17/ MUST MEMORY BE WHOLLY ASYMMETRIC?
or
CAN PEOPLE PRE-CALL? - OCCASIONALLY...
Summary: To ascribe full time asymmetry to memory may not be
entirely correct. For if one accepts the common experience of intutions as
genuine, they are most simply interpreted as a form of anti-memory or pre-call.
With
a natural frequency of ca. 10-8 relative to re-call, close observation also suggests that pre-call should have a highly repressed character.
While
the several initial or knee-jerk reactions against its possibility lack clear validity......
The
Prime Assumption
As
we’ve already seen, time commentators in physics now accept the total asymmetry
of memory as a primary given, and without any questions of validity.
Still high expertise in physics need not imply similar competence in psychology or philosophy, a point of
especial importance in this case.
For
one thing certain past philosophers have never been quite so dogmatic as modern physicists, about memory’s full asymmetry. Their ranks go back at least as far as Augustine, concerned with heretical fortune-tellers in his Confessions of 398 AD:
“Whether
some process similar (to memory) enables the future to be seen, I confess, my
God, that I do not know....”. 1
While in 1917 Bertrand Russell suggested that asymmetric memory was ‘merely an accident’. So that -
“our relations between Past andFuture would be symmetrical, were it not for some fortuitous quirk of mind...” 2
And in 1956 Sir Alfred (‘Freddy’) Ayer maintained:
“There is no a priori reason why people should not succeed in making true statements about the future in the same spontaneous way as they succeed, by what is called the exercise of memory, in making true statements about the past” 3
So does this common notion, of wholly asymmetric memory, owe more to unverified assumption than well established fact?. For nobody hitherto has ever really considered or tested out whether its future analog – i.e. pre-call or anti-memory – might not in reality be feasible!
One may therefore regard the common position here as humanity’s Prime Assumption. It’s an unverified epistemic foundation on which rests so many ideas of reality, and derived formal constructs like causality.
Intuition
as pre-call ?
In any case also, and through more careful observation on humanity, it appears that infrequent incidents of pre-call or anti-memory may in fact occur. Such forms of occasional mentality all come under the general heading of intuition, which I will define for this purpose as ‘seemingly non-inferential knowledge of future experience’.
Intuitions
can range from the trivial (“I suddenly
thought of far distant Mary for no obvious reason, and almost immediately she
texted me!”) to the more impressive (“John dreamt of a motor accident – and was
nearly run down by a car next day!”).
And while statisticians may strive to ascribe all such to coincidence,
they can never do so with full individual certainty.
Intuitions are also much prized by the scientific community, for their proven role in creativity. As for example when Kekule dreamt up the true structure of benzene in 1862. Einstein also was especially strong in praise of the intuition faculty: he regarded it as a valuable mentality too much suppressed by logic in the modern age.
But in any case all intuitions of whatever sort exhibit a clear common pattern, one again apparently first clarified by me long ago.4 “First think, then see!” is their temporal sequence always, with ‘see’ denoting any kind of observation by ordinary means.
This common pattern for intuitions of all sorts is also a matter of logical necessity, as further consideration of texting Mary will make clear. For if you’ve suddenly been just thinking of her for no obvious reason, but she then doesn’t text you or whatever, you can have no intuition possibility to contemplate!
But
in any case intuition incidents, with their common temporality of “First think, then see!”, are a clear inversion to more usual past-oriented memory. In the latter case “First see,
then think!” is the temporal sequence of recall. For example if long-absent Mary did indeed suddenly text you out of the blue, she’d probably recur occasionally in memory or reflection, over the next few days or hours afterwards.
It’s only when you think about her beforehand that potential intuition can be entertained!
The
Paranormal Explained
Intuitions
of course have also long been the focus of paranormal research, or
parapsychology in its modern guise. This
largely began in the 1880s, when the new Society for Psychical Research (SPR)
polled the British public, to detail 109 incidents where
intuition seemed genuine.
Reports of these incidents were then interpreted as a first proof of telepathy - a supposed psychological analog to the new Victorian physics of telegraphy. It was seen as a mysterious mental process which somehow defied physics, by operating across impossible distances or space.5
Such
thinking stemmed from a seldom realised but near universal thought-habit of
humanity, i.e. to think initially in terms of space before considering time. 6 And the same thought-habit also
produced other space-violating notions of intuition, like (earlier)
clairvoyance or (later) hypotheses of remote-viewing or extra-sensory
perception (ESP).
So that in our recurrent example of texting Mary, most parapsychologists would think that she had somehow entered your thoughts, by mysterious mental transmission across impossible space or distance, and just before her text arrived. While seldom or never considering the simpler time alternative - that you might have been merely ‘thinking forward’, to unusual experience a few minutes ahead!
And
yet (as I clarified at the most recent SPR Conference - Sept. 2013), every last single one of those original 109
Victorian ‘telepathic’ intuitions’, can be more simply interpreted in terms of
time violation alone. 7 This
also applies to at least most subsequent experiments.
If therefore you wish to have most of ‘The Paranormal Explained’, (as is the title of my second book), it’s all quite simple really. Just discard all those misbegotten inferences of space violation, and focus instead on that clear common factor of time anomaly alone. Which will then lead on, through clear anti-memory or pre-call development, to far more productive and physics-coherent science.....
Dunne’s
Experiment with Time
About
the only previous investigato, who ever likewise considered intuition in terms of
pure time anomaly, was JW Dunne - an Anglo-Irish aeronautical pioneer of the
early 20th century. He regarded some
10% of his dreams – and a few waking thoughts – as intuitions very definitely
reflecting tomorrow instead of yesterday. But apart from their temporal anomaly -
“If they (the dreams) had happened on the
nights after the corresponding events, they would have exhibited nothing in the
smallest degree unusual” 8
Dunne reported his dreams in “An Experiment with Time” (1927) , a work still significant in global time studies. For example current neuroscientist Fernando de Pablos finds his main conclusion confirmed, with REM sleep possibly serving to process future and not just past experience. 9
Obviously too if such non-inferential knowledge of the future could ever be proven decisively, most prevalent views on time would have to be strongly modified. This point was well recognised by GJ Whitrow, the original doyen of all modern commentators on time. So in his definitive Natural Philosophy of Time (1961) he devotes the very last section to considering the possibilities.
Though in doing so Whitrow does use the traditional term ‘precognition’, a muddled misdescription as
I’ve already shown. For as a clear
antonym to more common ‘recognition’, it would impute qualities to intuition
which are simply not there....
Quantifying
through Diagram
Alternatively
when intuitions are summarised in more precise terms of pre-call or anti-memory, they start to “make
more sense” almost immediately. For
example all of their great variety can be usefully encapsulated into one simple diagram. This makes them easier to
comprehend through visual intelligence, a form of mentality often superior to
just words.
Memory Anti-memory?
Normal Paranormal?
Diagram
- depicts the common experience of
memory in the left section. This
shows how details of past experience, available to present re-call, grow ever less with
time. Intuition can be incorporated as a
much steeper and future-oriented pre-call curve appended to the right!
To
diagram intuitions in this way further enables their relative frequency to be
quantified more readily. Just endow the
average person with one single act of re-call every second, not worrying too
much about whether this figure should really be increased/decreased by a factor of ten. Conservatively also, allow him or her just
one experience of potential intuition, between every 4 months and every 3
years.
Since these are time spans of 10-to-100 million seconds, the relative pre-call/re-call frequency in common experience then works out around 10-7 or 10 - 8. But of course anomalies of this slight order have often proved crucial throughout science history. For example, the extent of the Higgs Boson anomaly as sought by the LHC is about one million times less again.
A
repressed mentality
Nevertheless
the first obvious or knee-jerk reaction to the possibility of anti-memory, is that it must
obviously be impossible. Or as a
pragmatic sceptic might well retort: “There! I’ve just tried to exercise
pre-call, and it doesn’t work for me!”
But such a facile retort would deny the likely great initial difficulty in such a wholly foreign and unfamiliar mental exercise. In addition close observation of intuitions as commonly experienced, reveals that they have a strongly repressed (subconsciously censored) character. Most likely because they conflict with the great bulk of other more common temporalities.
Certain
strands from conventional psychology also bear this out. For example J. Piaget (the founder of
child psychology) once reported to A.Einstein that common time notions are more
learned then obvious: they mainly derive from enculturation and language
assimilation in our early years. 10
Which would explain why a strong intuition can strike one as disconcerting or
even vaguely threatening: it conflicts too much with those other time notions we’ve
grown comfortable with since infancy.
In
the same vein S. Freud considered the common construction of experienced time ,
as a form of ordering imposed by the conscious intellect to make sense of
reality. This was because –
“The
processes (of the unconscious) are timeless; they are not ordered temporally,
are not altered by the passage of time, in fact bear no relation to time at
all.” 11
And his one-time colleague CJ Jung went further:
“We are finally compelled to assume, that there is in the subconscious, something like an a priori knowledge, which lacks causal basis.” 12
All of which then suggests that pre-call would likely be a highly repressed mentality, as indeed close observation of spontaneous intuition also shows.
Premature
Speculation
“But
how could it possibly operate?” is of course another objection to any
possibility of pre-call. However this frequent question is best regarded as too premature right now. For humanity has been using re-call with great success for several million years - but still has no clear idea (or perhaps no idea at all?) about its underlying physiology.
At
this early stage of brain/mind knowledge therefore, to speculate about
potential mechanisms for far less frequent pre-call, must seem unwisely premature.
And
in any case more pragmatically and using suitable psychology - and as I
will report in my next blog - learned pre-call is indeed quite feasible. So that - through its further employment in
suitably directed experiment – that great trichotomy (between time understanding
in RT, QT, and everyday experience) may eventually be healed...13
1
– Augustine of Hippo - Confessions – 398 AD - Ch. 10
2-
B.Russell – Mysticism and Logic – 1917 – p 202
3
– A.J.Ayer – The Problem of Knowledge – 1956 – p 166
4
– Parascience Conference – London 1973
5
– FW Myers et al – Phantasms of the Living - 1886
6
– GJ Whitrow – Time in History – 1985 – p5
7
- See SPR Website, 2013
8
– JW Dunne - An Experiment with Time
– 1934 – p50
9
– F de Pablos – Scientific
Foundations of Precognitive Dreams - 2011
10
– J Piaget – The Construction of
Reality in the Child - 1954
11
– S Freud – Collected Papers – 1959 – Vol 4 – p.368
12
– CJ Jung – Synchronicity – 1954 – p.43
13
– S.O’Donnell - Five New Experiments with Time – ebook 2013
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