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.

This after-the-fact selection of some of the light to measure again is known in these experiments as post-selection—a key concept that we will be returning to throughout the remainder of this book.

need to include the putty-like malleability of memory, and the ability of the imagination to put vivid visual-sensory flesh on the bare bones of passing thoughts or things we read, within our account of precognition and how it might operate. In fact, it would help make sense of the characteristic obliquity of precognition.

There are good evolutionary reasons why strong emotion might play an important role in precognition (or James Carpenter’s “first sight”): It needs to orient us to new information relevant to our survival so that we can update our knowledge about the world in a fruitful way.

Although precognition often surfaces to awareness in the context of stress and trauma, even death in many cases, I will argue that it really orients us ultimately to life, and to a renewed, intensified awareness of being alive.

Meaning, while often confused with information, really refers to the value of a piece of information to some agent (conscious or not) who can use it to convey a message or otherwise effect some change.

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 take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.

precognition may actually be intrinsic to what we think of as intelligence.