JSE Editorial: on Bem, precognition, and the limitations of quantitative experiments

On Bem, precognition, and the limitations of quantitative experiments

S.Braude

Another quite different and thorny set of issues concerns the concept of causality itself, along with the common assumption—expressed in various ways by philosophers of science and physicists—that retrocausation is no different from clockwise causation except for the temporal direction of the causal arrow. However, this mirror image view of retrocausation is actually exceptionally problematical. For one thing, the positing of causal connections is a form of explanation, and the activity of explaining is irreducibly pragmatic and appropriate only relative to a surrounding context of inquiry.

 And for another, events are not items in a perspective-independent warehouse of ontological furniture. The pie of history may be sliced in an indefinitely large number of ways, none of which is inherently privileged. But that means that ordinary clockwise causal connections must be parsed, pragmatically, out of an intrinsically undifferentiated web of happening running in the same temporal direction. That is, each causal connection is merely and necessarily a part of a more temporally extended clockwise causal story. And there will always be an indefinitely large number of extended stories we could tell for a putatively identified cause and effect, each of which makes sense in its own way of how the former event leads causally to the latter, and none of which is appropriate simpliciter, or succeeds as an explanation no matter what.However, retrocausalists treat ostensibly precognitive links as isolated from a presumed surrounding web of retrocausal happening—that is, as having no retrocausal antecedents stretching indefinitely into the future and no retro-causal consequences extending indefinitely into the past. For example, we’re not told what events retrocausally led to the earlier plane crash, or what retro-causal consequences flowed backwards from the precognitive experience. In fact, the events described in allegedly retrocausal chains (e.g., plane crashes and dreaming) are even described using clockwise causal terms. Plane crashes and dreams are sequences of events running from earlier to later.

The second point is that the concept of causation, like every other concept, can’t be isolated from an extensive network of additional related concepts—in this case, the concepts of explanation, understanding, intention, decision, action, to mention just a few. So we can’t radically revise the concept of causation to allow causal links to be isolated from a surrounding history without making far-reaching and arguably gratuitous changes to members of the enormous conceptual network of which it’s a part.

[Laird]

Some thoughts on a possible way to overcome Stephen Braude's objections to retrocausality:

Perhaps our four-dimensional (three dimensions of space and one of time) universe is merely an aspect of a reality with higher dimensions, in which it exists as a sort of "fixed object" which nevertheless can be tinkered with from those higher dimensions. It, then, has a sort of immutability in the sense that it is - even now - defined over all time, but also a sort of mutability in the sense that it can be "adjusted" from those higher dimensions. Perhaps, retrocausality would, then, be the "adjustments" from a higher dimension to our "fixed block" of four-dimensional reality; the stringing of a tenuous cord from (the fixed, from the higher perspective) future to (the fixed, again) past/present so as to link the two in a way deemed appropriate by whatever forces in the higher dimension deem such things - in a sense changing our universe but in another sense - the sense in which it is always defined over all space and time - leaving it as fixed. This way, the "ontological furniture" is not done away with entirely, but merely relocated in part into the higher dimensions.