Time Loops Quotes

“The brain may well turn out to be an organ that extracts meaning from an otherwise noisy, but constant, informational reflux from the Not Yet.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“You’ve heard the woodsman’s advice, don’t get between a bear and her cubs? Well, don’t get between a modern, science-literate person and their beliefs about causality.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“We may be on the verge of a massive shift in how we view time, causality, and information. Classical causality, the one-thing-after-another billiard-ball world of Isaac Newton and his Enlightenment friends, is being revealed as folk causality, a cultural construct and a belief system, not the way things really are.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction. In the film, one of the heptapods sacrifices its life to save that of Louise and her team members from a bomb planted by some soldiers, even though it clearly knows its fate well in advance. Their race even knows that in 3,000 years, humanity will offer them some needed assistance, and thus their visit is just the beginning of a long relationship of mutual aid in the block universe. At the end of the film, Louise chooses to have her daughter, even knowing that the girl will die.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“In the 2016 film Arrival by director Denis Villeneuve, based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is part of a scientific team summoned to Montana to help decipher the language of visiting extraterrestrials, known as “heptapods,” so that their intentions can be clarified. She starts to have frequent visions of a dying girl that she cannot place—she fears she may be going crazy from the strain of her assignment. The audience naturally assumes that these are flashbacks, memories of a child she lost in her past. As Louise begins to realize that her increased understanding of how the aliens communicate is helping liberate her cognitively from linear time, she begins having visions that aid in her work, including reading from the definitive book on the aliens’ written language that she herself is destined to write and publish in her future. From the book’s dedication, she realizes that the girl in her visions is a daughter she is going to have and who will eventually die of a rare disease. And at a key moment, when the world is on the brink of war with the visitors, she is able to contact a Chinese General on his private cell phone and talk him out of his belligerence after she “premembers” his phone number, which he will show her at a celebration months or years in the future—an event celebrating international unification in the aftermath of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial beings, made possible thanks largely to her intervention. It is a story about time loops, in other words. And what “arrives” at the climax and at various turning points—excitingly in some cases and sadly in others—is the meaning of Louise’s baffling experiences. The heptapods, with their circular language, feel at home in the block universe of Minkowski spacetime, where past, present, and future coexist. In Chiang’s short story, the scientists attempting to crack the code of their language get an important clue from Fermat’s principle of least time (Chapter 6), which suggests a kind of teleological interpretation of light’s behavior—it needs to know where it is going right from the start, in order to take the fastest possible route to get there. Chiang resolves the perennial questions about precognition and free will by suggesting that knowledge of future outcomes causes a psychological shift in the experiencer: an “urgency, a sense of obligation”1 to fulfill what has been foreseen. “Fatalism” would be one word for it but inflected more positively—perhaps not unlike how Morgan Robertson and Phil Dick may have seen it: as absolution rather than restriction.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Fortunately, Dick lacked the money sense and guile to do much in the way of deliberate religion-founding. And his unreliability as a narrator notwithstanding, he was basically an honest chronicler of his experiences—he mainly wanted to understand them, not convince people of any single metaphysical picture that could provide the focus for a new belief system. Nothing in Dick’s writings suggests the easy answers that followers of new religious sects are often looking for.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Dick delves in subsequent letters into the possible Jungian meaning of all this, the significance of ancient Rome in his mystical experiences, and the sibyl as representing his “anima,” the inner source of his own prophetic capacity. Recall here Morgan Robertson’s belief that his own muse was likewise a feminine spirit of some sort. We can observe Dick here beginning to weave these dream images into his evolving self-mythology and what became a major metaphysical strand in his Exegesis, as well as the novel VALIS that was based on his experiences. In his search for a meaning behind all these coincidences—an answer to the question “why me?”—Dick understandably gropes in many different directions for an explanation and attaches great, mostly Jungian significance to the symbols. Yet he does not go down the path of thinking he is simply accessing archetypes in the collective unconscious. Rather, he is drawn to the conclusion that somehow the ancient world is still present, only camouflaged—or indeed, that we are still in it. It all seems to confirm a dream remembered from his youth that was much like the “B___ Grove” dreams, in which he had searched for a story in Astounding Stories called “The Empire Never Ended.” That story, he had felt certain, contained all the mysteries of existence. As a result of some of his visions and experiences in 1974, Dick came to believe he was possibly a reincarnated Christian from ancient Rome.38 We are rewarded best by bracketing the various interpretations, the Exegesis per se, and looking at Dick’s project as a making of something, a creation of meaningful narratives to be read by other people, a reaching out. The term “cry for help” may sound a bit extreme, but it is not. It was during this black period of his life, most specifically in February 1976, when Tessa left him and took their son, that he attempted suicide via drug overdose, slitting his wrists, and carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage, all at the same time. Fortunately, all three plans failed. Setting aside the metaphysics and cosmology, what was Dick trying to say in his writing during this period—to Claudia, to Tessa, to his readers, and to posterity? And what whispered message was he straining to hear from his own precognitive unconscious? Arguably, he wanted to hear the same thing Morgan Robertson managed to hear, loud and clear, when news of the Titanic’s fatal collision with an iceberg splashed across the front page of The New York Times on April 15, 1912. Both in his Exegesis and in his private correspondence with friends like Claudia, Dick flickered between two basic stances on his experience: the secret persistence of the ancient world underneath the veneer of mid-1970s Orange County, and the idea that he was haunting himself from his own future. These are not incompatible ideas in the sense that they both point to our old friend Mister Block Universe, where the past still exists and the future already exists—and by implication, nothing is subject to alteration.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Dick delves in subsequent letters into the possible Jungian meaning of all this, the significance of ancient Rome in his mystical experiences, and the sibyl as representing his “anima,” the inner source of his own prophetic capacity. Recall here Morgan Robertson’s belief that his own muse was likewise a feminine spirit of some sort. We can observe Dick here beginning to weave these dream images into his evolving self-mythology and what became a major metaphysical strand in his Exegesis, as well as the novel VALIS that was based on his experiences. In his search for a meaning behind all these coincidences—an answer to the question “why me?”—Dick understandably gropes in many different directions for an explanation and attaches great, mostly Jungian significance to the symbols. Yet he does not go down the path of thinking he is simply accessing archetypes in the collective unconscious. Rather, he is drawn to the conclusion that somehow the ancient world is still present, only camouflaged—or indeed, that we are still in it. It all seems to confirm a dream remembered from his youth that was much like the “B___ Grove” dreams, in which he had searched for a story in Astounding Stories called “The Empire Never Ended.” That story, he had felt certain, contained all the mysteries of existence. As a result of some of his visions and experiences in 1974, Dick came to believe he was possibly a reincarnated Christian from ancient Rome.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Dick’s own Jung-inflected mythologizing framed “2-3-74” as a “metanoia,” a transcendence that results in a greater integration of the personality and thus healing. Biographer Arnold argues persuasively that it was nothing of the sort. His “intoxicating taste of radical wholeness and connectedness to the world” gradually slipped from his grasp, leaving him with the same sufferings and problems as well as a brand-new emptiness, a brand-new abandonment to add to his list. Over the following eight years until his death, Dick wrote thousands of pages of analysis to try and understand what had happened to him, and it does not lessen the value or genius of this text, the Exegesis, to say that it was the product of a nervous breakdown. “The Exegesis is the embodiment of Dick’s psychospiritual nostalgia,” Arnold writes.28 It may be that many of the world’s greatest spiritual texts have been produced in such a state of crisis. Fortunately for later students of precognition, this period in Dick’s life also produced some striking precognitive experiences that the writer recorded in fascinating and compelling detail thanks to a new pen pal—and muse—that entered his life just a month after his “2-3-74” visions and dreams began.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Whether or not alcoholism, the obvious “iceberg” the writer could not escape, drowned some more private and secret suffering related to sexual desire or even gender identity, Robertson clearly wanted fate to absolve him for some compulsion that he feared was a choice, and perhaps also give him the ability to free himself from that compulsion—an impossible, contradictory, ambivalent wish. His precognitive habit seems to have answered both needs. Eisenbud makes a very key observation in this regard, one that goes well beyond Robertson in its implications: “With such an ambivalent attitude toward fate,” he writes, “all one would need, it might seem, would be heads and tails on the same throw. But any good precognitive event provides just this, since … the metaphysical significance of such an occurrence is sufficiently in question to satisfy both schools.”24 There was surely no better “precognitive event” than reading a New York Times headline about a sea disaster you had written a novel about 14 years earlier. The psychoanalytic rule of thumb is that nothing is ever an accident.25 The disasters and misfortunes that repeat themselves over and over in the lives of neurotics like Robertson look for all the world as though some higher power or cosmic theater director is testing them or just being cruel, but these situations are actually elicited by the neurotic in deviously subtle ways. For Freudians, the thematic consistency of the neurotic’s failures is always assumed to represent unresolved past situations confusedly haunting the neurotic’s present reality, governed by the repetition-compulsion beyond the pleasure principle. Instead of seeing things as they are, the neurotic sees replays of situations from early life and reacts accordingly, with predictably disappointing outcomes—the idiomatic “carrying baggage.” The alternative possibility that a case like Robertson’s suggests is that some of our baggage comes from our future. Robertson seems all his life to have been confusedly presponding to a future upheaval, even a kind of near miss or close call (since, having written about it beforehand, the Titanic disaster was in some sense “his” disaster), but treating it again and again as a present reality, a disaster that had already occurred or was in the process of occurring. By the time the real thing happened, he himself was already sunk, “washed up,” and could not even successfully capitalize on what might have been the perfect advertisement for his precognitive gift. What if something like this is true of many neurotics? What portion of ordinary human floundering and failure might really be attributable to misrecognized precognition, a kind of maladaptive prematurity of feeling and thought? We now turn to another deeply neurotic writer whose life even more clearly illustrates the painful temporal out-of-synch-ness of the strongly precognitive soul.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Blindness is another classic castration symbol, according to Freud, and the template for the “blind prophet” goes back to the ancients, including the mythological backstory of Freud’s favorite tragedy Oedipus the King. That story is in some sense just as relevant to the tragic life of Robertson as it is to that of Freud, but in a very different way. Oedipus’s self-blinding when he realizes his own guilt links him to the blind seer Tiresias, who announces the king’s guilt at the end of the tragedy. Audiences would have known the mythological backstory of the seer and his blindness, just as they knew that of Oedipus. In his younger days, Tiresias had come upon two entwined snakes in the forest and touched them with his staff; upon doing so, he was transformed into a woman. After living as a woman for seven years, Tiresias encountered the snakes again, touched them, and was turned back into a man. Summoned to Mount Olympus to report on his experience, he revealed to Hera, in front of her husband Zeus, that (based on his extensive experience) women get much more enjoyment from sex than men do. Hera blinded him in punishment for revealing this secret, and Zeus gave him prophetic foresight in recompense. Tiresias thus reveals an ancient symbolic association between these two ideas, prophecy and sexual/gender liminality or boundary-crossing.20 The symbolism of the Sphinx, the guardian whose riddle Oedipus had to answer to become King (and thus to marry his mother), is also relevant here. Sphinxes are symbolic guardians of time,21 and not accidentally, sphinx is closely related to the word sphincter: a guardian (literally a “strangler”) designed to mainly admit the passage of things in one direction but sometimes capable of admitting other things traveling in reverse. As I hinted earlier, suggesting that the normal order of causality can be transgressed arouses similar hostile reactions from skeptical guardians of Enlightenment science that the prospect of a phallus—the ultimate “causal arrow”—moving the wrong way through a sphincter arouses in gatekeepers of patriarchal “Christian” morals. In a sense, Oedipus and Tiresias were permutations of the same basic possibility—transgression of some kind of sexual boundary, punished by symbolic castration but also (at least in Tiresias’s case) compensated with foresight. Transgressive enjoyment, which “impossibly” connects the future to the past, is thus what turns precognition into a psychoanalytic problem. As with Tiresias, the point of Oedipus’s story is not merely that he “traveled the wrong way through time” by marrying his mother and killing his father; it is that he committed these crimes and enjoyed them, and only belatedly discovered what it was that he had been enjoying. His guilt was not over his actions but over his enjoyment. Our ignorance as to our enjoyment (that is, our blindness to it) allows both the past and future to affect our lives in uncanny and seemingly “impossible” ways like the kinds of coincidences and twists of fate that seem to have characterized Robertson’s life.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Many writers tie their writing ability to some kind of occult influence. Robertson belongs to a much larger pattern in the world of letters that Jeffrey Kripal has charted in his book Mutants and Mystics—science-fiction and comic book writers inspired in their work by paranormal and “psychic” experiences.5 Robertson reported the distinct sensation when he was setting words to page that he was channeling, in the words of one friend, “some discarnate soul, some spirit entity with literary ability, denied physical expression, [which] had commandeered his body and brain.”6 When poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote to Robertson in the aftermath of the Titanic tragedy to ask him about it, Robertson replied: As to the motif of my story, I merely tried to write a good story with no idea of being a prophet. But, as in other stories of mine, and in the work of other and better writers, coming discoveries and events have been anticipated. I do not doubt that it is because all creative workers get into a hypnoid, telepathic and percipient condition, in which, while apparently awake, they are half asleep, and tap, not only the better informed minds of others but the subliminal realm of unknown facts. Some, as you know, believe that in this realm there is no such thing as Time, and the fact that a long dream can occur in an instant of time gives color to it, and partly explains prophecy.7”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Many writers tie their writing ability to some kind of occult influence. Robertson belongs to a much larger pattern in the world of letters that Jeffrey Kripal has charted in his book Mutants and Mystics—science-fiction and comic book writers inspired in their work by paranormal and “psychic” experiences.5 Robertson reported the distinct sensation when he was setting words to page that he was channeling, in the words of one friend, “some discarnate soul, some spirit entity with literary ability, denied physical expression, [which] had commandeered his body and brain.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“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? The next two chapters will examine this question through the lives of two famously precognitive and neurotic writers. Both show strikingly how creativity may travel together with trauma and suffering along the resonating string that connects us to the Not Yet. 12 Fate, Free Will, and Futility — Morgan Robertson’s Tiresias Complex Who can tell us of the power which events possess … Are their workings in the past or in the future; and are the more powerful of them those that are no longer, or those that are not yet? Is it to-day or to-morrow that moulds 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? — Maurice Maeterlinck, “The Pre-Destined” (1914) The monkey wrench precognition appears to throw into the problem of free will is an important part of the force field inhibiting serious consideration of it by many people in our culture. It may have been a fear of the inevitability of things prophesied that made the whole subject so anathema to Freud, for example. In a society that places priority on success and the individual’s responsibility for its attainment, it is both taken for granted and a point of fierce conviction that we choose and that our choices are not completely made for us by the inexorable clockwork of matter—the Newtonian inertia that brought the Titanic and the Iceberg, mere inert objects, together. Scientists may pay lip service to determinism—Freud himself did—but the inevitability of material processes due to causes “pushing” from the past somehow feels less restrictive than a block universe in which our fate is already set. The radical predestination implied by time loops may rob “great men” of their ability to claim credit for their successes.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“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? The next two chapters will examine this question through the lives of two famously precognitive and neurotic writers. Both show strikingly how creativity may travel together with trauma and suffering along the resonating string that connects us to the Not Yet.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Animawoman” is Jung-speak for a kind of intellectual and erotic muse.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“What Beitman is suggesting presupposes either “superpowers” that go well beyond even the unconscious mental feats Freud and his predecessors had posited or, alternatively, some omniscient higher knower capable of aligning our intentions with the infinitely complex webs of material causation governing objectively unfolding events. Once again, the fact that we live in a world of information—including cultural information like books and symbols—does not mean the universe speaks our mental language. At best, both the archetypal and intentional explanations lack parsimony. Fortunately, a causal (with a big asterisk beside the word) explanation for meaningful coincidences is no longer nearly as unthinkable as it was in Jung’s day, thanks to advances in several fields that, as we saw earlier, seem to be converging on a plausible (and indeed even materialistic) answer to how experiences from our future may reflux into our past and inform our dreams, thoughts, and actions. It remains to test these hypotheses, deepen our understanding of physical laws and the brain with new methods and technologies, and persist in our inquiries into psychology and nature with the healthy presumption that we don’t yet know everything about the physical world or how the mind/brain works. We cannot simply reject anomalous phenomena that don’t fit into the current materialist paradigm, but it is also too soon to appeal to explanatory factors beyond physical causation, as the latter is turning out to be far more rich, varied, and interesting than once believed. Causation really seems to go both directions in time.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Maggy never fit in with her aristocratic European life. Jung mentioned in an unpublished lecture about this patient (where she also appears anonymously) that she was extremely intelligent and sensitive and did not share the interests of her peers or her culture. She insisted on behaving unconventionally and, as a young woman, refused to marry11—though with her wealth, her looks, her passion (Jung wrote that she played the piano with such intensity that her body temperature quickly rose above 100 degrees12), and her brains, she ought to have been quite a catch for any man of suitable quality. He would have to put up with her independent-mindedness and argumentativeness though, a product of her keen intelligence and education. In her conservative social world, these qualities did not contribute to her being happy.13 But now, in Zurich, freed from the stifling atmosphere of her youth, in an intellectually exciting milieu dominated by the psychiatrist-mystic Jung, all that was changing.14”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“The push-pull of jouissance around signs of self-destruction represented a significant advance over Freud’s thinking about why traumatized people behave the way they do. Whereas Freud understood the traumatized person’s “compulsion to repeat” as a way of metabolizing or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts, Lacan saw that repetitive symptoms are really an adaptation to a new regime of enjoyment, how a person reorganizes his or her life in such a way as to continue to derive enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, may be despised and even (in its most extreme and pathological forms) possibly does harm. Lacan was no more interested in literal precognition or prophecy than Freud was, but his revision of the Freudian theory of symptoms and their relation to trauma is highly suggestive for an understanding of precognitive phenomena, and the ways trauma may sometimes become “displaced in time.” For instance, in many cases where disasters and deaths are precognized, even including deaths of loved ones or near-fatal perils in one’s own future, there is an implicit reward, if only in the very primitive—and hard-to-acknowledge—sense of “but I survived.” This can be a very repellant kind of reward, something appealing to a very base, “lizard-brain,” survival-oriented part of us that may be at odds with our conscious, moral, social desires and sense of self. The paradoxical connection between survival and death, which sparked Freud’s thinking but which he could never resolve successfully, in some sense boils down to a matter of semiotics: the fact that the one value (survival) takes on its meaning or value as a signal only contrastively, when paired with its opposite (death/destruction). According to structural linguistics, which was hugely influential on Lacan, all signifiers ultimately derive their meaning from their opposition to other signifiers. In life’s semiotic (or “sign language”), death or disaster befalling others is the foremost signifier of our own being-there, our da-sein. If you find yourself “traumatized” by witnessing something terrible, you have by definition survived. Dreams seem to give people dramatic and often distorted previews of those situations lurking in the foggy waters ahead.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“He proposed that, apart from and even surpassing the rule that we are governed in our actions by pleasure, there is a parallel urge to dispel life energy and thus tension—and that this drive can be found at the root of war neuroses and the neurotic’s compulsion to repeat unpleasant situations. Specifically, he called this a “death drive,” or thanatos. Thus, beyond pleasure lay the even more extreme reward of oblivion.13 Although intriguing, Freud’s idea of an instinctive urge toward negation or annihilation seemed paradoxical, and never really caught on … except as it was reformulated by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the late 1950s. Lacan’s French had an advantage that Freud’s German lacked, specifically the word jouissance, meaning painful pleasure or pleasurable pain—literally something “beyond pleasure” that takes over and drives a neurotic or someone who has been traumatized. The simplistic examples commonly given of jouissance include an orgasm so extreme that it causes agony, or the erotic pleasures of sadomasochistic acts. But a better analogy would be addiction, the compulsion to repeat an act (taking a drug, for instance) that cannot be resisted yet no longer gives much pleasure because it is more about the temporary dissipation or release of unpleasure.14 There is no equivalent word in English either. In reference to Lacan, jouissance is usually translated as “enjoyment,” but it needs to be understood that there may be something deeply ambivalent or even repellent about this particular kind of enjoyment. It is an enjoyment we do not want, a weird mix of excitement and pain, reward and regret. The concept of jouissance, as the underlying energy driving human compulsions, including pathological compulsions and obsessions treated in psychotherapy, became so central for Lacan that late in his career he made the provocative statement that jouissance is the “only substance” psychoanalysis deals with.15 Lacan might better have said “force” and not substance. Later Lacanian thinkers have likened jouissance to the warping of space in a gravitational field. The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious reward bends our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessional behavior, and on some level all behavior.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Freud continued to be perplexed by traumatized patients behaving in compulsive and seemingly very unpleasurable ways, almost as if they wanted to relive the event that had traumatized them rather than forget it. On the one hand, conflicts between our conscious aims and our unconscious desires could go some of the way toward explaining this. People’s reactions to traumatic events may be much more complex than we like to imagine, for one thing—we harbor unconscious death wishes for those close to us, as a result of sibling rivalries and the like. But ambivalence could not be the whole story. Why do war veterans obsessively relive objectively horrifying combat situations in their dreams? Why do neurotics find it so hard to “let go” of real or imagined traumas and end up staging situations that essentially repeat and reinforce them, almost as though they are trying to (re)create those traumas instead of move on? For a doctor whose whole theory of human motivation rested on the individual’s pursuit of his or her wishes in dreams and of pleasure in daily life, this compulsive returning to past traumas was a conundrum”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Memory seems to work on multiple levels in the brain. The circuit level (multiple interlinked neurons and circuits, involvement of distinct brain areas like the hippocampus, amygdala, and so on) is best understood because it unfolds at a scale that puts it within the granularity of existing research tools. On this level, we can see how “memories” are encoded in the brain physically as the readiness of dispersed groups of neurons to fire together again having fired together in the past (i.e., Hebbian learning—“neurons that fire together, wire together”). Again, long-term potentiation (and its opposite, long-term depression) reflects the constant forging of new connections between neurons and the updating of the weights of existing connections—the readiness of synapses to transmit signals, based on their (prior) history of signal transmission.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“Because unconscious thoughts and muscle movements originate outside of conscious awareness, he argued, they feel alien and are readily interpreted as originating with spirits or other entities.19 The unconscious, as an “other” inside, is, when you think about it, really a very “occult” idea. Freud’s “hermeneutics of suspicion”20 naturally invited a suspicious rationalist skepticism in return. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, could not abide an unconscious formation in the psyche. To him, it smacked of bad faith, inauthenticity, the failure to take responsibility for our actions. For instance, he pointed out the contradiction inherent in the idea of a “censor” in the mind that could be aware enough of what it was censoring to form a judgment yet also be completely alien to our conscious experience. The “resistance” that impedes patients from developing self-insight implies a similar non-aware awareness: “the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can resist.”21 There is no unconscious, Sartre argued, just the avoidance of responsibility. Claims of an unconscious mind that could only be explored through a highly subjective process of interpretation also offended the philosopher of science Karl Popper, one of Freud’s harshest critics. How would you test claims about an unconscious? Psychoanalysis is not a science, Popper contended, not only because its claims cannot be falsified but also because the clinical situation, with suggestible patients in a kind of trance-like thrall to their doctor, is an echo chamber—a machine for producing evidence in support of its premises (the usual meaning of “self-fulfilling prophecy”).22 Although 20th-century psychological science and neuroscience rejected Freud (and ignored Freud’s contemporaries in psychical research), it ultimately came around to embracing some notion of an unconscious—or what came to be called “implicit processing”—as a domain of cognitive functioning that is hypersensitive to subliminal signals and much quicker at making inferences and judgments than the conscious mind. Abundant experimental evidence shows implicit processing’s overriding dominance over anything like conscious will. A large school of thought, much of it inspired by Benjamin Libet’s work described in the preceding chapter, holds that we are mere spectators of our lives and that conscious will is an illusion, a kind of overlay. If the unconscious was for Freud the submerged majority of the iceberg, for some contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, it is all submerged—the tip is a mirage. We are unaware of the bulk of what seems to occur in our heads—there is thinking, sensing, and feeling that is not thought, sensed, or felt, and our non-experience of this huge domain is much more than a matter of bad faith (although there is that also). As with Freud’s unconscious, you can only probe the implicit domain indirectly, obliquely, via tools and paradigms such as priming tasks, like the ones Daryl Bem inverted in some of his “feeling the future” experiments.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate. Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other. More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“In a 1974 meeting of physicists and parapsychologists in Geneva, Switzerland, the French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard—the one who first proposed that quantum entanglement might be explained retrocausally—described the train of thought that led to his own ultimate acceptance of the probable existence of something like precognition: My starting point … occurred in 1951 when I suddenly said to myself: If you truly believe in Minkowski’s space-time—and you know you have to—then you must think of the relationship between mind and matter not at one universal or Newtonian instant but in space-time. If, by the very necessity of relativistic covariance, matter is time extended as it is space extended, then, again by necessity, awareness in a broad sense must also be time extended.69 It is very much like an updated version of Charles Howard Hinton’s reasoning about the brain’s capacity for four-dimensional thought: Our brains are four-dimensional, so our awareness must be as well.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions. We are only now realizing that there may indeed be words in all that noise—it’s not just gibberish. But how to decode them?”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“The out-of-the-box California physicists beat their heads against this problem for years, but by the early 1980s, it became apparent that there is no way to send a signal via entanglement alone. For one thing, if you force one of a pair of entangled particles into a certain state, the entanglement with the other particle will be broken, so it will not “send” information about its state to its twin. You are limited to performing measurements of a particle’s uncertain value, which compels it to make up its mind about the (previously uncertain) state it is in. In that case, you can be sure its entangled twin will make the same choice, but then some additional information channel needs to be available to let your distant partner know what measurement you performed and what result you got. The latter part of the problem has an analogy in basic semantics. For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher. If I say “yes” to my wife, it can only be meaningless noise, a random word, unless my utterance was produced in the context of a question, like “Are you going to the store later?” Without knowing exactly how the physicist on Earth measured her particle, Alice, and what result she got, the change in Alice’s entangled partner Bob four light years away in that lab orbiting Alpha Centauri cannot be meaningful, even if it is information. The Earth physicist needs to send some slower-than-light signal to inform her distant colleague about her measurement and its outcome … which defeats the whole purpose of using entanglement to carry a message.47 This is also the problem with the metaphor of the universe as a computer. No matter how much computation the universe can perform, its outputs can be little more than out-of-context yesses and nos, addressed to no one in particular. If there is no “outside” to the system, there is nothing to compare it to and no one to give all those bit flips meaning. In fact, it is a lot like the planetary supercomputer “Deep Thought” in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: When, after millions of years of computation, it finally utters its output, “42,” no one knows what it means, because the question the computer had been programmed to answer has long been forgotten. We are now perhaps in a better position to understand how the behavior of atoms, photons, and subatomic particles could carry information about their future—tons of information—without any of it being meaningful to us, and why we would naturally (mis)construe it as randomness: It is noise to our ears, stuck as we are in the Now with no way of interpreting it. It is like the future constantly sending back strings of yesses and nos without us knowing the questions.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

“In other words, particles may know so much about the future because they have already been to the future … although again, a more correct way of looking at it is that they are halfway “in” the future already. Think back to that glass block of Minkowski: Every particle is really a spaghetti strand snaking across time. Or better yet, imagine particles as colored threads on a vast and chaotic loom; everywhere a thread entwines with another thread is an interaction (or “measurement”), and the patterns woven by the zig-zagging, criss-crossing threads as they are stretched between both sides of that loom would not appear random at all if we could take a higher, Archimedean vantage point outside of time, as Price recommends.24 From a viewpoint that could grasp the whole cloth, it would be strange—indeed, ridiculously biased—to privilege one side, or one direction of causation, over the other. It would be like saying the pattern created by the interwoven colored threads in a blanket is “caused” by its lefthand side, with a component of capriciousness in the threads’ turnings as we scan the blanket from left to right, and the righthand side of the blanket exerting no “leftward” influence on the pattern at all. With retrocausation, we can no longer privilege the past, as though causation is only a matter of “pushing” (sometimes called efficient causation). The real mystery becomes why those efficient causes are so much more apparent and intuitively understood, and why influences propagating in reverse give us headaches to even think about. This is a mystery that physics alone might not be able to solve, but the first step toward finding a solution may be to train ourselves to “think backwards” about events.”
― Eric Wargo, Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious