neatly explains why you dreamt of Danny: you were precognizing the astounding multi-Danny conjunction to come. If you live-report to friend-Danny this prodigy when he phones, you're provided him rewarding feedback (an astounding story, featuring him), thus you've drawn him to call you on a hunch & so enable the numinous loop.
We've yet to explain the two "exterior" Dannys: the Danny t-shirt and Danny Place. Assumedly the passing bloke in the t-shirt never gets feedback on his role in this, nor does the city planner who named the intersection; hence these are "exterior" Dannys, their conjunction without precognitive cause. They're perhaps just one of those cool coincidences bound to happen now & then, which you & friend-Danny take precog advantage of. They require nothing Psi, just the Law of Large Numbers, with some Selective Perception thrown in to seal it.
Yet at some point in the accumulating conjunction (or rhythmic iterating) of exterior Dannys, we'd rightly resist a skeptical reduction, wonder about the weird Remainder. Urgent messaging from the Prophet Daniel? A personalized Design Argument, the Sim Lord (or its Hackers) evincing their System mastery? Incursions of Monism into worldly multiplicity, maybe: a syntax of simultaneity, what a Vedantic god sounds like when narrating via spacetime. Instead of x happens, then y happens, then z happens, we get several x's happening without apparent causal link between them.
Jung's "vague acausal fog of synchronicity" doesn't really explain, says Wargo. An acausal phenomenon would be, by that description, beyond science. Yet how acausal need a synchronicity be? Events aligned by linked affinities may be like iron filings in a magnetic field: the field is the cause, the aligning the effect. If synchronicities are archetypes imprinting on our experience, we can ask about the mechanism of the imprinting. If synchronicities are messaging from higher Entities, we can ask about the power source, wires, & amplifiers. Granted, these fields & mechanisms may take us further from our current Physics than the extensions Wargo asks of us; I realize I'm hand-waving way more than he does!
While I'm at it, consider an extended precog model, where the world itself is the Mind, messaging itself across time. Wargo may be right that the future is the big X in our quantum anomalies; yet Mind of the future may transcend our individual brain's presponsive quantum circuits, extending into our environment. When it post-selects and reaches back, it may organize our world in ways which make the external seem mental, the curious aligning of inner & outer worlds typical of Jungian synchs.
Such a megabrain could presumably fire only so far back as the presponsive "wires" were hung, whatever those wires be made of. If they're the actual wires of Tech Civ, then such environmental precog would be no older than the City. If those wires extend into the Biosphere, then perhaps the signs & portents discerned in the flockwide co-motions of bird were precognitions, yet not constrained to the 4D brain of the human auspex.
True or Not, Worth a Read
Time Loops is well worth a read even if you remain unconvinced of precog, skeptical of the psi research & anecdotes. You may yet read it as a fascinating Conditional: if there were precognition, this is how it might happen.
Wargo's take, if false, is neat Sci Fi!
If you're intrigued by the evidence for psi, you might begin exploring for yourself. Wargo believes our dreams are teeming with precog content, but it needs decoding. Record your dreams on waking and immediately free-associate with the key elements—to get it while it's fresh and to avoid biased free association toward later events. Check your notes an hour, a day, a year later for hits.
Restrain, of course, your hit-seeking with judicious use of the Skeptic's toolbox; yet stay open to the Weird.
[i]putatively prophetic, if we're neutral.
[ii] in An Experiment With Time, 1927
[iii] Indeed, Wargo wonders if predictive processing is partly funded by this short-range presentiment.
[iv] It seems they've often failed to replicate, too. See e.g. Kekecs et al, 2023: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.191375