Can Some People See the Future?
A rational argument for clairvoyance
You can catch a ball
I am not one to believe in mystical or paranormal phenomena — as far as I can tell, my phenomena are all normal.
But there is nothing paranormal about the argument I’m about to make, which is part of why it seems worth making.
The argument is this:
We can predict the future.
Maybe that seems a bit trite: we know we can. We predict a lot of things to varying degrees of accuracy — the weather, for example.
But I mean it in the sense that some individuals have the capacity to predict the outcome of future events with a significant amount of certainty and in a way that isn’t just guessing.
Paranormal
The problem, of course, is that this claim has generally been placed in the realm of the paranormal, and the individuals who claim to possess such skills tend not to offer or seek normal explanations for such claims.
Again, I’m not proposing to argue for some paranormal or mystical explanation. But there is a line of reasoning that leads to the possibility that certain individuals can predict the future, which is what I aim to present.
So bear with me.
Another problem with seeking a scientific explanation for “paranormal” phenomena is that proponents of the phenomena (especially those with a financial stake in others believing in it and in their abilities) seem concerned that the purpose of any investigation is purely aimed at debunking their claims, without any real consideration.
Or they cling to the idea that there is some kind of separate, magical process by which such things take place, and that to seek out a normal, physical, scientific explanation is to reveal one’s ignorance of these special processes and perhaps to also do some injustice to them.
This concern accompanies the sentiment that a rational, scientific approach to understanding reality destroys the magic of it.
But that sentiment, in turn, exposes a misunderstanding of what science is, of what a scientific explanation is, of what science is interested in, and of what it means for an explanation to be cast in “physical” terms.
Indiscriminate Science
Science, in its unbiased form, is interested in everything that occurs.
That means things actually need to be happening in some physical sense — dragons are not in the interest of science because there are no living, fire-breathing ones available to submit under scientific inquiry.
If things are real, and they are within the realm of things that we humans can detect — or could detect given the requisite level of technological sophistication — then there is no reason for science not to care about it.
(Science might be interested in the belief in dragons, because the belief is happening, but there’s no value in investigating the possibility of such phenomena in reality.)
Of course, our current level of technological sophistication matters; it allows us to investigate phenomena outside our human sensory capacities. And by dictating how we investigate those phenomena, it also dictates which phenomena we investigate.
Hence, what science chooses to investigate is heavily skewed in favour of things for which we already have “detectors”, in the broadest sense.
However, it is very likely that there are interactions — physical ones — that we have not yet detected, or do not yet have the technical sophistication to measure.
Information
Either way, when we detect something, what we’re really interacting with, and what we’re really interested in, is not the physical thing itself, but the information that it carries.
Information isn’t physical, but it must be transmitted by physical means — you have to move this flag or press this button or have that retina get hit by a photon to have this neuron spark that one and so on.
And this is the first important brick in my argument:
Reality is full of information.
Importantly, information sources — light, sound, heat, chemical changes — are what organisms, including ourselves, tap into in order to navigate the world.
Language, for example, we acquire by analysing both the sounds around us and the interactions between the people making those sounds to figure out what those sounds relate to.
Generally:
Information comes in, some analysis occurs — usually unconsciously — and some understanding or prediction pops into our consciousness.
There may be information sources which are difficult to measure or for which the physical interactions are difficult to detect.
There may be some that scientific disciplines have traditionally not been interested in.
There may be some which are so complex that we haven’t yet been able to decipher them.
Or there may be sources which some people are better at tapping into than others.
For example, there are mathematical prodigies who seem to be able to extract and analyse information about the world rapidly without any conscious deliberation.
People like Daniel Tammet. Such people are rare, but they exist.
Of course, it’s easier to measure and prove abilities that relate to mathematics because you can check the math and the math doesn’t change. But the outcomes of future events are the result of extremely complex interactions. So the possibility of being able to do with future events what Daniel Tammet does with mathematics is very difficult to measure.
Back to The Future
To talk about the future — and to make my argument — we first need to accept a few more assumptions.
Of course, these assumptions are up for debate, but they’re not unreasonable given our experiences of reality.
The first is that:
Past events cause future events
One thing causes another and the direction of that causality is from the past into the future — revolutionary, I know.
This might seem obvious, but if we accept this assumption, we must imagine that everything that is happening now is the result of some past cause.
Which means that all future events have their cause either in the present or in the past.
Another way to say this is that the future is already determined.
This assumption is generally called determinism. And although it has a long history of debate, it’s difficult to make a strong case against it without seeming to contradict basic causality.
So until some fundamental property of reality is determined that states that causality is a lie or that it’s only local, or that consciousness has some capacity to influence the course of anything, it only makes sense to assume that:
Everything that has happened and that will happen was determined long ago.
Catching Balls
This might seem like a big assumption, but it’s basis — that past events cause future events — seems as a priori as it gets:
When I press the keys of this keyboard, I assume that my pressing them will (and is) leading to the appearance of the letters and words on the screen.
When I throw a ball, I assume that my throwing it with a certain amount of force in a certain direction will be the cause of its destination.
And, when you try to catch that ball, you attempt to predict the future.
Importantly, you do it with a certain amount of accuracy, precision, and foresight.
This series of events is well-accepted and nothing about it is considered paranormal — it’s just called physics.
Things like this — catching a ball — you can do without thinking: you don’t know how you do it, but you do it.
You may also have an intuition about many other characteristics of the ball that would normally require prior physical interaction with it, like its weight, for example.
You can predict the future
You can do it by analysing information that you’re not consciously aware of analysing, or information that is not directly available to your senses.
This is true not just for catching balls:
Some people also have the ability to walk into a room and know that someone is upset with them.
Or to get home and realise something is wrong without knowing what.
Or to have deep intuitions about a specific area of expertise.
You can also get it wrong
If you’ve ever failed to catch a ball, or you’ve caught something you thought would be heavy but wasn’t, you know that it’s possible to fail to predict something you otherwise normally can.
This is broadly accepted as fine: we develop abilities slowly, and part of that learning comes from failing.
When you or someone else fails to catch a ball, you don’t think that the ability doesn’t exist. You just think that, this time, the prediction machine that is our brains didn’t get it right.
That’s a big part of what the brain is — a prediction machine.
But, importantly, it’s a prediction machine and not a know-the-future-perfectly machine.
Again, the reason why we can do any of this is because reality is full of information: we know a ball is heavy when we see it drop to the ground and make a thud — we get visual and auditory information that conveys as much.
This is a trivial example, but the same logic extends to highly complex things.
Which brings us back to the extremely complex interactions that are responsible for the outcomes of future events, and to the rare people who can tap into and analyse extremely complex sources of information.
Clairvoyance
With all that in mind, here’s the argument:
The future is determined.
The past and present determine the future.
Reality is full of information.
Information available in the present can tell you about the future (given the requisite analysis).
People (brains) are organisms that tap into and analyse information sources in order to make predictions about the future.
Some people can tap into and analyse information sources in a way seemingly incomprehensible to others.
Therefore:
Some people may be able to predict the outcomes of future events with a significant degree of accuracy, with the occasional error, via a process that isn’t just guessing, without being consciously aware of the analysis that produced that prediction.
Or, in fewer words:
Some people may be able to predict the future.
Not because they’re in communication with the dead or with aliens or because they’re from the future, or whatever other magical explanation they or anyone else might wish to give for the ability.
But because the present contains information about the future and they, without knowing how or why, can analyse that information to make successful predictions that are greater than chance.
Nothing about that argument requires paranormal explanations or magical thinking.
And hence there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take the possibility seriously.
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