Time Concept Goes Wobbly

Time is like a fortress, unassailable, impregnable—until the experience of precognition makes the concept go wobbly. This is no problem for those who dogmatically deny that precognition is possible. But if it has happened to them (it has for me), they have problems denying it. Precognition is also the only paranormal phenomenon that resists explanation by the ever-handy super-psi explanation (discussed here); thus it’s difficult to explain away.

It’s easy to see why. We feel time as a moving front and therefore do not feel that the future exists, now, in any sense. The raw material of future events is already here, enduring along, as it were, but events are waiting for causation in that nebulous land of potential. Time is thus a necessary part of causation because cause-effect relationships are sequential. Therefore no one can pick up precise, complexly-related features of the future from presently existing minds—by telepathy, for instance—no matter how advanced the telepathic power might be. For this reason I’ve thought for quite a while now that precognition is a genuine hard pointer to some kind of transcendental reality. The really good cases totally resist explanation by naturalistic assumptions. In Einstein’s universe, by way of contrast, time is a function of space and space a function of time. You don’t get one without the other. Can we even think a future space?

Good (believable) cases of precognition therefore force us to question either our own understanding of time or our concept of free will. Let’s take the latter and see where it leads.

If we jettison free will, we are able at least to hypothesize that past, present, and future coexist. If that is true, the future is already present, we just don’t see it. Everything is fixed because everything happens deterministically—and therefore must be. No choice, no alternatives. The future then is totally predictable because it is produced deterministically. J.W. Dunne, one oft-cited thinker about this subject, suggested in the early editions of his An Experiment with Time that if we could move ourselves into the next dimension over, into a time above our time, we would be able to see our lives as a whole, from beginning to end, much as, from a high hill, we can see a whole train progressing east to west, say, on the plain below. Dunne believed in a serial time, a layered time. I came to realize that Dunne mustn’t have thought his example all the way through. Foolishly, perhaps, I did.

Yes. I made a real effort to picture the situation that Dunne described. And I realized that I wouldn’t see a body. I would see a very strange snake formed of endlessly many instances of my body. Let me explain. Take tonight. I would see myself as I was an hour ago (watching TV), as I am now (at the computer), as I will be in an hour (lying in bed). But I would also see my body rising from the chair, moving up the stairs, would see myself slightly advanced at every second, but still connected to the earlier versions, one for each of my slightest movements, each of which would still be there. I’d be a continuous snake. Indeed, the whole house would be filled with my body—up near the ceiling too, because once I painted the ceilings. This giant snake would grow smaller as I moved ever farther into the past and ultimately I would see myself emerging from my mother’s body. — Or, to change the example, the earth wouldn’t appear as a globe but, rather, as a solid ring of many, many earths, all overlaid, forming a ring around the sun. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be able to see anything because the light of the sun would still be there, the photons would also be present at every instant of time, and the brilliance would hide everything.

As you can see, “collapsing time” so that past, present, and future coexist produces some fairly serious problems in seeing anything—or anything clearly. Everything is jam-packed into a solid mass of bodies. Because I don’t live in this house alone—and every visitor is still here too—as are the bodies of the men who built it, the birds that flew through this space before there was a house, and the trees that grew here once are still here too. But I’ve said enough to make the point. The past remaining as it was, the future as it will be—so that it can be seen, if only we changed our perspective—is not a very plausible hypothesis. So I abandon it—and get my free will back as a reward.

But if the future is not already present, how can anyone perceive any piece of it in a precognitive dream? Not by attempting, as Dunne attempted, to finesse the situation by spatializing time. I’d like to be able to deny that precognition is possible at all—but as I’ve shown in an earlier post, I’ve experienced it, and you can’t doubt your own experience. So I punt, seeing especially that it’s nearly midnight. Alas. There are more things out there, beyond the border, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…