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Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
Time Is Not What You Think It Is. Neither Are You.Welcome to a world where participants in psychology experiments respond to pictures they haven’t seen yet … where physicists influence the past behavior of a light beam by measuring its photons now … and where dreamers and writers literally remember their future. This landmark study explores the principles that allow the future to affect the present, and the present to affect the past, without causing paradox. It also deconstructs the powerful taboos that, for centuries, have kept mainstream science from taking phenomena like retrocausation and precognition seriously. We are four-dimensional creatures, and sometimes we are even caught in time loops—self-fulfilling prophecies where effects become their own causes.
452 pages, Paperback
Published October 19, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
April 1, 2022
Oh my, this is a fun, rum book! It sets out to demonstrate that retrocausation - i.e. future stimuli causing past events - is a real phenomenon, and that it is responsible for déjà vu, precognitive dreams and a whole host of other strangenesses. Throughout the book Wargo overwhelms the reader with examples of just such strange experiences, while anticipating the objections - including hindsight bias, availability bias, and file-drawer bias - that prevents these from being treated as serious scientific evidence. But the book is most interesting when it proposes a mechanism by which "memories of the future" might work - starting from the apparent ability of light quanta to "know" in advance if they are going to be measured, and adjusting their behaviour accordingly, and moving on to how such future-to-past causality may operate within the brain's memory circuitry, enabling memory to operate within both directions. Wargo is fully aware of the heresy of his statements, and he has a lot of fun dealing with potential objections from scientists and their "folk belief" that causality flows only from past to future. He is quite aware that, due to the subjective and individual nature of memory and dreams, his thesis is not amenable to testing by standard scientific means, and he rarely misses the chance to poke fun at scientists who assume that anything worthwhile should be scientifically testable. Ultimately, as Wargo admits early on in the book, whether you believe him or not is likely to depend on your preconceptions. As someone whose own interests straddle both the scientific and the more esoteric, I found this a thrilling read, but as for whether or not it's true - perhaps we'll never know. (Or perhaps we already do know??)
August 21, 2020
How to bore you to death on an otherwise fascinating subject
The author apparently has no filter in his head for “too much information” ( in the sense of volume, not ick_factor). He takes interesting stories and theories about precognition, then beats them to death with astounding verbosity. I read it all, even as my eyes glazed over. I estimate he could have eliminated 25% of the word-count with rewriting for conciseness, and another 30% by eliminating details and theorizing that was relevant but just not that interesting.
The author apparently has no filter in his head for “too much information” ( in the sense of volume, not ick_factor). He takes interesting stories and theories about precognition, then beats them to death with astounding verbosity. I read it all, even as my eyes glazed over. I estimate he could have eliminated 25% of the word-count with rewriting for conciseness, and another 30% by eliminating details and theorizing that was relevant but just not that interesting.
February 17, 2023
This is one of those situations where the reading experience didn't live up to the content. The premise was super interesting and worth thinking about, but the way it was written just felt dense and boring. I had to push myself to get through it, but the subject matter was so compelling that I couldn't give up.
As always happens with books that tackle these topics, there is an urge to provide some scientific explanation. This is no exception, and we get the usual, although on this occasion, thorough and well-explained lecture on, you guessed it, quantum physics. It might be the best approach I have seen so far, but it is still unnecessary. There were some really interesting experiments mentioned and other scientific facts that helped get the point across, but I thought the chapter could have been shorter.
The subject of time can be confusing, but the author did an excellent job of breaking it down and organizing it. I don't think the complexity is the only reason the writing was so dense, but because the author also had a bit of a monotone, and the pace at which they presented each concept was a bit tiresome.
All in all, I'd recommend this book for the ideas it presents, just be aware that the writing can be a bit of a slog at times and you'll be fine.
As always happens with books that tackle these topics, there is an urge to provide some scientific explanation. This is no exception, and we get the usual, although on this occasion, thorough and well-explained lecture on, you guessed it, quantum physics. It might be the best approach I have seen so far, but it is still unnecessary. There were some really interesting experiments mentioned and other scientific facts that helped get the point across, but I thought the chapter could have been shorter.
The subject of time can be confusing, but the author did an excellent job of breaking it down and organizing it. I don't think the complexity is the only reason the writing was so dense, but because the author also had a bit of a monotone, and the pace at which they presented each concept was a bit tiresome.
All in all, I'd recommend this book for the ideas it presents, just be aware that the writing can be a bit of a slog at times and you'll be fine.
October 21, 2024
Consider Mark Twain's prophetic dream of his brother's death.[i] Notice the dream is, more precisely, of Twain's own experience of his brother's death: his attendance of the corpse at the Memphis Exchange, down to details of the casket (metal, propped on two chairs), the brother's dress (a suit lent from Twain), and a bouquet of roses placed on the chest.
If precog is of my own future experiences, then it's a local phenomenon. My mind need not astral travel to the target event, nor telepathically receive thru the ether; it need simply peek ahead to its own mundane learning of the event, keeping to my head.
Credit for this key insight goes to J.W. Dunne, who found "tracers" in his precog dreams—misrepresentations of the objective future that he forensically traced to his own future misreadings of those events.[ii] If you dream of 4000 dead in a volcanic eruption, when the fact is that 40,000 will die—and if you misread the next day's news as 4000 DEAD IN VOLCANIC ERUPTION (or, you correctly read a misprinted headline), you've precognized your imperfect learning of the calamity; you didn't clairvoy that calamity itself.
The precognitive brain would be somewhat time-symmetric, reaching into our past via memory, and to our future via "premory". My memory of groping for glasses in my handbag is the effect of that groping; similarly, my premory of a book cover I'm about to notice in an airport bookstall is an effect of that future noticing. A key asymmetry is that my memory doesn't reach back to affect the experience remembered, yet my premory can affect the premoried experience. Indeed the premory could be causally necessary for that experience: one reason my eyes dwell on the airport book is it's oddly familiar, so I'm curious—even if my premory was but a subconscious flash, like the millisecond primers deployed in Psych labs.
I precognize the book because I'll look at it, and I'll look at it because I precognized it—this is the "Loop" in Time Loops, the timey-wimey, weird & winding heart of precog which Wargo concedes might have some readers getting off his train early. Yet a causal tautology is no impossible contradiction, and Nature may not conform to our linear expectations.
The Physics may allow it
Precognition involves retro-causation: future info affecting the present self. But given the Minkowski Block Universe, given time-symmetric interpretations of quantum mechanics, retro-causation isn't alien to Physics, and has some intriguing evidence. A 2009 experiment by John Howell at the University of Rochester suggests that the measurement of light affects its history: photons aimed at a floating mirror displace the mirror more if measured after the deflection. Accumulating experiments like this may be vindicating Einstein's famous repudiation of intrinsic uncertainty:
"Hidden variable" interpretations of quantum weirdness have long hung around as minority alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wargo wonders, following physicist Yakir Aharonov and others, if the hidden variable, the big X in all the quantum weirdness, may be the future.
Precog, a useful adaptation
To align precog with Biology, first note it would be useful to the organism. If physics allows info to flow from the future, then life may have eked an adaptation to exploit this.
Quantum Biology was speculative some decades ago, but now it's a sub-field. Just as photons find the shortest route to their destination (Fermat's Principle), in photosynthetic quantum tunneling, electrons find the shortest route thru the cytoplasm to the reaction center of the plant. For each case, one might explain the particle's efficient pathmaking via quantum superposition: in a wave-like state, the quantum explores many paths at once, so discovers the most efficient path. Yet is this more, or less, parsimonious than a retro-causal take, where the particle's path is "partly determined by the reaction at its destination"?
Howell's Rochester set-up could be modified into a future detector, notices Wargo: by tying some real-world outcome to the second measurement—a jump in Apple stock, say—we could prognosticate, at the time of the first measurement [measurement i.e. of the struck mirror’s displacement], that the jump is coming. Granted, photons are a bad practical choice of measured target: too fast to give us "any useful temporal window" between the first and second measurements. Yet if a future detector can be lab-made, it's not implausible that life already found a way.
The brain's "time eye" could be like the visual eye—our "space eye"—which measures incoming light twice: once at the pupil pinhole, where most incoming light is deselected, then at the retina which receives the constrained beam. This double measuring, a filtering then receiving, allows a structured representation of the external world. (All structure, all statuary, requires carving.) Of course, the time eye would be weirder: its "first" selection, the filtering selection, is the "post-selection" ahead in time, allowing constrained, meaningful info to reflux back to the present.
As in the Howell-style future-scope, neural post-selection would be triggered by some vital real-world event, giving the organism an orienting advantage. Prime among such events would be the organism's survival: a message from the future is
The more primitive time eyes might operate beneath awareness and take peeks only millisecs ahead to help coordinate our perceptions with each other—laggy pain with speedy vision, for example—and with the external world. We'd experience such tight presentiment not as numinous peeks beyond the present, but as a natural and continuous synching with the present.[iii]
The Psi literature often magically invokes "quantum entanglement" to explain telepathy and clairvoyance, but Wargo notes that entanglement does not seem to operate at the scale of brains and bodies, of envelopes and Zener cards. Yet it might operate in the microstructures of a single brain. Neuronal microtubules may not solve the hard problem of consciousness, but are a promising locus of cellular quantum computation, of shaping axon terminals and dendrites so that "signaling at synapses may be potentiated or enhanced if they are going to be signaling in the future (and vice versa if they won’t be)."
Yes, Wargo's links between physics, biology, and psychology are often hand-wavy, but that's fine when the waver acknowledges the hand-waving, like Scott Alexander's "epistemic status" warnings at the top of some Astral Codex Ten posts. When groping thru the dark we need to wave a bit, and sometimes hand-waving is "saying hello to a future the rest of us cannot yet see."
The Parapsychology
The famous/infamous Daryl Bem experiments in presentiment, summed in his 2011 paper "Feeling the Future", forced the Choice in academic Psychology: either the discipline's experimental standards are low, or presentiment is real. Psychology largely chose the former, initiating its "replication crisis."
Wargo argues that Bem's experiments are sound, and notes they've been replicated in many labs.[iv] Indeed the Psych lab, Wargo contends, has yielded much evidence for psychic ability—of high significance, low effect, typically—including decades of work at the Duke University Center for Parapsychology (the place that gave us the terms parapsychology and ESP), and the Stanford Research Institute's Pentagon-funded explorations of "remote viewing", or clairvoyance.
He notes, however, that no transmission of info or energy between telepaths, or between a clairvoyant and the remotely viewed target, has ever been discerned. Also, psychic effectiveness does not diminish with distance, or when subjects are bound within a Faraday cage. Yet if telepathy & clairvoyance are actually precognition, and what is precognized is the precognizer's own future experiences, then no psychic waves should be found emanating beyond the relevant skull.
Crucial for Wargo's reduction of Psi's varia to precog is that Psi subjects typically receive some kind of feedback on their attempts: minimally, they are rewarded with the confirmation that they had a psychic hit. Apparent telepathy could thus "merely" be the psychic precognizing their future reward: their learning the answer, thus also learning they're successful, special—the sort of meaningful experience the mind might orient toward.
When merely linguistic feedback is given for "remote viewings" of hidden drawings, the hits seem based on the idea of the target drawing, rather than the specific drawing. That is, when the Answer Booklet of the Future consists of generalized abstract descriptions of the target drawings ("a hand"), the psychics' sketched hands are in various poses & angles bearing little compositional correlation to the target image. In contrast, when the feedback is visually richer—in some SRI experiments, psi subjects were taken to the target location after they'd completed their remote drawings—the drawings were based on "sketchy visual impressions during the task, with no sense of the meaning or identity of the object / location." Thus their drawings showed a greater graphic match, though still "sketchy".
These discrepancies in the participants' hits seem like Dunne's tracers: they may indicate premories of a future learning experience with the target.
Sort of Foreseen
To simply sum the inter-Science links: quantum physics may be retro-causal, and the Brain may compute quantumly. Ergo the brain may have retro-causal ability. The brain may be a 4D tesseract that reaches into its past and future to guide the organism's present behavior. Foreseen rewarding experiences could orient the organism toward those experiences, if only the bittersweet reward of confirming "but I survived" a foreseen disaster.
Well, sort of foreseen: we typically don't realize we foresaw till the foreseen event happens, if ever. For one, a precog dream, like all dreams, is occluded in puns, symbols, and other associations. Second, precog is graphically rendered from our existent mental furniture, in a bricolage of memory's bits: a dream may dramatize a coming car crash by splicing in your inner stock of car crash images. Third, premory lacks the rich context of memory, so is rarely recognized as premory. My mental flash of riding a red tricycle around my old hood is accepted as memory, even if I don't remember that tricycle. But a flash of bicycling thru Beijing is anomalous if I've not yet been to Beijing, so I dismiss it as imaginative noise.
Some occlusion is required, logically: we can't receive info from the future in a form that would preclude that future from happening. The precognition can't motivate the precognizer to avoid that event, thus never precognize it.
Yes, there's this tension in Wargo's account: precognition is naturally selected because it gives the organism valuable info, yet that info must be so hidden that we only recognize it, if ever, once the precognized event has transpired. For the millisecond-scale synching of the nervous system & environment, the precog need not be recognized as precog to be useful. But for longer-term precog, like young Nabokov's dream, in 1916, of his fortune restored in 1959, the biophysics is much hand-wavier, and the value of the dream harder to discern. Perhaps the dream gives Nabokov hope through the decades, it feeds his writerly ambition, thus helps to fulfill the prophecy? The fortune is in fact returned to him with the sale of Lolita's film rights to Harris-Kubrick Pictures, so needed him to work for it.
Yet why would that dream in particular motivate Nabokov, above all the noisy polyphony of dreamlife? Perhaps their loopiness endows prophetic dreams with an aura that impresses us, even when we don't know they're prophetic. They are eerie, bearing from our future the confidence of confirmed fulfilment. Nabokov's dream comes from 1959, so "already" knows his fortune is restored. His dream-uncle, who speaks the good news in 1916, has an epistemic authority Nabokov can't quite dismiss in his day life.
Precog & Psychoanalysis
Wargo is indebted to psychoanalysis for its systematic study of dreams, for its serious attempt to discern the dream's meaning for the dreamer. The Freudian recognition that this meaning comes coded in associational logic is central to Wargo's own reading of precog dreams.
Yet Freud, with his focus on the patient's history as the storehouse of meaning, and Jung, with his atemporal amnion of the Collective Unconscious, have each overlooked the Future.
Freud
In 1895, Freud dreams the central dream of The Interpretation of Dreams, a dream that yields, under his analysis, a key to all dreams. The dream centers on his impromptu oral examination of "Irma" (his pseudonym for Anna Hammerschlag, a friend and recent patient), which Freud interprets as deflection of his anxieties around his professional treatment of her. (To rather simplify.)
Wargo argues that the dream makes more sense as precog of Freud's brutal battle with mouth cancer, diagnosed in 1923. The dream's leucous inner cheek, the scabbing, the glimpse of turbinal bone through the removed palate—these all match Freud's own clinical presentation as the cancer works its way into his head. In 1895, Freud transposes his premonitions of the 1923 medical trauma onto dream-Anna. Anxieties in the dream about a dirty syringe used on dream-Anna implicate his toxic cigar habit, which he'd long been warned about. The grim medical proclamation that "It's really only your fault", spoke by the dreamer to dream-Anna, "was really a kind of self-reproach", says Wargo.
Freud is thus a tragical Oedipus, who misreads a prophecy by not recognizing it as prophecy. Indeed he misreads prophecy more generally by ignoring the precognitive in his theory of dreams. His Irma/Anna dream carries anxieties over mistreatment of a patient; was this premonition of his feelings after the 1923 diagnosis, when he'd surely have realized, Wargo says, that Psychoanalysis had misled us all about the content of dreams?
Jung
A patient describes last night's dream, in which she receives a golden scarab beetle, an exquisite jewellery piece. As she narrates, Jung hears a tapping behind: it's a shiny green-gold beetle, a Euro relation of the Egyptian one, butting at the window. Jung opens the window, cups the creature in his hand, and brings it to her: "Here's your scarab" he pronounces.
The moment is a breakthrough in the patient's treatment, eroding her resistance to the non-rational, and pivotal in Jung's career, the central "specimen" of his synchronicity theory and confirmation of his status as therapeutic shaman.
Here we find three conjoined events: [i] her dream of the scarab; [ii] her describing it in therapy, synchronous with [iii] the beetle's arrival at Jung's window. Yet a beetle or something else of archetypal affinity is bound to knock at Jung's window now and then. That she dreamt it, and was narrating just as it knocked, can be explained through precog: her dream anticipated the beetle's arrival, as did her narration, which she subconsiously timed to coincide with that arrival. The convergence is loopy-weird, but nothing so mysterious as synchronicity: it's "merely" precog taking advantage of the beetle's tapping.
In general, when a putative synchronicity consists of a psychological datum plus its later reiteration in the external world, precog may be a simpler explanation than synchronicity, since it requires only the precognizer's brain and the external event, not the vague ontology of the Jungian collective unconsciousness & archetypes.
True or Not, Worth a Read
Time Loops is well worth a read even if you remain unconvinced of precog, skeptical of the psi research & anecdotes. You may yet read it as a fascinating Conditional: if there were precognition, this is how it might happen.
Wargo's take, if false, is neat Sci Fi!
If you're intrigued by the evidence for psi, you might begin exploring for yourself. Wargo believes our dreams are teeming with precog content, but it needs decoding. Record your dreams on waking and immediately free-associate with the key elements—to get it while it's fresh and to avoid biased free association toward later events. Check your notes an hour, a day, a year later for hits.
Restrain, of course, your hit-seeking with judicious use of the Skeptic's toolbox; yet stay open to the Weird.
notes
[i] putatively prophetic, if we're neutral.
[ii] in An Experiment With Time, 1927
[iii] Indeed, Wargo wonders if predictive processing is partly funded by this short-range presentiment.
[iv] It seems they've often failed to replicate, too. See e.g. Kekecs et al, 2023: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
If precog is of my own future experiences, then it's a local phenomenon. My mind need not astral travel to the target event, nor telepathically receive thru the ether; it need simply peek ahead to its own mundane learning of the event, keeping to my head.
Credit for this key insight goes to J.W. Dunne, who found "tracers" in his precog dreams—misrepresentations of the objective future that he forensically traced to his own future misreadings of those events.[ii] If you dream of 4000 dead in a volcanic eruption, when the fact is that 40,000 will die—and if you misread the next day's news as 4000 DEAD IN VOLCANIC ERUPTION (or, you correctly read a misprinted headline), you've precognized your imperfect learning of the calamity; you didn't clairvoy that calamity itself.
The precognitive brain would be somewhat time-symmetric, reaching into our past via memory, and to our future via "premory". My memory of groping for glasses in my handbag is the effect of that groping; similarly, my premory of a book cover I'm about to notice in an airport bookstall is an effect of that future noticing. A key asymmetry is that my memory doesn't reach back to affect the experience remembered, yet my premory can affect the premoried experience. Indeed the premory could be causally necessary for that experience: one reason my eyes dwell on the airport book is it's oddly familiar, so I'm curious—even if my premory was but a subconscious flash, like the millisecond primers deployed in Psych labs.
I precognize the book because I'll look at it, and I'll look at it because I precognized it—this is the "Loop" in Time Loops, the timey-wimey, weird & winding heart of precog which Wargo concedes might have some readers getting off his train early. Yet a causal tautology is no impossible contradiction, and Nature may not conform to our linear expectations.
The Physics may allow it
Precognition involves retro-causation: future info affecting the present self. But given the Minkowski Block Universe, given time-symmetric interpretations of quantum mechanics, retro-causation isn't alien to Physics, and has some intriguing evidence. A 2009 experiment by John Howell at the University of Rochester suggests that the measurement of light affects its history: photons aimed at a floating mirror displace the mirror more if measured after the deflection. Accumulating experiments like this may be vindicating Einstein's famous repudiation of intrinsic uncertainty:
What seemed for all the world like randomness—blind chance—may really be the previously unseen influence of particles’ future histories on their present behavior. Retrocausation, in other words.
"Hidden variable" interpretations of quantum weirdness have long hung around as minority alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation. Wargo wonders, following physicist Yakir Aharonov and others, if the hidden variable, the big X in all the quantum weirdness, may be the future.
Precog, a useful adaptation
To align precog with Biology, first note it would be useful to the organism. If physics allows info to flow from the future, then life may have eked an adaptation to exploit this.
Quantum Biology was speculative some decades ago, but now it's a sub-field. Just as photons find the shortest route to their destination (Fermat's Principle), in photosynthetic quantum tunneling, electrons find the shortest route thru the cytoplasm to the reaction center of the plant. For each case, one might explain the particle's efficient pathmaking via quantum superposition: in a wave-like state, the quantum explores many paths at once, so discovers the most efficient path. Yet is this more, or less, parsimonious than a retro-causal take, where the particle's path is "partly determined by the reaction at its destination"?
Howell's Rochester set-up could be modified into a future detector, notices Wargo: by tying some real-world outcome to the second measurement—a jump in Apple stock, say—we could prognosticate, at the time of the first measurement [measurement i.e. of the struck mirror’s displacement], that the jump is coming. Granted, photons are a bad practical choice of measured target: too fast to give us "any useful temporal window" between the first and second measurements. Yet if a future detector can be lab-made, it's not implausible that life already found a way.
The brain's "time eye" could be like the visual eye—our "space eye"—which measures incoming light twice: once at the pupil pinhole, where most incoming light is deselected, then at the retina which receives the constrained beam. This double measuring, a filtering then receiving, allows a structured representation of the external world. (All structure, all statuary, requires carving.) Of course, the time eye would be weirder: its "first" selection, the filtering selection, is the "post-selection" ahead in time, allowing constrained, meaningful info to reflux back to the present.
As in the Howell-style future-scope, neural post-selection would be triggered by some vital real-world event, giving the organism an orienting advantage. Prime among such events would be the organism's survival: a message from the future is
one that necessarily indicates a course of action that survived long enough to send that message back—like a little breadcrumb trail from the organism’s future self, or a note at a crossroads weirdly in its own handwriting, saying “come this way.”
The more primitive time eyes might operate beneath awareness and take peeks only millisecs ahead to help coordinate our perceptions with each other—laggy pain with speedy vision, for example—and with the external world. We'd experience such tight presentiment not as numinous peeks beyond the present, but as a natural and continuous synching with the present.[iii]
If the brain really is a quantum future detector—or perhaps, trillions of quantum future detectors networked classically—then effective motor action might be initiated partly from a position displaced slightly ahead in an organism’s timeline, when the success of the action is already confirmed. Such a model would offer another way of thinking about skillful performance in sports or martial arts, for example, not to mention intuition, creative insight, and inspiration.
The Psi literature often magically invokes "quantum entanglement" to explain telepathy and clairvoyance, but Wargo notes that entanglement does not seem to operate at the scale of brains and bodies, of envelopes and Zener cards. Yet it might operate in the microstructures of a single brain. Neuronal microtubules may not solve the hard problem of consciousness, but are a promising locus of cellular quantum computation, of shaping axon terminals and dendrites so that "signaling at synapses may be potentiated or enhanced if they are going to be signaling in the future (and vice versa if they won’t be)."
Yes, Wargo's links between physics, biology, and psychology are often hand-wavy, but that's fine when the waver acknowledges the hand-waving, like Scott Alexander's "epistemic status" warnings at the top of some Astral Codex Ten posts. When groping thru the dark we need to wave a bit, and sometimes hand-waving is "saying hello to a future the rest of us cannot yet see."
The Parapsychology
The famous/infamous Daryl Bem experiments in presentiment, summed in his 2011 paper "Feeling the Future", forced the Choice in academic Psychology: either the discipline's experimental standards are low, or presentiment is real. Psychology largely chose the former, initiating its "replication crisis."
Wargo argues that Bem's experiments are sound, and notes they've been replicated in many labs.[iv] Indeed the Psych lab, Wargo contends, has yielded much evidence for psychic ability—of high significance, low effect, typically—including decades of work at the Duke University Center for Parapsychology (the place that gave us the terms parapsychology and ESP), and the Stanford Research Institute's Pentagon-funded explorations of "remote viewing", or clairvoyance.
He notes, however, that no transmission of info or energy between telepaths, or between a clairvoyant and the remotely viewed target, has ever been discerned. Also, psychic effectiveness does not diminish with distance, or when subjects are bound within a Faraday cage. Yet if telepathy & clairvoyance are actually precognition, and what is precognized is the precognizer's own future experiences, then no psychic waves should be found emanating beyond the relevant skull.
Crucial for Wargo's reduction of Psi's varia to precog is that Psi subjects typically receive some kind of feedback on their attempts: minimally, they are rewarded with the confirmation that they had a psychic hit. Apparent telepathy could thus "merely" be the psychic precognizing their future reward: their learning the answer, thus also learning they're successful, special—the sort of meaningful experience the mind might orient toward.
When merely linguistic feedback is given for "remote viewings" of hidden drawings, the hits seem based on the idea of the target drawing, rather than the specific drawing. That is, when the Answer Booklet of the Future consists of generalized abstract descriptions of the target drawings ("a hand"), the psychics' sketched hands are in various poses & angles bearing little compositional correlation to the target image. In contrast, when the feedback is visually richer—in some SRI experiments, psi subjects were taken to the target location after they'd completed their remote drawings—the drawings were based on "sketchy visual impressions during the task, with no sense of the meaning or identity of the object / location." Thus their drawings showed a greater graphic match, though still "sketchy".
These discrepancies in the participants' hits seem like Dunne's tracers: they may indicate premories of a future learning experience with the target.
Sort of Foreseen
To simply sum the inter-Science links: quantum physics may be retro-causal, and the Brain may compute quantumly. Ergo the brain may have retro-causal ability. The brain may be a 4D tesseract that reaches into its past and future to guide the organism's present behavior. Foreseen rewarding experiences could orient the organism toward those experiences, if only the bittersweet reward of confirming "but I survived" a foreseen disaster.
Well, sort of foreseen: we typically don't realize we foresaw till the foreseen event happens, if ever. For one, a precog dream, like all dreams, is occluded in puns, symbols, and other associations. Second, precog is graphically rendered from our existent mental furniture, in a bricolage of memory's bits: a dream may dramatize a coming car crash by splicing in your inner stock of car crash images. Third, premory lacks the rich context of memory, so is rarely recognized as premory. My mental flash of riding a red tricycle around my old hood is accepted as memory, even if I don't remember that tricycle. But a flash of bicycling thru Beijing is anomalous if I've not yet been to Beijing, so I dismiss it as imaginative noise.
Some occlusion is required, logically: we can't receive info from the future in a form that would preclude that future from happening. The precognition can't motivate the precognizer to avoid that event, thus never precognize it.
Yes, there's this tension in Wargo's account: precognition is naturally selected because it gives the organism valuable info, yet that info must be so hidden that we only recognize it, if ever, once the precognized event has transpired. For the millisecond-scale synching of the nervous system & environment, the precog need not be recognized as precog to be useful. But for longer-term precog, like young Nabokov's dream, in 1916, of his fortune restored in 1959, the biophysics is much hand-wavier, and the value of the dream harder to discern. Perhaps the dream gives Nabokov hope through the decades, it feeds his writerly ambition, thus helps to fulfill the prophecy? The fortune is in fact returned to him with the sale of Lolita's film rights to Harris-Kubrick Pictures, so needed him to work for it.
Experiences like precognitive dreams point to a whole unknown part of our lives—our whole future—that we are interacting with, subtly and obliquely, and that is exerting an influence over our thoughts and behavior now, here in our future’s past.
Yet why would that dream in particular motivate Nabokov, above all the noisy polyphony of dreamlife? Perhaps their loopiness endows prophetic dreams with an aura that impresses us, even when we don't know they're prophetic. They are eerie, bearing from our future the confidence of confirmed fulfilment. Nabokov's dream comes from 1959, so "already" knows his fortune is restored. His dream-uncle, who speaks the good news in 1916, has an epistemic authority Nabokov can't quite dismiss in his day life.
Precog & Psychoanalysis
Wargo is indebted to psychoanalysis for its systematic study of dreams, for its serious attempt to discern the dream's meaning for the dreamer. The Freudian recognition that this meaning comes coded in associational logic is central to Wargo's own reading of precog dreams.
Yet Freud, with his focus on the patient's history as the storehouse of meaning, and Jung, with his atemporal amnion of the Collective Unconscious, have each overlooked the Future.
Freud
In 1895, Freud dreams the central dream of The Interpretation of Dreams, a dream that yields, under his analysis, a key to all dreams. The dream centers on his impromptu oral examination of "Irma" (his pseudonym for Anna Hammerschlag, a friend and recent patient), which Freud interprets as deflection of his anxieties around his professional treatment of her. (To rather simplify.)
Wargo argues that the dream makes more sense as precog of Freud's brutal battle with mouth cancer, diagnosed in 1923. The dream's leucous inner cheek, the scabbing, the glimpse of turbinal bone through the removed palate—these all match Freud's own clinical presentation as the cancer works its way into his head. In 1895, Freud transposes his premonitions of the 1923 medical trauma onto dream-Anna. Anxieties in the dream about a dirty syringe used on dream-Anna implicate his toxic cigar habit, which he'd long been warned about. The grim medical proclamation that "It's really only your fault", spoke by the dreamer to dream-Anna, "was really a kind of self-reproach", says Wargo.
Freud is thus a tragical Oedipus, who misreads a prophecy by not recognizing it as prophecy. Indeed he misreads prophecy more generally by ignoring the precognitive in his theory of dreams. His Irma/Anna dream carries anxieties over mistreatment of a patient; was this premonition of his feelings after the 1923 diagnosis, when he'd surely have realized, Wargo says, that Psychoanalysis had misled us all about the content of dreams?
Jung
A patient describes last night's dream, in which she receives a golden scarab beetle, an exquisite jewellery piece. As she narrates, Jung hears a tapping behind: it's a shiny green-gold beetle, a Euro relation of the Egyptian one, butting at the window. Jung opens the window, cups the creature in his hand, and brings it to her: "Here's your scarab" he pronounces.
The moment is a breakthrough in the patient's treatment, eroding her resistance to the non-rational, and pivotal in Jung's career, the central "specimen" of his synchronicity theory and confirmation of his status as therapeutic shaman.
Here we find three conjoined events: [i] her dream of the scarab; [ii] her describing it in therapy, synchronous with [iii] the beetle's arrival at Jung's window. Yet a beetle or something else of archetypal affinity is bound to knock at Jung's window now and then. That she dreamt it, and was narrating just as it knocked, can be explained through precog: her dream anticipated the beetle's arrival, as did her narration, which she subconsiously timed to coincide with that arrival. The convergence is loopy-weird, but nothing so mysterious as synchronicity: it's "merely" precog taking advantage of the beetle's tapping.
In general, when a putative synchronicity consists of a psychological datum plus its later reiteration in the external world, precog may be a simpler explanation than synchronicity, since it requires only the precognizer's brain and the external event, not the vague ontology of the Jungian collective unconsciousness & archetypes.
True or Not, Worth a Read
Time Loops is well worth a read even if you remain unconvinced of precog, skeptical of the psi research & anecdotes. You may yet read it as a fascinating Conditional: if there were precognition, this is how it might happen.
Wargo's take, if false, is neat Sci Fi!
If you're intrigued by the evidence for psi, you might begin exploring for yourself. Wargo believes our dreams are teeming with precog content, but it needs decoding. Record your dreams on waking and immediately free-associate with the key elements—to get it while it's fresh and to avoid biased free association toward later events. Check your notes an hour, a day, a year later for hits.
Restrain, of course, your hit-seeking with judicious use of the Skeptic's toolbox; yet stay open to the Weird.
notes
[i] putatively prophetic, if we're neutral.
[ii] in An Experiment With Time, 1927
[iii] Indeed, Wargo wonders if predictive processing is partly funded by this short-range presentiment.
[iv] It seems they've often failed to replicate, too. See e.g. Kekecs et al, 2023: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/do...
March 7, 2023
From a degreed anthropologist, a very fair and academic view of precogognition, particularly prophetic dreams, through the lenses of both psychology and physics. Wargo is just the kind of “skeptical-believer” I relate to, with well-researched evidence and solid rational conclusions. He’s in the same camp as Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake who champion the minority opinion that you do not have to throw away your logic and rationality in order to explore and accept “paranormal” experiences and phenomena. I would give this book six stars if I could. As it is, I’ll have to dial back a few of my other reviews to four and a half.
January 12, 2020
This is not an easy read , but Wargo's idea is so bold that you keep on reading.I liked his case studies the most : they are just baffling.Take for example the case about the Titanic : two books were written that predict the disaster in amazing detail.This is just one example , and Wargo has a lot more ...Recommended
July 17, 2022
A fascinating take on precognition. There are some interesting things in here but, this book is twice as long as it needs to be. It seemed like too much of the book was an anthology of supporting material, the reading of which started to feel a bit like slogging uphill in deep snow.
March 9, 2019
Synopsis: Eric makes a bold hypothesis in this book, simply put all forms of parapsychology are a byproduct of our brain’s ability to see in an extra dimension, both backwards and forwards in time. He backs this up in many ways and even asserts ways of strengthening this theory which are in the works. The book is broken into three parts:
The first section is an introduction to the topic, in this section Eric introduces his idea and provides some evidence for his solution. His evidence are anecdotal, attempts at scientific method, and scientific experiments. Some of these stories are incredibly intriguing from the scientific studies which show participants can predict which door a picture is behind before the picture is placed, although only if the picture is pornographic; and studies that show studying after an exam can influence how well you did on said exam. He also introduces the idea of national losses, such as 9/11 and the Titanic, lead to massive anecdotal sharings of dreams and “feelings” that something was about to happen or had just happened. One of the keys that seems to come from this look is that the future the precognitive events seen are from the viewers future, they do not see the event first hand, but instead from where they will be seeing it in the future. This was first noticed by Dunne when he looked at his precognitive dreams and noticed they contained errors which he makes when he actually discovers said future event in his present.
The second portion of the book is a look at physics and the trouble it seems to have bringing the theory of everything in line with what is happening at the quantum level. He talked about time symmetry which way time flows does not impact the view of an event. The trouble scientists had with the observational issue, observing quantum events impacts the event and the measurements we get from said event. Eric moves on to talk about covalent bonds, the idea that measuring one particle impacts the particle which the particle is bonded too immediately, no matter how far away, sometimes exceeding the speed of light. He then ties this in to biology and how living organisms may have used the particle bonds in evolution, showing that the membranes of cells have particular structures which may take advantage of particle bonding and which have different DNA from the rest cell, meaning at some point they were separate organisms. He ties this into the human brain and how covalent bonds traveling over billions and trillions of neuron conections could lead to how we see into the future and links scientific facts such as being able to see and feel our toes touching a cold surface at the same time despite the difference in time required for brain input.
The third portion is a look at particular case studies: included in this sectioin are the likes of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Morgan Robertson, Philip K. Dick and Dunne (Can’t remember his first name). THese men all had interesting lives and stories regarding dreams throughout their lives. In the case of Freud he is used to show that his interpretation of dreams was incorrect and he did in fact foresee terrible happenings in his future. All of these men had many precognitive events throughout their lives which leads interesting questions and thoughts.
This book is a bold work of research and keeps you mentally stimulated throughout. You will not leave with any hard evidence one way or the other for proving or disproving our current outlook on time and the human mind or the idea of time loops, events which occur due to the dream which pushed the dreamer towards said event. Instead this is a look at anecdotal evidence, which is unfortunately the only evidence available when you look at something as subjective as one’s own thoughts and dreams. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking to expand their look at parapsychology or our perception of time.
The Best: the idea of free won’t instead of free will, we can preconceive the future however we may not be required to act out that particular future.
The Worst: This felt like reading a school textbook, it was dense reading, and although enjoyable it was hard to get through in parts, particularly his attempt to bring quantum physics to the average reader’s level.
The first section is an introduction to the topic, in this section Eric introduces his idea and provides some evidence for his solution. His evidence are anecdotal, attempts at scientific method, and scientific experiments. Some of these stories are incredibly intriguing from the scientific studies which show participants can predict which door a picture is behind before the picture is placed, although only if the picture is pornographic; and studies that show studying after an exam can influence how well you did on said exam. He also introduces the idea of national losses, such as 9/11 and the Titanic, lead to massive anecdotal sharings of dreams and “feelings” that something was about to happen or had just happened. One of the keys that seems to come from this look is that the future the precognitive events seen are from the viewers future, they do not see the event first hand, but instead from where they will be seeing it in the future. This was first noticed by Dunne when he looked at his precognitive dreams and noticed they contained errors which he makes when he actually discovers said future event in his present.
The second portion of the book is a look at physics and the trouble it seems to have bringing the theory of everything in line with what is happening at the quantum level. He talked about time symmetry which way time flows does not impact the view of an event. The trouble scientists had with the observational issue, observing quantum events impacts the event and the measurements we get from said event. Eric moves on to talk about covalent bonds, the idea that measuring one particle impacts the particle which the particle is bonded too immediately, no matter how far away, sometimes exceeding the speed of light. He then ties this in to biology and how living organisms may have used the particle bonds in evolution, showing that the membranes of cells have particular structures which may take advantage of particle bonding and which have different DNA from the rest cell, meaning at some point they were separate organisms. He ties this into the human brain and how covalent bonds traveling over billions and trillions of neuron conections could lead to how we see into the future and links scientific facts such as being able to see and feel our toes touching a cold surface at the same time despite the difference in time required for brain input.
The third portion is a look at particular case studies: included in this sectioin are the likes of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Morgan Robertson, Philip K. Dick and Dunne (Can’t remember his first name). THese men all had interesting lives and stories regarding dreams throughout their lives. In the case of Freud he is used to show that his interpretation of dreams was incorrect and he did in fact foresee terrible happenings in his future. All of these men had many precognitive events throughout their lives which leads interesting questions and thoughts.
This book is a bold work of research and keeps you mentally stimulated throughout. You will not leave with any hard evidence one way or the other for proving or disproving our current outlook on time and the human mind or the idea of time loops, events which occur due to the dream which pushed the dreamer towards said event. Instead this is a look at anecdotal evidence, which is unfortunately the only evidence available when you look at something as subjective as one’s own thoughts and dreams. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking to expand their look at parapsychology or our perception of time.
The Best: the idea of free won’t instead of free will, we can preconceive the future however we may not be required to act out that particular future.
The Worst: This felt like reading a school textbook, it was dense reading, and although enjoyable it was hard to get through in parts, particularly his attempt to bring quantum physics to the average reader’s level.
December 12, 2019
How important is the future is to us and how does it influence our present? Maeterlinck asks us:"Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?"
What a great read this is. Eric Wargo's book on time loops and the unconscious is undoubtedly intriguing and thought provoking. This is a bold attempt to build a framework of "retrocausation" for a whole range of issues which most mainstream scientists have a hard time explaining: premonitions,"feeling the future" telepathy, Libet's paradox, post selection in the double slit experiment, cell-based information processing (in the microtubules), synchronicity, neuroses as time-loops,and the psychic basis of artistic and scientific creativity. Causality is part of our culture and in our everyday world we assume that causes precede and determine effects. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that we seem to have an ability to send ourselves messages from our own personal future and that there are significant turning points in our life where the effect seems to pull us forwards to make the right causes, like some kind of strange attractor. Wargo says that "Synchronicity is simply what it looks like when people orient toward future meaningful encounters with no inkling that this is what they are doing". Our dreams and visions contain fragments of our emotional reactions to future events, whose significance for us will only become apparent when they actually occur. Wargo explains " the precognitive unconscious cannot know the meaning of what it is producing; the meaning only emerges when a dream or fantasy or behavior is interpreted in light of subsequent events". This future-scanning sense ,we have, ensures our survival and may be basic to all cellular organisms. We live in a kind of glass-block four dimensional universe (of space and time) but we are constantly reappraising our past and venturing into our future. The present is entangled with both the past and the future, while our lives entangle with significant others.
There is much to be commended in this book. Bem and Radin's experiments demonstrate how our bodies and minds react to future stimuli. Retrocausation could well be a survival mechanism at the cellular level explaining the"intelligence" of slime mould as well as explaining Libet's finding that we appear to move our limbs before we are consciously aware of the movement. Libet theorized that we live half a second in the past in order to synchronize our senses with our movements but this seems to condemn us to live in a world where free will goes out of the window and we are at best left with veto power over our actions "free won't". However, if our brain is a quantum future detector, we don't have to live half a second in the past in order to feel synchrony with our movements.
Wargo believes our brain synthesizes a wide range of information from both our future and our past. He calls the brain "an informational tesseract, a 4-d meaning-machine"
Sometimes this "meaning-machine" produces premature results which can drive us off course. Even Freud and Jung struggled to keep the occult future out of their clinics. Wargo speculates:
"What if it is somehow our misunderstood, unacknowledged, looping relationship to our future that makes us ill—or at least, that contributes to our suffering—and not our failure to connect appropriately to our past? Could some neuroses be time loops misrecognized and denied, the way we haunt ourselves from our futures and struggle to reframe it as being about our past history?"
In a world of uncertainty, both scientist and layman struggle to understand the entanglement of matter and meaning. Wargo writes:
"in the double-slit experiment, the photon in its unmeasured state is a lot like an ambivalent neurotic, taking both paths simultaneously through two available slits because it cannot make up its mind or commit to taking one slit or the other. This ambivalence, literally a kind of self-interference, shapes the observed behavior of matter on a fundamental level. When the wavefunction “collapses” to something definite, it is like making that photon's unconscious conscious"…
Despite being a great book, I don't agree with some of Wargo's ideas.I think Eric Wargo is mistaken in his idea that we will discover some new brain-based sensory apparatus to explain our ability to sense the future. He himself is uncertain whether the mechanism is at the cellular or brain level. His efforts to attribute all telepathic phenomena to retrocausation can at best be partially correct because he relies on the communication of the event as the retroactive cause. This can't possibly nullify fifty years of telepathic research in a laboratory context where the subjects are unaware of the results. He certainly can't account for the evidence of all psychic phenomena such as psychokenisis, apparitions, OBE, NDE and regression to past lives , by reducing them to brain-based retrocausation. It's much more logical to think of consciousness as primary and the brain as a receiver.
Wargo's analysis of the individual psychic base of creativity does not take into account the fact that so many scientific discoveries were made almost simultaneously by different people. He says retrocausation as something essentially personal, so who or what is co-ordinating the scientists? Perhaps Sheldrake's concept of morphic resonance is needed to complete the picture.
Nevertheless, whatever your views, if the subject of time fascinates you, this book is a must read.
What a great read this is. Eric Wargo's book on time loops and the unconscious is undoubtedly intriguing and thought provoking. This is a bold attempt to build a framework of "retrocausation" for a whole range of issues which most mainstream scientists have a hard time explaining: premonitions,"feeling the future" telepathy, Libet's paradox, post selection in the double slit experiment, cell-based information processing (in the microtubules), synchronicity, neuroses as time-loops,and the psychic basis of artistic and scientific creativity. Causality is part of our culture and in our everyday world we assume that causes precede and determine effects. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that we seem to have an ability to send ourselves messages from our own personal future and that there are significant turning points in our life where the effect seems to pull us forwards to make the right causes, like some kind of strange attractor. Wargo says that "Synchronicity is simply what it looks like when people orient toward future meaningful encounters with no inkling that this is what they are doing". Our dreams and visions contain fragments of our emotional reactions to future events, whose significance for us will only become apparent when they actually occur. Wargo explains " the precognitive unconscious cannot know the meaning of what it is producing; the meaning only emerges when a dream or fantasy or behavior is interpreted in light of subsequent events". This future-scanning sense ,we have, ensures our survival and may be basic to all cellular organisms. We live in a kind of glass-block four dimensional universe (of space and time) but we are constantly reappraising our past and venturing into our future. The present is entangled with both the past and the future, while our lives entangle with significant others.
There is much to be commended in this book. Bem and Radin's experiments demonstrate how our bodies and minds react to future stimuli. Retrocausation could well be a survival mechanism at the cellular level explaining the"intelligence" of slime mould as well as explaining Libet's finding that we appear to move our limbs before we are consciously aware of the movement. Libet theorized that we live half a second in the past in order to synchronize our senses with our movements but this seems to condemn us to live in a world where free will goes out of the window and we are at best left with veto power over our actions "free won't". However, if our brain is a quantum future detector, we don't have to live half a second in the past in order to feel synchrony with our movements.
Wargo believes our brain synthesizes a wide range of information from both our future and our past. He calls the brain "an informational tesseract, a 4-d meaning-machine"
Sometimes this "meaning-machine" produces premature results which can drive us off course. Even Freud and Jung struggled to keep the occult future out of their clinics. Wargo speculates:
"What if it is somehow our misunderstood, unacknowledged, looping relationship to our future that makes us ill—or at least, that contributes to our suffering—and not our failure to connect appropriately to our past? Could some neuroses be time loops misrecognized and denied, the way we haunt ourselves from our futures and struggle to reframe it as being about our past history?"
In a world of uncertainty, both scientist and layman struggle to understand the entanglement of matter and meaning. Wargo writes:
"in the double-slit experiment, the photon in its unmeasured state is a lot like an ambivalent neurotic, taking both paths simultaneously through two available slits because it cannot make up its mind or commit to taking one slit or the other. This ambivalence, literally a kind of self-interference, shapes the observed behavior of matter on a fundamental level. When the wavefunction “collapses” to something definite, it is like making that photon's unconscious conscious"…
Despite being a great book, I don't agree with some of Wargo's ideas.I think Eric Wargo is mistaken in his idea that we will discover some new brain-based sensory apparatus to explain our ability to sense the future. He himself is uncertain whether the mechanism is at the cellular or brain level. His efforts to attribute all telepathic phenomena to retrocausation can at best be partially correct because he relies on the communication of the event as the retroactive cause. This can't possibly nullify fifty years of telepathic research in a laboratory context where the subjects are unaware of the results. He certainly can't account for the evidence of all psychic phenomena such as psychokenisis, apparitions, OBE, NDE and regression to past lives , by reducing them to brain-based retrocausation. It's much more logical to think of consciousness as primary and the brain as a receiver.
Wargo's analysis of the individual psychic base of creativity does not take into account the fact that so many scientific discoveries were made almost simultaneously by different people. He says retrocausation as something essentially personal, so who or what is co-ordinating the scientists? Perhaps Sheldrake's concept of morphic resonance is needed to complete the picture.
Nevertheless, whatever your views, if the subject of time fascinates you, this book is a must read.
March 7, 2025
This book is very dense reading. The sentences are long with high level vocabulary. There are many many references to studies, jargon, cultural referrals, names. footnotes which make it hard to remember and follow the thread of thought. Some of the passages include physics which are hard to follow. That said, I enjoyed the analyses of Freud and Jung quite a bit.
The primary point of the book is that knowing beforehand what will happen is common. The author feels we all have some innate capacity for this. He states that much of this ability to see the future (he calls it precognition) occurs in dreams. He states that dreams are a process of metabolizing our current experiences with our prior memories. He also states that precognition is only recognizable after the even foreseen has occurred in real life. He compares precognition to the physics concept of entanglement (or connection of particles to one another) and synchronicity in Jungian analysis.
I can understand the power of dreams. I myself have had a few strong dreams that changed the way I felt and lived my life. I also agree that all things in the universe are connected by some force we don't understand. I have also experienced that some people are able to sense these entanglements better than others. I can see how precognition can exist with memories of similar situations. It reminds me of how mycelium sense the needs of trees it connects and provide the needed nutrients to the trees. This is based on sensing the physical condition of the trees and reacting. This is a short-term phenomenon which provides the trees with what they need to stay healthy, but this is short-term. I am pretty agnostic about precognition that happens months or years ahead of the real-life event it is supposed to foretell.
The primary point of the book is that knowing beforehand what will happen is common. The author feels we all have some innate capacity for this. He states that much of this ability to see the future (he calls it precognition) occurs in dreams. He states that dreams are a process of metabolizing our current experiences with our prior memories. He also states that precognition is only recognizable after the even foreseen has occurred in real life. He compares precognition to the physics concept of entanglement (or connection of particles to one another) and synchronicity in Jungian analysis.
I can understand the power of dreams. I myself have had a few strong dreams that changed the way I felt and lived my life. I also agree that all things in the universe are connected by some force we don't understand. I have also experienced that some people are able to sense these entanglements better than others. I can see how precognition can exist with memories of similar situations. It reminds me of how mycelium sense the needs of trees it connects and provide the needed nutrients to the trees. This is based on sensing the physical condition of the trees and reacting. This is a short-term phenomenon which provides the trees with what they need to stay healthy, but this is short-term. I am pretty agnostic about precognition that happens months or years ahead of the real-life event it is supposed to foretell.
May 2, 2023
I started this book a couple of years ago, it was interesting, but as others have said, quite a slog in parts. Physics isn't my forte at the best of times, but I do think evidence wise, the sections on quantum physics are the most convincing.
Anyhow I got distracted by other reading so picked it back up last week to finish.
Overall it's a fascinating read, my future self clearly knew I was going to change my reading habits at this point.
The idea is that we inform our past selves, and our brain is informed by the future, because we are in a block universe, where the future is here as is the past and present. I've heard these ideas on podcasts and YouTube lectures by physicists such as Carlo Revelli (Also it's the film Arrival ..) but I did enjoy that this book also had a lot of anecdotes and case studies and more accessible things mixed in. The section on Freud, Jung and Philip K Dick is fascinating but not so convincing as the earlier sections.
Anyhow I got distracted by other reading so picked it back up last week to finish.
Overall it's a fascinating read, my future self clearly knew I was going to change my reading habits at this point.
The idea is that we inform our past selves, and our brain is informed by the future, because we are in a block universe, where the future is here as is the past and present. I've heard these ideas on podcasts and YouTube lectures by physicists such as Carlo Revelli (Also it's the film Arrival ..) but I did enjoy that this book also had a lot of anecdotes and case studies and more accessible things mixed in. The section on Freud, Jung and Philip K Dick is fascinating but not so convincing as the earlier sections.
January 24, 2025
Sometimes, I felt like this book got a little annoying because there's a lot of uncertainty around everything it goes into, but I still couldn't stop reading. I think a lot about the possibilities of a 4-D world: what would it look like, etc? Wargo proposes that the 4th dimension may actually be temporal. Maybe we exist at all moments of our lives simultaneously, but are mostly only aware of the slice that we think of as the present. There are some intriguing indications that we might sometimes be "remembering the future." Our future mental experiences may be influencing our present in, you guessed it, "time loops."
If that sounds appealing to think about, this book should be on your list... although there's a lot more to the book than just that. I enjoyed the time I spent reading it.
If that sounds appealing to think about, this book should be on your list... although there's a lot more to the book than just that. I enjoyed the time I spent reading it.
December 31, 2024
Phew, just in time
Anyway it was hell-like but also interesting read, the writer didn’t go in detail or dwell on the subject that might attract the reader after seeing the title, he goes around and round ..tip toeing around the main subject and using god only knows phrases to show you how uneducated you are.
I’m glad i finished this earlier than i thought, make me sad only how i get bamboozled over and over by these fascinating books names. But again don’t get me wrong it was good experience to out of my usual readings. And still it was intriguing because how i could finish this 400+ ?!
Anyway it was hell-like but also interesting read, the writer didn’t go in detail or dwell on the subject that might attract the reader after seeing the title, he goes around and round ..tip toeing around the main subject and using god only knows phrases to show you how uneducated you are.
I’m glad i finished this earlier than i thought, make me sad only how i get bamboozled over and over by these fascinating books names. But again don’t get me wrong it was good experience to out of my usual readings. And still it was intriguing because how i could finish this 400+ ?!
March 14, 2024
A fantastic, important book that challenges the "most hard wired" taboo of our societies: that of causality and the direction of time.
But, man, it is hard to read. Took me a while, I read other books in between.
It's a scientifically researched and written book about a fringe topic. If the author is right, it has the potential to change everything about how we see and experience the world.
But, man, it is hard to read. Took me a while, I read other books in between.
It's a scientifically researched and written book about a fringe topic. If the author is right, it has the potential to change everything about how we see and experience the world.
August 28, 2024
Intelligent, gripping
I really enjoyed reading this book. A humbling sense of humour throughout, he argues his case with several examples and analysis. The theory is an interesting one
I really enjoyed reading this book. A humbling sense of humour throughout, he argues his case with several examples and analysis. The theory is an interesting one
January 31, 2020
Thought provoking, challenging, rigorous and one of a kind.
November 18, 2020
It’s good and thought-provoking, but gets bogged down in long sections about Freud... The central tenet is compelling though!
July 22, 2023
A must-read for anyone interested in the nature of time.
March 4, 2023
This is a fascinating book about the type of precognition often experienced in dreams, built off the work of J.W. Dunne. Author Eric Wargo provides numerous famous examples of precognitive dreams, often about traumatic events such as plane crashes or the sinking of the Titanic. Wargo claims such cases of precognition are actually “prememory”: your unconscious mind remembering a future memory, not of the event itself, but of your emotional reaction to learning news of the event. Both the author and I are aware of how crazy and “woo” this all sounds, but Wargo’s research is scientifically rigorous, and he walks a fine line of being both skeptical about paranormal claims but also open-minded to their possibilities (something I wish more on both sides of the paranormal/skeptical debate were willing to do).
For instance, after 9/11 many people reported having prophetic dreams about the attack before it happened, but the details were often vague, with no dates or locations, so it was not as if they could have prevented the events of that day. According to Wargo, time exists in a block universe where the future is set and cannot be changed. The “precogs” were not dreaming of the 9/11 attacks themselves, but sort of “pre-remembering” their personal emotional reaction upon learning about the attacks in the news and watching it on TV. This type of precognition often happens with artists and creative types (like Philip K. Dick, Carl Jung, and Vladimir Nabokov), where in some cases they dream of a book they will later write.
I first learned of Eric Wargo and his “time loops” theory several years ago when I heard him interviewed about his book on the Hermitix podcast and have been wanting to read it since. It inspired me to start keeping a dream journal of my own, which I’ve been doing for three years now. I’ve always had a fascination with dreams but never seriously studied my own. Since keeping the dream journal, there have been some slight synchronicities, but nothing major—yet. Though, as Wargo explains, the precognition in dreams works obliquely, and you will only recognize it as precognitive retroactively, sometimes years or even decades later. So we shall see…
For instance, after 9/11 many people reported having prophetic dreams about the attack before it happened, but the details were often vague, with no dates or locations, so it was not as if they could have prevented the events of that day. According to Wargo, time exists in a block universe where the future is set and cannot be changed. The “precogs” were not dreaming of the 9/11 attacks themselves, but sort of “pre-remembering” their personal emotional reaction upon learning about the attacks in the news and watching it on TV. This type of precognition often happens with artists and creative types (like Philip K. Dick, Carl Jung, and Vladimir Nabokov), where in some cases they dream of a book they will later write.
I first learned of Eric Wargo and his “time loops” theory several years ago when I heard him interviewed about his book on the Hermitix podcast and have been wanting to read it since. It inspired me to start keeping a dream journal of my own, which I’ve been doing for three years now. I’ve always had a fascination with dreams but never seriously studied my own. Since keeping the dream journal, there have been some slight synchronicities, but nothing major—yet. Though, as Wargo explains, the precognition in dreams works obliquely, and you will only recognize it as precognitive retroactively, sometimes years or even decades later. So we shall see…
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