Becoming Timefaring (Part 2)

Chronophone Calls and C-mails from the Future

Eric Wargo
24 min readOct 2, 2024
Drawing by David Metcalfe

The story so far: Alterations to the historical timeline and associated
“time-travel paradoxes” are nothingburgers arising from faulty reasoning. Time travel is perfectly allowable in physics, and best of all, grandfathers are perfectly safe from their murderous timefaring grandchildren. It’s not because causality police swoop in in flying saucers to prevent grandfather-assassinations, or because a paranormal force causes the gun to jam at the crucial moment. It’s because there’s simply no historical backstory for a mischieviously paradox-causing misadventure in time. It can’t happen because it didn’t already happen.

Yet, all those fatal gunshots, echoing down through the generations of time-travel fiction and physicists’ thought experiments, have had the effect of warning us off: The past, if it can be visited, is therefore subject to alteration — so it probably can’t be visited … at least not safely. This has given us a flat-earth view of fourth dimension, and it has imposed a cognitive blockade on imagining traveling in it other than in the usual way — ploddingly, to grow old in a single direction along the one-way arrow of time. At best, we have been given comic-book fantasies of multiple forking timelines and alternative histories, a “multiverse” that lets us have the cake of time travel and eat it too.

One of the most interesting treatments of time travel in recent SF is William Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral. A gamer somewhere in the rural South in the mid 21st century named Flynne spends a few evenings helping her Marine vet brother beta-test a new “sim”: piloting a quadcopter defending a glamorous inhabitant of a futuristic high-rise from a swarm of insectlike paparazzi drones. The ultimate objective or point of the game is never clear to her, nor is it clear to her brother, who was hired by a mysterious company to play it. It isn’t just “some shooter” — and to Flynne, who is sick of game violence, it is weirdly satisfying just idly intercepting drones while observing the life and loves of the female character whose ultra-futuristic apartment she is defending. But on the second night of her play, she cannot protect the character from being gruesomely devoured by nanorobots that have managed to scale the building and get onto her balcony, seemingly with the help of the alluring woman’s male companion.

Realities that turn out to be simulations are the staple of postmodern SF, but this theme invites its antithesis: apparent simulations that turn out to be real. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is the most famous example of that premise, but The Peripheral takes it to a new, time- and mind-bending level: Disappointed at her failure to successfully defend her virtual target from attack, Flynne does not realize that the character whose apartment she was defending was (or, will be) real — the woman was not just some NPC. She witnessed an actual murder, one taking place across the ocean, in London … and seven decades in her future.

The Peripheral flickers back and forth between mid-21st century America and early-22nd Century London, where celebrity publicist Wilf Netherton seeks insights into the disappearance of the sister of one of his high-profile clients. In that future world, wealthy survivors of a late-21st Century global apocalypse called the Jackpot use an old quantum computer server in China (and dating to Flynne’s time period) to hire gamers in the past for odd telepresence jobs, such as drone-piloting, without ever being witting to what they are really doing. The missing sister of Wilf’s celeb client is the woman Flynne saw murdered on the balcony — so he uses the server to call Flynne, 70 years in the past, and find out what she saw. A police detective asks Wilf and his associates to send Flynne instructions for 3D-printing a virtual headset through which she can attend a celebration of the murdered woman’s life, via a telepresence android (the “peripheral” of the title); there, she may be able to identify the man who let the killer-nanobots into the victim’s flat. (Making the headset is no sweat for Flynne, who works at the local 3D printshop.)

The idea of communicating across time via something like a quantum server is a fascinating premise, and as we’ll see shortly, it could well be the real precursor to physical timefaring. But The Peripheral has one major flaw. Like many other time-travel storytellers, Gibson takes unnecessary pains to let himself off the paradox hook by having his characters live in divergent timelines once they have begun communicating across time. Wilf explains to Flynne that it is not really exactly her future he is calling from and that her timeline is a “stub,” branching off of his timeline.

Parallel timelines — or “continua” in the parlance of The Peripheral — can be thought of as pop-culture variants of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics first proposed in 1957 by a physics doctoral candidate named Hugh Everett: the idea that at every decision point in quantum reality, a particle takes every possible path, thus creating effectively infinite branching histories. Although it is a science-fictionally appealing way of understanding quantum mysteries, it may turn out that those mysteries arise instead from a kind of informational time travel at the smallest scales — more on this momentarily. I suggest that parallel timelines are really just another trope that needs to be jettisoned, like Ray Bradbury’s “assigned walkway,” so we can think rigorously about the problem of communicating or interacting across the fourth dimension.

22nd Century London in the Amazon TV adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2022)

The same self-consistency laws discovered by Igor Novikov for billiard balls traveling through wormholes will govern any kind of informational time travel, such as message from a future sender to a recipient in the past: The sender will always find that however their message affected the past is already part of their own backstory, which in most cases just means the diffuse background causal cloud of their society at whatever time point they happen to live. (Who really knows that many details about one’s own grandfather’s life, let alone the lives of one’s great and great great grandfathers, let alone anybody else’s? How would you ever know if anybody in the past had interacted in some way with a time traveler? How would they even know it?)

In fiction, multiple branching timelines were born from the need to escape grandfather paradoxes. Gibson just didn’t want to deal with these complexities, because as more of a cyberpunk writer, it’s not really his bag. But if there are no grandfather paradoxes — if the whole idea is a bugbear of faulty reasoning — then there’s no need for a “garden of forking paths” view of history. There is no inconsistency in a self-consistent universe. So, there is no longer any traumatic rupture that would somehow bounce or deflect history onto a new track, nothing that would create a “stub.”

Bathwater, Meet Baby

Gibson is most famous for his 1984 novel Neuromancer, which is widely considered to have been prophetic of the virtual worlds and cyberculture that took shape a couple decades later. Stubs notwithstanding, The Peripheral may be similarly prescient. An often-overlooked precursor to true, physical time travel using timeships or wormholes will likely be technologies that enable data transfer — communication as well as even virtual interactions — backwards and forwards across the fourth dimension. When this kind of informational time travel capability comes online, at scale, it could prove to be a decisive horizon for our civilization, technologically and societally.

Sufficiently advanced technology may literally conjure itself into being in the no-space and no-time of time loops, without anybody doing a lick of intellectual or technical work.

As we have seen, time travel is really all about backstories. To understand how quantum servers might work, and the effects these technologies could have, it is helpful to back up a bit and consider why people have so long disbelieved that anything of the sort could be possible. Some of the disbelief comes from those supposed time paradoxes. But more fundamental (and perhaps part of the reason those tropes have proliferated) are longstanding stigmas around the idea of any causation — even something as simple as a message — traveling from the future toward the past.

Information is just causation by another name; so when we are talking about sending a message back in time, we are talking about backwards causation. And the idea that some future cause could exert an effect backwards in the present is one that has been widely, almost universally, rejected by science ever since the Enlightenment. At the time of Isaac Newton, the idea was called teleology, and the only teleology that natural scientists could imagine had to do with God’s divine plan. Since the new rule in science was that God couldn’t be part of naturalistic explanations, teleology was thrown out along with Him.

This restriction worked fine for two centuries. Through the period when industrialism was ascendant, efficient causes — that is, causes “pushing” from the past — were sufficient to understand, predict, and control thermodynamic processes (i.e., involving heat and its transformations in work and its losses in entropy) and to build new technologies based on these processes.

But the Enlightenment’s machine models of cause-and-effect began to break down at the turn of the last century, around the time that physicists were making major leaps in their understanding of electricity and radiation. It was discovered that at the smallest scales in nature — the realm of photons and electrons and other subatomic particles — there was an unpredictable component, which the astronomer-writer James Jeans likened to the “play” in an untightened mechanism. The equations of electromagnetism are famously precise, but only for predicting a large aggregate of particles. The behavior of individual particles — or larger assemblages of particles that are “entangled” and thus act as one unity — can only be predicted by what is called a wavefunction, a hazy smear of possibilities. Even if you knew everything about the past history of an electron, for instance, you couldn’t completely predict what it would do next. This is the famous “uncertainty” that rules the domain of subatomic particles.

The most forceful personality among the brilliant minds of the first generation of what we now call quantum physicists was the Dane, Niels Bohr. Although there were many interpretations of quantum uncertainty, it was Bohr who dominated the conversation at physicists’ gatherings (such as the decisive Fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927), and it was his “Copenhagen Interpretation” that won out: We have to just accept that randomness is an intrinsic property of nature at the smallest scales. Only when a particle is subject to a final measurement or observation does something definite emerge from a prior cloud of wavy possibilities. It is from Bohr that we get the evocative but misleading notion that observation creates reality.*

Einstein hated Bohr’s idea, insisting that “God does not play dice” — he thought that there was a definite real world out there and preceding our observations. But Bohr’s personality prevailed, and physicists for decades, especially through the height of the Cold War when their services were funded for defense, were told to not question, not to hunt for other explanations or other interpretations for (what looked like) randomness in the quantum world. But many within that field quietly (or sometimes not so quietly) dissented. Murray Gell-Mann, in a 1976 Nobel lecture, declared that Bohr “brainwashed an entire generation of physicists” with his Copenhagen Interpretation. David Griffiths wrote in the Afterword to his widely taught Introduction to Quantum Mechanics that “It is entirely possible that future generations will look back, from the vantage point of a more sophisticated theory, and wonder how we could have been so gullible.” In a recent history of Bohr and his influence, David Ferry calls the Dane’s century-long domination of physics the “Copenhagen Conspiracy.”

I’m not a physicist, but my hunch is that the dissenters are correct. I approach things more as a psychoanalytic anthropologist, and the Copenhagen Interpretation has all the hallmarks of a collective hysterical defense mechanism against the taboo of teleology, or what we now more neutrally call retrocausation. There is mounting evidence for it, but for all kinds of psychological as well as cultural reasons, things going backwards really bother us. To avoid confronting such possibilities, we will do rather amazing mental gymnastics to keep things linear, and this goes for physicists as much as for other people. As we saw in Part 1 with the theory of visual perspective in 15th century Florence, scientific geniuses can promote actually absurd ideas to avoid confronting the realities of a new paradigm. Future historians of science may indeed look back on Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation and shake their heads at the absurdities that the avoidance of retrocausation led physicists — and the public — to accept.

Predictors

Retrocausation means that in addition to the efficient causes we intuitively understand and perceive — like balls hitting each other in sequence on a billiards table — particles like electrons and photons may also be affected or inflected by whatever they will encounter next in their tiny lives. The “uncertain” component of particles’ behavior may actually reflect these causes propagating from the future toward the past, interaction to interaction, on back. Except in rare circumstances, we can’t know exactly what those causes are, because it’s not the future yet — which is why they seem random (or causeless) to our eyes, stuck as we are in the present. And this is why testing retrocausation experimentally is difficult. But when you put constraints on those future causes — a technique now being used widely in quantum computing research called “post-selection” — you can design experiments to test the most mind-bending explanation of quantum weirdness.

In 2009, at the University of Rochester, a research team led by physicist John Howell passed a laser through a beam-splitter to create two identical beams. The amplitudes of both beams were “weakly” measured using extremely sensitive mirrors that could detect the subtle pressure of the photons bouncing off them, but then only one of the two beams was post-selected to receive a later “strong” measurement. When they looked at the results of the initial weak measurement, it turned out that the photons in that later-measured beam were considerably amplified compared to the beams in what, if this were a biomedical experiment, would be called the control group. Although the results were controversial, it suggests that the later measurement amplified those photons in their past.

In 2011, MIT engineering professor Seth Lloyd and colleagues used post-selection to demonstrate the possibility of sending information carried by a photon into that photon’s own past. On the analogy of a time traveler trying to kill its grandfather or younger self, Lloyd called their setup a “quantum gun.” Although it was only a few billionths of a second into the past, the results seemed to support that particles like photons can be influenced backwards in time by processes occurring subsequent to some outcome of interest. Per their prediction, no paradox occurred — “grandfathers are tough guys to kill.” As reported recently in New Scientist, Lloyd is now planning a further experiment that elaborates on these ideas.

In 2021, a friend of mine, neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, reported “causally ambiguous behavior” in trials she had conducted using a different kind of optical system that just shoots photons at a detector, through slits in a screen. It is the kind of setup used for variants of the famous “double slit experiment” that demonstrate light’s probabilistic, wavelike properties by making an interference pattern on the detector. There are especially intriguing versions of this experiment that show that photons seem to interfere with each other even when they are shot through the slits at different times, one by one, and this is the kind of setup Mossbridge used. What she found was that the interference pattern produced was different depending on how long she ran each trial of her experiment — that is, how long the apparatus was turned on. She couldn’t say conclusively that what she was detecting was photons interacting or interfering with each other — or themselves — across time, but that is one possible interpretation of the results she got.

Ted Chiang is an SF writer who addresses the question of time travel and its variants (e.g., precognition) rigorously and realistically. His very short story, “What’s Expected of Us” (in his collection Exhalation) is about a simple fidget-spinner-like toy called a Predictor, with a button and a light linked by a negative time delay — meaning it lights up a second before the button is pressed. With no way to trick or cheat the device, some users are troubled (to put it mildly) by what it reveals about the nonexistence of free will — we’ll come back to this. But the retrocausal behavior suggested by the findings by Howell, Lloyd, and Mossbridge could make such a device a reality. As I was writing this article, a team at the University of Toronto reported the results of an intriguing experimental finding that photons entering a cloud of supercooled rubidium atoms spent a “negative amount of time” in that medium before exiting. It means that they left the rubidium cloud before they entered — quite literally, a “negative time delay.”

Harnessing this kind of effect in a real technological application could be incredibly useful in such things as safety devices. Imagine for instance an airbag in your car that deploys a second in advance of a collision that has not been anticipated by the car’s standard safety systems, or an ejector seat that throws a fighter pilot to safety seconds before their plane is struck by an anti-aircraft laser. Predictive circuits in medical implants could sound an alert or deliver stabilizing medication immediately prior to an imminent cardiac arrest.

Note that I’m not talking about ordinary prediction, which gathers available evidence to calculate a probable or possible outcome, but a device that pre-sponds to an “already existing” future event. For the same reason you cannot change the timeline, you could not use such a device to prevent the pre-detected outcome. If the outcome never happens in the future, then there is nothing to foresee — it’s a permutation of the famous grandfather paradox. But you can prepare for an outcome to either mitigate its impact or be ready to capitalize on it when it occurs. As one might imagine, the first use of such devices will be to predict the outcomes of sporting events and fluctuations in the value of shares on a stock market. The first entrepreneur or company to build a reliable “future detector” will get very rich, very quickly, at least before the authorities detect something fishy.

Tie some anticipatory behavior of a group of mice or plants or algae to an outcome of real-world interest, and presto, you have a future detector.

Possibilities, Singularities

We live in a wired world, and the wiring that connects people across space — through emails, phone calls, virtual reality, and telepresence — may also be able to connect us across the fourth dimension. As Gibson envisioned, quantum computers could be the key.

A quantum computer is a matrix of subatomic particles like electrons that are entangled with each other, effectively scaling up the spooky properties of the quantum world and exploiting them for information-processing purposes. Oddly enough, the technical ability to construct these devices somewhat exceeds consensus about how exactly they work. Cambridge quantum philosopher Huw Price and his physicist colleague Ken Wharton, for example, argue that the entanglement that lets the particles in a quantum computer act in unison is not telepathy across space (as it is usually imagined) but instead a function of a kind of causal zig-zag back and forth through time. Nobel laureate Roger Penrose has recently articulated this view of entanglement, too. And indeed, among the properties quantum computers could capitalize on is the causal bidirectionality I mentioned above. Multiple research teams have found that causal order can be reversed using the entangled “qubits” that perform computation in these devices.

A simplistic way of putting it is that you could theoretically have a kind of output that preceded an input. And if that’s true, then thinking of quantum computers as just amped-up number crunchers could be missing the point. They might also be used to scale up the retro-signaling capabilities of something like a Predictor by many orders of magnitude. More or less as Gibson envisioned in The Peripheral (but minus the branching-fork continua), a quantum server might serve as a kind of interface, a chronophone or c-mail server, connecting future and past users.

Think of the possibilities: Meteorologists could use such a server to alert their colleagues in the past about destructive hurricanes, which would give affected communities time to prepare or evacuate. Seismologists could do the same to help mitigate the impact of earthquakes and tsunamis. And of course, if the police or national guard could get forewarnings of terror attacks, those too would become less threatening. Once again, by sending information back in time, you are not able to change history and prevent the threat before it occurred — a conceptual bug implanted by all those science-fiction novels and films of your youth. A quantum-computer-mediated version of the Precrime Unit from Philip K. Dick’s story “The Minority Report” would not, for instance, be able to actually prevent crimes from occurring. But you would be able to mount a preparatory response to mitigate or eliminate the damage or harm, or be ready to capture the criminal afterward.

This is what I meant in Part 1 by history gardening: Using time-travel technology to create conditions in the past for a better future that would have been unattainable otherwise. And the possibilities only multiply if you leave such a device plugged in for years or decades.

For instance, picture the following scenario: You are an epidemiologist in the late 21st century working for NICOID, the National Institute on Coronaviruses and Other Infectious Diseases. Our fragile world, reeling from the effects of runaway climate change, is now a tropical hothouse of rapidly evolving pathogens. There is no time to meet each new pandemic threat — they come hot on each other’s heels, new lethal viruses and antiobiotic-resistant bacterial strains being identified practically every month. But unlike earlier historical pandemics that you learned about in your school history holograms, the new ones are less of a danger thanks to that same kind of quantum server that saves people from hurricanes and earthquakes. Data on newly identified pathogens is fed to laboratories in the past, giving them time to develop and test vaccines and antidotes before they spread widely. Each new virus and superbug finds that humans’ immune systems are already pre-prepared, and the diseases fizzle before they are able to gain a foothold.

I offer these scenarios to spark your imagination — but again, our imagination doesn’t have to be exactly accurate; it just needs to motivate us. Using informational time travel technology to protect the public from natural and artificial disasters presupposes benevolent governmental authorities that place the safety and welfare of their citizens topmost. But there are obviously more nefarious or at least amoral possible uses of such technology, and when you have rival countries and factions vying for supremacy and gaming the time-travel system, things could get very complicated. They might already be complicated.

In The Peripheral, for instance, past histories in alternate continua are exploited as test beds for unethical and lucrative biomedical experimentation. The people in those alternate histories are expendable lab rats, and calling their worlds “stubs” makes it easier to “third-world” them. (Gibson borrowed the idea of exploiting the resources of alternate histories from a 1985 short story by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, “Mozart in Mirrorshades.”) But that kind of trans-temporal exploitation is perfectly possible within a single historical timeline. For instance, an amoral pharmaceutical company could test new drugs on some unwitting population, on another continent, or even in its own population, in its past. Defense contractors could test new weapons the same way. History shows that greedy countries and corporations hardly need other timelines; they can and do “third world” the third world, all the time. The past — and remember, we here now are “the past” of our timefaring future — could readily be a new kind of third world.

All this is to say nothing of the strategic and security priorities that, in all likelihood, will trump many of the possible social benefits of informational time travel technology. Quantum servers could transform warfare, with rival factions tweaking the past to produce favorable outcomes for their side in the immediate or near future. In geopolitical conflicts, advance knowledge of many enemy actions is not acted upon — and human pawns are sometimes sacrificed — in order to keep the intelligence source secret. Already there is a wide suspicion among many in the UFO and UFO-adjacent world that potentially transformative technologies like antigravity and free energy have been developed but are either hoarded for secretive military purposes or suppressed by entrenched industries fearful of their own obsolescence. Of all exotic technologies, time-travel will be (or, who knows, perhaps already is) the most secret of the most secret for the nation states and other actors possessing it. They will be very loathe to tip their hand.

Whether they are still on the horizon or already exist deep within the black world and/or in the hands of foreign governments, the first quantum servers that are switched on (and protected from disconnection) could be used not only to gain military and financial advantage over adversaries but also to borrow further technological knowhow from future users. This could make runaway technological development envisioned and feared around AI seem almost trivial, and it is another reason why governments may try hard to keep this technology secret. In fact, it really wouldn’t be technological “development” in the usual sense but spontaneous emergence arising from a kind of bootstrapping — the same kind of bootstrapping depicted by James Cameron in his Terminator films, where debris from future AI discovered by a defense contractor is used to back-engineer that very AI, in a loop. It is more like technological fast-forwarding, skipping over the intermediate steps that our present, linear understanding of science and knowledge rests on.

Given that a future user of such technology cannot send a message to an earlier point in time than when the computer was switched on, it creates something like an event horizon around future technology. Michael P. Masters, a physical anthropologist at Montana Tech and the leading exponent of the time-travel interpretation of the UFO phenomenon, describes the development of physical time travel as potentially creating a “super-technological singularity”: Future-human time travelers visiting us in the present could be delivering future technology, or at least, leaving it behind, enabling us to reverse-engineer it. Many of the questions currently occupying the UFO community — rumors of flying saucer crash retrievals and back-engineering programs — become very interesting in light of such Terminator-like possibilities. But informational time travel via quantum servers or perhaps other, simpler, future-detection technologies may be all that is needed to precipitate such a singularity.

Weirdly, as our civilization approaches this singularity, we may be nearing the end of ordinary science as we know it: The evolutionary processes through which, Karl Popper insisted, scientific knowledge accumulates may be replaced by a new informational regime in which the secrets of nature are just given to us by our descendants — kind of like the scenario in the TV series Dark, where the inventor of a time machine is just given the principles of time travel by his older self, without ever having done the work of solving time travel. Such a scenario is, believe it or not, perfectly allowed — and might even be pervasive — in a universe that allows retrocausation. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic, and he may have been more right than he knew. Sufficiently advanced technology may literally conjure itself into being in the no-space and no-time of time loops, without anybody doing a lick of intellectual or technical work as we usually understand it. Work is a thermodynamic thing, but our timefaring future may literally be a post-work world, with new technological boons popping into being from nowhere and from nothing.

The fact that these transformations will be (/already are?) unevenly distributed and possibly kept extremely secret by those who hold them is one reason to pay special attention to the simpler, Predictor-type future-detecting devices I mentioned. These could be more accessible to us little people who live and work far outside the deep-black world of hypersecretive aerospace companies and government agencies with their billion-dollar, supercooled quantum computers. With the help of some experiment.com donations, Mossbridge was able to purchase the instrument for her time-traveling photons experiment from a science equipment company. Once our eyes are opened to the possibilities, there may be myriad other mechanisms for future-detectors hiding in plain sight, including even in nature. I argued in my book Time Loops that your brain is probably such a device; so, likely, are much simpler biological systems. The latter may be the simplest to work with: Tie some anticipatory behavior of a group of mice or plants or algae to an outcome of real-world interest, and presto, you have a future detector. All it takes is imagination and the willingness to set aside the cultural stigma of teleology.

The (Post-)Human Factor

Besides the temporal horizon I mentioned, there are other important limitations of purely informational interaction (communication) across time, and they hinge on decidedly non-technological factors of the humans or posthumans doing the communicating. One concerns trust: How will recipients of a message in the present trust that the future sender (even their future self) is who they say they are, or that the sender has their best interests at heart? How can we trust that the server will not have been hacked at some point farther ahead and that a forewarning about some impending opportunity or disaster is not misdirection designed to lead us astray — perhaps a disinfo gambit in some time war? Mossbridge discusses the complexities of trust in time travel — and how to build trust across time through unconditional love — in her fascinating Medium article, “How to Avoid the Time Wars.”

The issues go beyond trust, though, and they carry us back to those paradoxes that don’t exist but haunt our thinking anyway: Information cannot reflux back in time in a way that would lead to its foreclosure in the future. Often, though, we want it to — and that’s even true, oddly enough, when outcomes are positive. Our neurotic assertion of our own free will demands we always try to change (past or future) history or otherwise “do something new.” This is why I always point out that in understanding retrocausation, time travel, and time loops, Freud is just as important as Einstein. Messages that are successfully sent across time may always take curved paths through sense and sensibility. It means a past user of a quantum computer might not be able to get a clear, unambiguous, completely trusted message from their future self. And a user in the future might not be sufficiently motivated to initiate an action in the past that they believed had already been done and accomplished in their present.

We seem to be hardwired, perhaps as a legacy of millions of years foraging and hunting for food, to be motivated by the unexpected and unknown. Our brains’ reward system thrives on moments when our expectation is undercut somehow, and dopamine drives us toward the incentive of discovery. Building on this rewarding signal of the unexpected is the further payoff of seizing new opportunities and tinkering with the expected. It is probably our natural revulsion to being forced to do something that someone else (including our own future self) has mandated that leads to the natural thought process of wanting to thwart history, the specific madness of Stephen Hawking’s “mad scientist” and, really, the madness underlying all of those misleading thought experiments about changing the past or bilking the future. People need to feel free, to not feel constrained or like they are going through motions. Feeling like you’re acting a part in a play is a form of dissociation that is symptomatic of depression.

This is the issue that Chiang tackles in “What’s Expected of Us.” A third of Predictor users slump into a kind of silent immobility called akinetic mutism, as playing with this time toy has destroyed their prior belief in their own free will. Not being driven to a state of depression (or madness) by the self-consistency laws governing the universe will be part of what is culturally and perhaps even genetically selected for in our timefaring future. At least, timefarers may arrange things to avoid putting themselves and each other in situations where they are called upon to do things that they know have already been accomplished. And indeed, to work reliably, trans-temporal communication may need to be arranged with the kinds of double-and triple-blinding protocols that you would find in psychology experiments. The sender of a future message would be unknown to the past recipient, and vice versa. In some ways it will be advantageous to simply automate things, taking the neurotic humans out of the system altogether … but that of course could be dangerous for all the reasons Cameron envisioned with his Terminator films, and it brings us back to all those questions of trust.

Over the longer haul, it is possible that by somehow bypassing or rewiring that motivational circuitry, Homo Chrononauticus could become more obedient to the future (and past), less interested in surprise and more interested in fulfilling what has been predicted and predetermined. Chiang’s “A Story of Your Life,” the basis for the movie Arrival, is a lovely examination of precognition and an alien civilization that is able to experience itself in 4D. For such beings, seeing the future actually brings with it a sense of urgency to fulfill what is foreseen — something like Nietzsche’s amor fati or love of (one’s own) fate, even when that fate includes tragedy or misfortune. I know a precog who consciously lives this way, seeking to build what she calls “congruence” with her future and past self. It is not too unlike Mossbridge’s “love” in her vision of a time-traveling future that avoids time wars and other darker possibilities.

I assured readers of my book Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self that Predictor-like devices, as troubling as they seem at first, may in fact be useful physical koans, propelling users to an enlightenment state that transcends our current hangups about free will. Zen satori experiences often are realizations of a block universe that profoundly challenges such notions, but in a blissful and paradoxically liberating way. Akinetic mutism, in other words, could just be the sullen teenager phase in our maturation as a species, as we’re getting used to the new reality and evolving toward a newer, wiser, timefaring self.

Continue Reading: Becoming Timefaring (Part 3): Timewrinkles, Timeships, and the Tesseractuality in the Room

A Heptapod addresses a human. From the movie Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

Note

* Don’t get too excited by the idea of “observation creating reality.” It doesn’t mean that consciousness somehow plays a role in “collapsing the wavefunction” as it is often called. Most physicists now agree that observation can include just an ordinary interaction with the environment, including a collision with another particle (sometimes called “decoherence”).

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Eric Wargo
Eric Wargo

Written by Eric Wargo

Eric Wargo has a PhD in anthropology and is the author of three books: Time Loops, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self, and most recently, From Nowhere.

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

You and I know all this, Eric, we're the only people on Medium from the future. And you've done such a fine job of mystification it looks as though it will stay that way for some time.

She couldn’t say conclusively that what she was detecting was photons interacting or interfering with each other — or themselves — across time, but that is one possible interpretation o...

Hi Eric!
I love this article -- especially the term "history gardening!"
I have new data conclusively showing these photons are entangled with each other through time (not sure I would use "interacting" or "interfering" here).
Also 2 replications by outside labs! We should talk!
Love, Julia