The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Thought Experiments”
The Passion of the Space Jockey
Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H.R. Giger by Eric Wargo The following is a paper presented in 2018 at the Rice University conference Gnostic Afterlives in American Religion and Culture. A final, fully sourced version appears in the journal Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 5(1), 2020. Giger paintings are used with permission […]
Time Portals, Time Drones, and Timeships
The thrust of much futurism since the 1950s has been toward space exploration and the prospect of colonizing Mars and exploiting the solar system’s resources. But I think the real final frontier for our species (and any intelligent, technological civilization) is going to be Time. Our destiny, if we do not destroy ourselves, is to […]
Edges of Forever: Time Travel and the Stories That Might Have Been
“We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”—Adam Phillips, Missing Out Ship’s Log: star-date 3139.0. Having tracked unusual spacetime ripples to their source, the Starship Enterprise now threatens to be ripped apart as it struggles to maintain its orbit over an uncharted, weirdly time-disturbing planet. There is chaos on the bridge. Mr. […]
Wormholes, Freud, and Jacob the Dreamer
In the 1980s, when the possibility of wormholes began to capture physicists’ imaginations, there was the inevitable concern about what such objects might mean for causality in an Einsteinian, time-elastic universe. Wormholes through space meant, inevitably, wormholes through time. And so, naturally, people thought of the grandfather paradox, that strange fantasy of killing one’s patriarchs […]
Welcome to the Noöverse
Check out my article in the March 2018 issue of EdgeScience, on why the extraterrestrial hypothesis should be kept on the table (with some modifications). (And thanks to all my readers who have been patient during my writing hiatus. The book is almost done!)
Master Minkowski’s Wild Ducks (Zen and the Glass Block Universe)
Probably because I am thinking about (and trying to finish a book on) precognition and retrocausation and the glass block universe they seem to imply, I keep finding my thoughts returning to a famous Zen koan from 8th-century China. You will have heard it: Master Ma and his student Pai Chang were walking along when […]
Stories Latent in the Landscape: Spirits, Time Slips, and “Super-Psi”
An alternative explanation sometimes given when mediums provide veridical information about deceased persons is “super-psi”—the idea that the medium is actually obtaining the information clairvoyantly and/or telepathically (i.e., from the heads of their sitters). Super-psi has also been used to account for cases of apparent reincarnation: A child psychically acquires information about a dead person […]
The Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup
Stand brave, life-liver, bleeding out your days in the river of time. Stand brave: Time moves both ways … —Joanna Newsom, “Time, as a Symptom” The philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who influenced Phil Dick, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and other science-fictional minds of the mid-20th Century, named “time binding” as a characteristic human activity. He was […]
Wyrd, Post-Selection, and the Quantum Trickster
English is blessed with a large and fascinating family of w-r words connoting twisting, turning, and turning-into (in the sense of becoming)—think writhing wriggling worms and the wrath of wraiths. (See my ancient post about “werewords” if you are curious.) My favorite of this family is Wyrd, which comes from the Old English weorthan, “to […]
Psi’s Big Guns: Sleep Paralysis and Astral Time Travel
A year ago I wrote at length about out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) in the context of alchemy and the hermetic tradition. I confessed that I was a fence-sitter on the question of what they are—lucid dreams that just feel more real than most (i.e., corresponding to real physical environments) or actually what they feel like, some […]
