Eric Wargo on retrocausation

Courtesy of the Anomalist, Eric Wargo has written a blog post about the Star Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever". Actually, it's more like a short book posing as a blog post:
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4359

Courtesy of the Anomalist, Eric Wargo has written a blog post about the Star Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever". Actually, it's more like a short book posing as a blog post:
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4359

A lot of interesting background material about the Star Trek episode, which I'd never heard about.

I thought it was interesting that although Joan Collins is perhaps not primarily associated with thoughtful drama, two of her most memorable roles were in the Star Trek episode that revolves around time travel, and in a film adaptation of the John Wyndham story, Random Quest, which deals with parallel universes (according to Wikipedia, she considered the latter one of the three performances she was proudest of).

Also interesting that the name of her character in the Star Trek episode was originally to have been Koestler. I'm a bit surprised that Eric Wargo didn't make something of that.

Also interesting that the name of her character in the Star Trek episode was originally to have been Koestler. I'm a bit surprised that Eric Wargo didn't make something of that.

Could you elaborate?

Could you elaborate?

I was just thinking of Arthur Koestler and his interest in parapsychology.

And another:
http://www.wheredidtheroadgo.com/show-ar...an-19-2019

In this interview he seems to be attributing psi and spiritual phenomenon to a materialist/physicalist word view. reminds me a bit of how super psi proponents want to reduce all psi phenomenon to some naturalistic law of physics that at some point will explain all these mysteries

In this interview he seems to be attributing psi and spiritual phenomenon to a materialist/physicalist word view. reminds me a bit of how super psi proponents want to reduce all psi phenomenon to some naturalistic law of physics that at some point will explain all these mysteries

Yes. That's the problematical part of his thinking for me. Not because I'm against that approach as a matter of principle, but because to my mind it hinges on all psi phenomena being explicable in terms of each mind being able to precognise its own thoughts. Any evidence that can't be fitted into that framework is a problem for him, I think.

Courtesy of The Anomalist - Eric Wargo has a new blog post entitled "What’s Expected of Us in a Block Universe: Intuition, Habit, & ‘Free Will’":
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4399

It's inspired partly by a science fiction story by Ted Chian, whose theme is our desire to believe in free will and the psychological effect of believing in 100% reliable precognition. This doesn't actually bother Wargo very much:
But what the Zen masters of China and Japan discovered is that direct experience of the illusory nature of free will actually leads to liberation, not apathy.
I wonder if he plans to discuss this with Alex Tsakiris in the future!

Wargo is also interested in recent work suggesting a possible psi role for the caudate-putamen in the brain.

Finally, he suggests a way in which the psychological blow of determinism might be softened. Even if our actions now are determined by future events through a "time loop", our conscious thoughts in the future may still play a role in the process, so the will may not be entirely without influence. To be honest I don't find this very convincing, because I thought the idea was that the work was being done by the unconscious mind, not the conscious mind. This idea seems a bit like trying to have your cake and eat it.

Just a thought that occurred, reading Wargo's comment in Benjamin Libet's experiments (also discussed in his book):
The first thing Chiang’s story reminds me of—and I’d bet the author had it in mind when he wrote the story—is an astonishing 1983 discovery by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet: The nerves in participants’ fingers readied to fire (“lit up” you might say) a fifth of a second before participants consciously decided to move their finger.

That is for a spontaneous decision, I think. Apparently a fifth of a second is comparable with reaction time. Has Libet's experiment been repeated when subjects are prompted to move their finger by a randomly determined stimulus?

Courtesy of the Anomalist, here's a new post on Eric Wargo's blog about dowsing - from a precognitive point of view, of course - entitled "In Defense of the Water Witches":
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4436