Time Loops

What we are talking about here instead is an inflection of ordinary particles’ observable behavior by something ordinarily unobservable: measurements—that is, interactions—that lie ahead in those particles’ future histories.

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.,

the wonderful precognition movie Arrival

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.

The time-symmetric, retrocausal framework advanced by Aharonov and his colleagues is sometimes called the two-state vector formalism

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, eithe

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.

Fundamentally, precognition seems to be not seeing or knowing or even feeling the future; rather, it seems to be a matter of producing a behavior that is tied to a forthcoming reward.

Rather than imagine hard-to-define consciousness or invisible morphic fields driving the emergence of life, a simpler answer is liable to come from retrocausation, the ability of future states of systems to influence prior states.

We precognize our highly biased hindsight, taking us deep into a kind of recursive or fractal, M. C. Escher territory.