The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “The Future”
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 […]
Big in Japan
Check out the very fun conversation I had last year with John Craig on his Japanese webcast Real Rover, about all things time-loopy. We discuss retrocausation, alchemy, Zen, and the Long Self that precognition gives access to. Enjoy! ***
What’s Expected of Us in a Block Universe: Intuition, Habit, & ‘Free Will’
Ted Chiang is an SF writer after my own heart. At every stage in my own investigation of time loops, someone sends me yet another Chiang story that addresses exactly the issues I’ve been working on. What’s more, his stories seem to act as attractors for precognitive and time-looping experiences. I’m sure his new collection […]
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 […]
What Was Your Original Face on Mars?—Zen and the Prophetic Sublime
The famous “Face on Mars,” first photographed by the Viking orbiters in 1976, was the object of much speculation in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be. After it was identified by Richard C. Hoagland, the Face became the central icon in a narrative of ancient global destruction—perhaps nuclear war—that, some suggested, may have […]
The Time Eye: Nuts and Bolts of a Biological Future Detector
Rubbing my temples and squinting, I foresee that no less a science writer than James Gleick will very shortly be publishing a book called Time Travel. Unlike his most famous book, Chaos, which was incredibly forward looking—introducing a whole generation to a really cool new concept, “the butterfly effect” (i.e., the way a butterfly flapping […]
Lost in Translation (or, Don’t Look for a Matrix of Meaning)
I have been arguing that present experience contains associative traces of emotional events ahead of us in time; we are detecting (faintly) the future—the real future, not just some imaginatively forecast future—at all moments, mostly beneath the level of conscious awareness. But because the retrocausality implied in this model is so “hard to think” (and […]
The Phil Dick Circuit and the Future of Precognitive Technology
Much of the skepticism surrounding quantum neuroscience is that its aim is generally to explain consciousness—a tall, confused, and some would say impossibly misguided order. Quantum explanations for consciousness invariably require large-scale coherence—that is, entanglement—across the whole brain or at least between large populations of neurons. Quantum wet blankets point out that this can only […]
