Your Precognitive Life

Your brain does it for free, like how spiders spin their webs.

(I have been collecting evidence—mountains of it—that I (and you, dear reader) have a brain that by default can precognize the future.

This precognition can have a duration of a few seconds or moments into the future…or a few hours…or days ... or weeks ... or, in fact, years.

I have gathered evidence that precognition pertains not only to dreams, but to waking. To everyday stuff that happens in the waking world. That an awful lot of what happens in my brain—and yours, dear reader—is…there really isn’t a great way to gloss this ... from the future.

This is Part III of a series of essays about all that.)

Hands up how many of my readers have a brain?

I’m not suggesting anything materialist or non-materialist or any kind of -ist by this question. Maybe your brain is a receiver that gathers its thoughts or what have you from somewhere else. Maybe it generates them. Maybe you do have a mind distinct from your body. Welcome. All metaphysics are welcome here.

But I think you’ll admit that you do have a brain. And that however your brain works and whatever your brain is, it’s quite amazing. And that if precognition is a thing, that this brain of yours can visualize (smell, touch, taste included) stuff from the future.

I like to think of my brain as a large googly-eyed mango that grew out of the biosphere, the tree of life. Finally I have a good reason to exercise! I want this guy to have oxygen, glucose … all the good stuff.

Emancipate Yourself from Mental Slavery

Your brain is like a googly-eyed mango growing from the tree of life, the biosphere. Everything about your precognitive powers is everything about LIFE. Isn’t that amazing?!

As the amazing Andrea Oddo points out, phenomena such as precognition are “the default human experience and not the other way around” ... and that this is highly adjacent to how “spirituality (regardless of religion) explains the metaphysical world” (“and not the other way around”). This is so huge and important and I’m going to unpack it a length ...

I’m having the nicest time thinking about my brain these days. I’m very much on the side of my dear old brain, as opposed to my supposed “mind” or my “self”: I think what now know about my precognitive brain radically transforms those ideas of mind and self. Eric Wargo has been thinking about this a LOT, for example in his work on “the long self.” And Jeffrey Kripal’s valuing of phenomena and phenomenology over what these things are “about” is very very special. The phenomena should CHANGE our sense of what they are “about.”

Too much talk about brains? Let’s just say you’re sentient. No matter how, you sense things. You can sense future things.

As a matter of fact, have you ever stopped to consider how equally and utterly amazing it is that you can visualize stuff from the past?

Seriously. Let’s talk about remembering for a moment.

What the heck is that? Truly? Isn’t life just ... amazing?

Think about it. You can somehow “go back” to a time that “isn’t here”--forgive my use of highly technical neuroscientific language--and superimpose it on the perceptions you’re having of the “here and now.” I’m putting all those words in quotation marks because when you start to think about all this, you start to find it difficult to draw a line around “here” and “now” that works all the time. I’ve come to think of it as like using a tape measure as a fence. It’s a category confusion.

But, think about it some more. You can conjure stuff that has happened, that is no longer happening. This conjuration is most definitely imaginative: in a sense, all memories are “fake” in the sense that my brain creates them. Look, why there’s another fence: between imagining and remembering. Last night I had a wonderful dream where I revisited the house I lived in as a nine-year-old child in 1977. Except, nothing about the house, apart from the fact that it was 1977, was accurate.

I go around remembering things and acting like it’s normal. I can remember stuff that we thought we had forgotten. I can regret things. I can remember that I left the lights on. I can wonder whether we left the lights on. I can have deja-vu, which is the pure sensation of … what? I often think it’s the sensation that I’ve had this feeling before, but without any content.

I just want to note that while you may think precognition is incredible--strictly unbelievable, even--you might want to stop and wonder about the thing contemporary humans take for granted: remembering. If it’s absurd that the future is available to the brain, why isn’t it absurd that the past is available to the brain?

And for free too. Your brain is the working class part of the thing you call your mind. It works and works and works. Even while you’re asleep (dreaming). Even when you don’t think you’re you. It can imagine. Don’t think of a pink elephant. There. I just made your brain do something I told your “mind” not to do.

Imagination is the “noise” a brain makes. How a brain “brains.” Amazing. Round of applause for your brain!

I don’t think we stop to wonder about how amazing all of this is.

Memory is a very deep fact about being sentient.

(I’m going to write about this some more later on, because life, as opposed to machinery, is a very special thing, and this is something Jeffrey Kripal, Eric Wargo and I all agree on. Along with Alan Turing ... stay tuned!)

Now let’s go even deeper on this. Closer to the “here and now.” I’ll show you that this here and now is definitely not a point on a Wikipedia time line. It’s more like a feeling of moving, even while you’re still. Like when I’m in a parking lot and there’s a car moving very slowly next to me, and for a moment I might think that I’m also moving. It’s more obvious on a train.

You know, I thought my car was out of control when this happened in a parking lot recently. I was reversing out of a spot, slowly, and another car was moving in at almost the exact same speed, next to me. It felt like I was reversing twice as fast as I should have been! It was so vivid, I jammed on the brakes. The other car kept moving, so I thought my brakes had failed! I was gonna slide over the edge of the lot, down the slope, onto the highway!

Just being “here and now” is a kind of smear, or better, a smearing ... being aware at all is shot through with reaching out with my feelers into the future, based on memory.

My sense of my world, my surroundings, right here and right now, is a memory. It arrives a few hundred milliseconds after my fingers touch the keyboard, after the ball of my foot rests on this ottoman, after the soundwaves from YouTube on my iPhone propagate into my inner ear.

This means something incredible: the actual, real surround, my environment, is a few hundred milliseconds in the future! Relative to how I perceive it, which is always a little delayed.

My sense of myself, right here and right now, is a memory. My basic heads, shoulders, knees and toes sense of me (my proprioception), is a kind of inverted, inside-out copy of that environmental awareness. This copy arrives a few hundred milliseconds after the image of my surroundings! So my sense of “me” in a very basic way is a memory of a memory.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmian (1922–2019)

And THIS means something incredible. My sense of “me” is time-shifted relative to my sense of “world”: so this “world” is also a few hundred milliseconds in the future!

“me” <<< sensed world <<< actual world past future

Whether or not I have a brain--say I’m a worm or even a tree--what I just said still holds in some sense. I wonder whether memory is not just intrinsic to being sentient (let alone “conscious”), but basic to being alive at all.

Think about how amazing yet how simple this is. I bet lifeforms can do it that don’t have brains. That are sentient in some other way. I bet worms do it. In fact neuroscience tells us that worms really do do it: take a look at the work of Björn Merker.

I bet trees do it.

I don’t want to get into the weeds with all this. Oh dear, dad joke ...

In a way, precognizing is just “remembering in the wrong direction” (Doctor Who). “Premembering” as Eric Wargo says. But “remembering in the right direction” is also pretty extraordinary, the more you think about it. Your brain just does it … it imagines, creates (memory is always creative).

And just “being,” without my brain doing the thing I call remembering, is also all about remembering and premembering, because my brain is always feeling into the very very near future with hunches based on feelings from the very very near past.

I might go around precognizing a lot, like a lot, all the time … every single day. But because there is “no such thing as precognition,” because thinking about it is taboo, I might just gaslight myself all the time about it. Which might take a lot of work. Which might make me reluctant to admit to it. I know that in my case, this is true. So true. Because it’s a bodily function, and admitting to it would be exposing.

But if we’re going to be kind to workers of all kinds we ought to be kind to our good old brains, no? And tolerant of the noises they make?

Peering into the Block Universe: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019)