Meaning is the value of information, in other words, and it is what we as humans constantly create and recreate as part of our social and cultural experience.50 Rather than hovering over and above us, animating us, or exerting its own transpersonal causal (or, in Jung’s paradoxical formulation, “acausal”) force, meaning is constantly fashioned and

we genuinely think across the fourth dimension

causation is, when it comes right down to it, synonymous with computation

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

J. B. Priestley, in a 1964 book on precognition and related questions called Man & Time, acknowledges that we cannot help but be biased in one direction or the other: “either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we

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

Israeli physicist named Yakir Aharonov basically agreed with Einstein about God not playing dice, and he proposed that the future is the hidden variable underlying quantum strangeness. Individual particles, such as those photons passing through the slits of the double-slit experiment, are actually influenced by what will happen to them next (i.e.,

Knowledge evolves by the spreading of metaphors and the (mis)application of new concepts to different, seemingly unrelated questions—a healthy epistemic ecosystem depends on cross-fertilization, play, and error. The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called it bricolage

Information from our future somehow appears able to exert an influence over our behavior, albeit usually in oblique, non-obvious ways. That it so often seems to operate outside of conscious awareness suggests that precognition may be a very primitive, basic guidance system, one that could be shared widely in the animal kingdom.