What if the future determines the present?
Retrocausality is the ability of the future to influence or alter the present (or of the present to do the same with the past). This is not, I think, to be confused with the fundamentalist protestant idea of predestination, of one’s life being mapped out in advance by an all-knowing God; although it might, at a stretch, map onto the notion of what anthropologists call ‘all-embracing determinism’, as practised in certain (actual or imagined) societies.
Sometimes the universe, or providence, conspires to move in a certain direction and the same signs or symbols keep cropping up in one’s life. Not long ago a series of events – or coincidences – occurred, which got me thinking about the strange possibility of retrocausality, and then, of course, my reading kept producing lines that seemed to confirm what was going on in the so-called ‘outer world’ was somehow being steered by its outcome, rather than – or in addition to – ‘working its way towards one’. It means, for a moment, putting everything we have always believed about causality on hold, and looking at events from another, or even the opposite direction.
Sometimes, we even write things, and then they happen, as I’ve discussed before:
There are times, when: ‘a fictional event or perception or concept is reproduced in reality after the story, or poem, or literary artifice, has been put down on paper. In grammar, cataphora is the reference to a textual item that has not yet been mentioned. By extension we might consider cataphoric reference also to be the way phenomena sometimes manifest themselves in the world after they have been written. On these occasions it is as if the workings of the inner world, the confabulations of the writer, had somehow seeped through into the outer world; as if there were a reflective symmetry between the devices of the imagination and events in reality, a kind of sympathetic magic, which is the idea that you can influence an outcome by concentrating your energy on an analogous object, invoking the desired effect through similitude. Georges Bataille refers to something of the kind when he describes writing as a form of contagion, the conjuring of contagious energies. This can happen either by accident, or intentionally.’ (The Vagabond’s Breakfast).
It is not too much of a leap, from here, to consider a kind of retrocausality at work, ‘with the unconsciousness of the predestined,’ as Robert Louis Stevenson phrased it, in an essay describing how he came to write Treasure Island. I love the idea of the ‘unconsciousness of the predestined’. It encapsulates the idea of inspiration (in its traditional sense) alongside that of the future determining the present. But is this all the fantasy of the over-excited literary mind? I’m not sure it is. It seems quite feasible that the present – or ‘now’, as we conventionally imagine it – is an illusion, and that we live in a universe ‘shot through with retrocausality’, in which past, present and future merge inseparably. This would appear to make sense in the quantum world too. Consider this, from the 17 Feb issue of New Scientist:
‘In its marriage of space and time, Einstein’s great theory [of general relativity] fatally undermines the concept of “now”. What is happening “now” in a particular location depends on where you are and how fast you’re moving, so two different observers may see different things at the same time in the exact same spot. This makes “now” an illusion. Time doesn’t really pass at all, and our perception that it does is due to our limited perspective on the world. In reality, past, present and future form a single, ever-existing block.
In a block universe, quantum retrocausality wouldn’t look so strange. If the past and the future coexist – if past events don’t fade away before future ones come into being – the future could easily influence the past. . . But if the quantum world is a block universe shot through with retrocausality, why don’t we see retrocausality in our everyday lives? After all, we are all made of quantum stuff. The answer boils down to quantum uncertainty. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. So there are features of the quantum world that are persistently hidden from us, and this is ultimately what allows for retrocausation without letting us send signals to the past.’
While I don’t claim to understand all of this, I can get the gist, I think – at least to the point where a terrible kind of clarity forms itself; and I can envisage the present – insofar as it exists – as being as much the consequence of the future as of the past. Which raises the question of where to go from ‘here’.
To be continued.
What reality, where?
Moments after seeing nothing at all, failing to see what was beyond their conceptual grasp, the native people began to see figures recognizable, perhaps, as men.
For as long as I can remember I have wondered at the stupid commonplace representation of what an alien might look like. You know the kind of thing; the eggheaded bug-eyed ET figure, the slimy green tentacled version, or the ectoplasmic ooze version. Why would an alien ‘look like’ anything, at least like anything that is familiar to our way of seeing, or that can be grasped by our cognitive filters and interpreted as a recognizable visual image.
So it was interesting to read the following in Eduardo Halfon’s fabulous collection of interlinked stories, The Polish Boxer:
And I suddenly remembered a legend Lía had told me, studious and devoted to quantum physics as she was. The legend says that as Columbus’s fleet was approaching the shores of America, the native Indians didn’t see it because they couldn’t see it, they literally couldn’t see it, since the concept of galleons in full sail was so alien to them, so unimaginable, that it didn’t enter their version of reality, and as such, their minds simply decided not to register it. There’s nothing there, I remember Lía saying to me, with her hand on my forehead, as though she was watching the horizon. I construct my reality solely on the basis of what I know, she said. Or something like that.
And on the subject of aliens, I couldn’t resist posting this delightful rendition of William Shatner and the crew of Star Trek doing a cover of Pulp’s ‘Common People’. Look out for the alien playing the lyre.
Ricardo Blanco's Blog 