Eric Wargo Ç 1 REVIEW

Re dreamers and writers literally remember their future This landmark study explores the principles that allow the future to affect the present and the present to affect the past without causing paradox It also deconstructs the powerful taboos that for. Causality is a deep mystery fraught with philosophical conundrums Just look at the topic causality on wikipedia There is no agreement on what causality is All physicalist theories end in infinite regress or magic which doesn t explain anything Then there are related Big uestions free will and the hard problem of consciousness This book fails to address any of these uestions in regards to retro causation whatever that means I would recommend Hoffman s book the Case Against Reality

SUMMARY Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

Time Is Not What You Think It Is Neither Are YouWelcome to a world where participants in psychology experiments respond to pictures they haven’t seen yet where physicists influence the past behavior of a light beam by measuring its photons now and whe. I was reluctant to buy Eric Wargo s book Decades of attempts to ground the paranormal or experimental research in parapsychology or Asian wisdom traditions in uantum mechanics has left me cold I often finished one of those books with the feeling that I ended up right back where I started no wiser but with countless hours of my life gone forever that may have been better spent doing something anything else So decades ago I stopped reading such booksI am pleased to report that I did not get that feeling after reading Eric Wargo s book It is beautifully written and extensively researched Wargo is a professional science writer and his book reads like a popular science book for intelligent readers He writes with wit heart and an enviable intellect I was happy to learn about many new hypotheses theories and research findings in a broad range of sciences biology physics and experimental psychology as the author offered scientific grounding for an impossible idea future events in one s life can influence a past eventWhat struck me about this book is that it self consciously attempts to ground precognition in scientific materialism and causality There is no facile retreat into Jung s meaningless acausal principle of synchronicity There is no talk here of Higher Selves or of consciousness separate from the body that somehow filters into it a departure from if not a direct rebuke of the filter theory of FWH Myers and Jeffrey Kripal In fact in several passages there seems to be skepticism about whether consciousness itself is a meaningful term at all for something that truly exists instead being a leftover or default term we use when we have depleted our linguistic and conceptual efforts to grasp subjective experience Skepticism admittedly muted but still audible in Wargo s text about consciousness itself removes this book from than a century of occultist Theosophical and New Age romantic reifications as well as speculations from uantum physicists who have glibly invoked the termI am not sure how many readers will pick up on the author s foundational materialism mainly because they may not want to It is based on the argument that we are all as is everything in the cosmos comprised of atoms and subatomic particles and therefore materially bound to the bizarre mysteries of uantum physics too Wargo grounds his time loops hypothesis about precognitionretrocausation in Darwinian evolutionary biology as well again revealing his adoption of materialism and causality as principle assumptions Precognition is about enhancing personal survival The emphasis here is on the personal It is about warnings of steep entropy gradients in the landscape of the near future an early warning system that alerts us to death or other dangerous things like explosions or fires in which entropy is speeded up and atoms rip apart death is sometimes referred to as allostatic collapse a term that conjures a fantasy of it as something like an explosion that makes a noise and releases photons that can be detected with a psychic retina There are no claims in this book for precognition being associated with spiritual development or as evidence for life after death There are no grand mystical or soteriological claims for precognition It occurs it just exists as a fact and can potentially be explained within the framework of what we already know about physics and biology though these sciences are incomplete and are subject to changePerhaps the most delightful aspect of this book is the many anecdotes of precognitive experiences culled from the biographies of literary Norman Mailer and entertainment figures like Alec Guinness and many other fascinating people I had never known about Dunne s famous but dry and difficult book about the nature of time as interpreted through the study of his own precognitive dreams is summarized and explained to us with loving care by the authorCG Jung gets an entire chapter devoted to him and the author intelligently demonstrates the emptiness of Jung s synchronicity concept as well as those of his collective unconscious and the archetypes Jungians will not like their security blankets ripped from them but there really does come a point in time when they must emerge from the amnion as Wargo terms it or vat of cotton candy as I prefer to imagine it and learn to read about things other than Jung Critical thinking skills that may enable them to view Jung s ideas in a broader context perhaps even to the point of rejecting them might actually develop through reading non Jungian literature like TIME LOOPS as first one pseudopod then another tentatively slithers out of the Jungian womb and feels for a firm footing Wargo extends Jungians a helping hand out of the amnion as he deconstructs Jung s famous anecdote about a scarab beetle knocking at a window and presenting it to a patient who has just told him about a dream she had of a scarab beetlePerhaps the most impressive aspect of the book is the summary of findings and theories in uantum physics that describe time as capable of flowing in both directions Admittedly most of this is still theory than substance despite cloud chamber Kodak moments capturing particles apparently moving backward in time but the survey of current thinking about this problem is helpful to those of us who have no background in uantum physics The author devotes many pages to a deep and detailed distillation of notions and findings in uantum physics in an engaging way However this is also the weakness of the book The author is not a uantum physicist and we therefore must trust his selection of concepts from physics as well as his explanations of them because most readers will not have that expertise I certainly do not But I found myself liking the author and as I read into his book and for purely subjective reasons I am willing to trust him despite my ignorance However I must admit as used to happen long ago when I read books invoking uantum mechanics for all manner of unexplained and seemingly paranormal events my eyes did glaze over and I found myself skipping pages because my own ignorance about these matters meant I could not contextualize or validate the author s claims That is entirely my problem my weakness not the author sRetrocausation in personal experience is next to impossible to conceptualize It is also difficult to validate with current methods of science The nomothetic bias in science particularly in psychology and parapsychology abhors ideographic data no matter how stunning and true they may be As the author notes precognitive experiences are deeply personal and the meaning of them is difficult to communicate to others This means as the author notes we are left with mostly anecdotal evidence I agree with the author that this does not invalidate the reality of the phenomenon But it ain t gonna make people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson happyThe reliance on non faslifiable anecdotal evidence inevitably leads one to turn to hermeneutical tools for the metaphorical grounding of the operation of time loops However by their very concern with meaning they too are non falsifiable and make causal claims that cannot be verified objectively think Freudian Jungian or Lacanian psychogenesis or the spirit world So which to choose And why In the end for all of us who turn to such hermeneutical discourses it s personal And it s complicated The author relies on Freud and Lacan in particular I found these sections to be the least convincing to me but of course as befits the spirit of hermeneutics that is a deeply personal opinion and may not be shared by others As I say it s personal And it s complicatedIf there is one criticism of the author s approach it would be that he tends to rely too heavily on retrocausative time loops as a grand perhaps monocausal interpretation for almost everything There are few boundary conditions to it which befits such a phenomenon but we can never rule it out of any situation or experience including the one I am having right now as I write this review Did I just change my past after writing that last sentence Did I just engage in an act of retrocausation perhaps tipping me in the direction of ordering this book on last week I hope so I personally very much like feeling like I am the Demiurge Freud Jung and so many others have demonstrated what can happen when theories jump the shark and slide into mission creep explaining everything is essentially explaining almost nothing at all I am in favor of Eric Wargo s time loops hypothesis but less so for some aspects of the causal theory he proposes for it However I will store it with admiration alongside other cherished imaginings of the mysteries of the universe in my cognitive tool kit and will reach for it only occasionally and judiciouslyFinal verdict Eric Wargo s TIME LOOPS is not a Kuhnian paradigm shift A better metaphor for the book is Neurath s boat So in that spirit I offer the follow suggestion If you have a precognitive dream of your inevitable death in which you are a passenger on the HMS Neurath and it hits an iceberg fear not The ship has only hit Minkowski s 4D glass block universe No harm will come to your atoms They will always exist recombining into new spaces and times wriggling worm like through Minkowski s block into new adventures As you read this you will realize you have swerved once again surviving a slide into a steep entropy gradient Feeling traumatized means you are still here so embrace your feeling hug it you lucky survivor Feeling traumatized is your reward for escaping death so don t mope gloat You ARE Neurath s boat Enjoy your day A House of My Own Stories from My Life just exists as a fact and can potentially be explained within the framework of what we already know about physics and biology though these sciences are incomplete and are subject to changePerhaps the most delightful aspect of this book is the many anecdotes of precognitive experiences culled from the biographies of literary Norman Mailer and entertainment figures like Alec Guinness and many other fascinating people I had never known about Dunne s famous but dry and difficult book about the nature of time as interpreted through the study of his own precognitive dreams is summarized and explained to us with loving care by the authorCG Jung gets an entire chapter devoted to him and the author intelligently demonstrates the emptiness of Jung s synchronicity concept as well as those of his collective unconscious and the archetypes Jungians will not like their security blankets ripped from them but there really does come a point in time when they must emerge from the amnion as Wargo terms it or vat of cotton candy as I prefer to imagine it and learn to read about things other than Jung Critical thinking skills that may enable them to view Jung s ideas in a broader context perhaps even to the point of rejecting them might actually develop through reading non Jungian literature like TIME LOOPS as first one pseudopod then another tentatively slithers out of the Jungian womb and feels for a firm footing Wargo extends Jungians a helping hand out of the amnion as he deconstructs Jung s famous anecdote about a scarab beetle knocking at a window and presenting it to a patient who has Under Her Command (The Bosss Pet, just told him about a dream she had of a scarab beetlePerhaps the most impressive aspect of the book is the summary of findings and theories in uantum physics that describe time as capable of flowing in both directions Admittedly most of this is still theory than substance despite cloud chamber Kodak moments capturing particles apparently moving backward in time but the survey of current thinking about this problem is helpful to those of us who have no background in uantum physics The author devotes many pages to a deep and detailed distillation of notions and findings in uantum physics in an engaging way However this is also the weakness of the book The author is not a uantum physicist and we therefore must trust his selection of concepts from physics as well as his explanations of them because most readers will not have that expertise I certainly do not But I found myself liking the author and as I read into his book and for purely subjective reasons I am willing to trust him despite my ignorance However I must admit as used to happen long ago when I read books invoking uantum mechanics for all manner of unexplained and seemingly paranormal events my eyes did glaze over and I found myself skipping pages because my own ignorance about these matters meant I could not contextualize or validate the author s claims That is entirely my problem my weakness not the author sRetrocausation in personal experience is next to impossible to conceptualize It is also difficult to validate with current methods of science The nomothetic bias in science particularly in psychology and parapsychology abhors ideographic data no matter how stunning and true they may be As the author notes precognitive experiences are deeply personal and the meaning of them is difficult to communicate to others This means as the author notes we are left with mostly anecdotal evidence I agree with the author that this does not invalidate the reality of the phenomenon But it ain t gonna make people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson happyThe reliance on non faslifiable anecdotal evidence inevitably leads one to turn to hermeneutical tools for the metaphorical grounding of the operation of time loops However by their very concern with meaning they too are non falsifiable and make causal claims that cannot be verified objectively think Freudian Jungian or Lacanian psychogenesis or the spirit world So which to choose And why In the end for all of us who turn to such hermeneutical discourses it s personal And it s complicated The author relies on Freud and Lacan in particular I found these sections to be the least convincing to me but of course as befits the spirit of hermeneutics that is a deeply personal opinion and may not be shared by others As I say it s personal And it s complicatedIf there is one criticism of the author s approach it would be that he tends to rely too heavily on retrocausative time loops as a grand perhaps monocausal interpretation for almost everything There are few boundary conditions to it which befits such a phenomenon but we can never rule it out of any situation or experience including the one I am having right now as I write this review Did I El Gaucho Martín FierroLa vuelta de Martín Fierro just change my past after writing that last sentence Did I Fragonard Art and Eroticism just engage in an act of retrocausation perhaps tipping me in the direction of ordering this book on last week I hope so I personally very much like feeling like I am the Demiurge Freud Jung and so many others have demonstrated what can happen when theories Mao Zedong jump the shark and slide into mission creep explaining everything is essentially explaining almost nothing at all I am in favor of Eric Wargo s time loops hypothesis but less so for some aspects of the causal theory he proposes for it However I will store it with admiration alongside other cherished imaginings of the mysteries of the universe in my cognitive tool kit and will reach for it only occasionally and The Monarchs Are Missing judiciouslyFinal verdict Eric Wargo s TIME LOOPS is not a Kuhnian paradigm shift A better metaphor for the book is Neurath s boat So in that spirit I offer the follow suggestion If you have a precognitive dream of your inevitable death in which you are a passenger on the HMS Neurath and it hits an iceberg fear not The ship has only hit Minkowski s 4D glass block universe No harm will come to your atoms They will always exist recombining into new spaces and times wriggling worm like through Minkowski s block into new adventures As you read this you will realize you have swerved once again surviving a slide into a steep entropy gradient Feeling traumatized means you are still here so embrace your feeling hug it you lucky survivor Feeling traumatized is your reward for escaping death so don t mope gloat You ARE Neurath s boat Enjoy your day

READ ´ VANSOUTLETMALL.CO.UK Ç Eric Wargo

Centuries have kept mainstream science from taking phenomena like retrocausation and precognition seriously We are four dimensional creatures and sometimes we are even caught in time loops self fulfilling prophecies where effects become their own causes. In this well written and lucid book the author hypothesizes that precognitive dreams reflect retrocausality ie that information from the future determines or at least influences behaviour in the past While the idea seems outlandish Dr Wargo presents a great deal of supporting evidence from both scientific research and personal accounts The concept explains a lot of otherwise inexplicable events ranging from uantum behaviour to alleged psi phenomena His uniue take on precognitive dreams is that they constitute information from a person s own future state rather than a generalized clairvoyant ability For example a dream of an airline disaster that subseuently happens is actually knowledge of that person s future reaction to the event rippling down the time lineI hate to give this excellent book anything other than five stars but in the spirit of constructive criticism I will point out what seemed to me to be some shortcomings First since the author focuses on dreams some discussion of Freud and Jung was reuired Both share responsibility for making this common phenomenon an object of serious study However I think Dr Wargo spent space refuting the premises of psychoanalysis than necessary These sections could have been much shorter and still eually effectiveThat would have left room for a discussion of the block universe concept on which his hypothesis depends The block universe essentially means that everything that ever happened or ever will exists in a series of tableaux like slices of a block Change doesn t really exist it s only a perception of consciousness moving through predetermined scenes in the time dimension This is a breathtaking idea for many reasons and begs for a fulsome discussion The author freuently refers to Minkowski spacetime but rather oddly in my opinion omits Julian Barbour who brought the concept into mainstream thinking in his 1999 book The End of TimeThe block universe idea has many puzzling implications One of course is the elimination of free will as we understand it Dr Wargo treats this problem only in a brief and cursory manner Another is the perception of now If all slices of the personal time line are eually real why do we live in a particular present Are earlier and later versions of ourselves perceiving their own momentary nows In fairness we can t expect the author to fully explain existence at one sitting But these big philosophical and scientific issues bear directly on his work and really merit a bit attentionA minor uibble You will get tired of seeing the word hermeneutic Do not interpret my critiue as in any way undermining the essential value of this book It offers a profound idea nicely presented and comprehensively sourced I highly recommend it and look forward to his next book