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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.

we genuinely think across the fourth dimension

it is this basic observation—that precognition is about our personal experiences, not about other people’s experiences or events in objective reality—that made Dunne’s experiment with time so distinctive and valuable in moving us closer to an understanding of how precognition may actually work.

With retrocausation, we can no longer privilege the past, as though causation is only a matter of “pushing” (sometimes called efficient causation). The real mystery becomes why those efficient causes are so much more apparent and intuitively understood, and why influences propagating in reverse give us headaches to even think about.

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

everything made of matter, including brains, may bear the traces of their entanglements in both directions across time.

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.

tautologies are not the same thing as paradoxes.

the “past” and the “future” are iteratively reworked and enfolded through the iterative practices of spacetimemattering

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.