117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

This week’s guest is Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. Contrary to your most likely first impression based on the title of the book alone, this is a supremely carefully constructed argument that anticipates its critics, understands statistics and their abuse, appeals to our desire for simplicity in scientific explanations, and single-handedly reorganizes the entire field of parapsychological research beneath a new and rational umbrella that allows for major weirdness without sacrificing mechanistic causation or parsimony. Telepathy and spooky action at a distance, Jungian synchronicity and many worlds quantum physics all get re-evaluated under Wargo’s tesseract-brain model, in which there’s no such thing as entanglement, but living systems co-opt quantum post-selection to “steer” toward evolutionarily significant events. If you have ever dreamt of something that then happened in your waking life, this episode’s for you. And if you think that time’s an arrow and this all sounds like high nonsense, this episode is also for you.I can’t possibly attempt to cover all the subjects we discuss in these two hours, but here are books and essays that we reference (some of which I haven’t read):Eric Wargo - Time Loopshttps://www.amazon.com/Time-Loops-Precognition-Retrocausation-Unconscious/dp/1938398920J. Scott Turner - Purpose & Desirehttps://www.amazon.com/Purpose-Desire-Something-Darwinism-Explain/dp/0062651560(I have to make a personal note that without having read this book, I’ve read enough reviews to caution anyone against taking it as legitimate science. I’ve argued for the importance of beauty and desire, purpose and effort in the evolutionary process – and I’ve argued evolution in general does have a kind of direction. So I’m sympathetic to the author’s desire to re-introduce these ideas into the discussion. But from everything I can tell this particular book misrepresents evolutionary theory in its attempts to get where it wants to go, and I can’t support that.)Paul Davies - The Goldilocks Enigmahttps://www.amazon.com/The-Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Right/dp/0713998830%Matthew Fox - “The Return of the Black Madonna”http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-centurySeth Lloyd, et al. - “The quantum mechanics of time travel through post-selected teleportation”https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615Eric Wargo - “Dream Paleontology”http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4215Eric Wargo - “What Lies Under The Skin”http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3198Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfieldAdditional Music: “It All Turned Out All Right” by Michael Garfieldhttps://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/it-all-turned-out-all-rightSupport this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes (and the last ten minutes of this conversation):https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe