Time Loops

How do you isolate the relevant causal factors behind any event, or any two events that seem to coincide? Any calculation depends on how you define an event, how you draw lines around pieces of data, how much weight you attach to which causal arrows, decisions that in the end must be arbitrary or guided by your particular interests and biases.

“The dreaming mind,” Dunne observed, “is a master-hand at tacking false interpretations on to everything it perceives.”

unlike memory for past experiences, we have no context for recognizing information from our future, let alone interpreting or evaluating it, and thus will seldom even notice its existence. We would also have little ability to directly search our memory for things future, the way we can rummage in our mental attic for information we know we acquired

The theory, briefly, is that precognition is not a matter of seeing or knowing objective events in some generalized future time but is the accessing of knowledge a person will acquire in his or her own future, often directly related to some rewarding or troubling learning experience ahead.

that idea—that information from the future “refluxes” to influence us in the present—is actually a very reasonable one, having increasing scientific support and plausibility.

The search for precognition in the physics of cause and effect as they apply to real occurrences like storms and plane crashes and fender benders “out in the world” is, I argue, to look in the wrong place.

trend away from describing natural phenomena in terms of causes and effects to instead describing them in terms of information and its transformations.

In her stunning 2007 meshing of critical theory, physics, and gender studies, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad revisited Bohr and his then-untestable Gedanken-experiments from the standpoint of recent developments in what she calls “experimental metaphysics”—the

If we routinely orient to rewards in our future, and do so unconsciously, then causal tautologies and self-fulfilling prophecies ought to be constant features in our lives, dime-a-dozen formations in the Minkowski block universe.

John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr, underscored that observation not only brings the world into being but actually shapes it—an idea known as the “participatory universe.”