Precognition

Precognition (from the Latin prae-, "before" and cognitio, "acquiring knowledge"), also called prescience, future vision, future sight is a claimed psychic ability to see events in the future.

Not to be confused with Precognition (Scots law). "Premonition" redirects here. For other uses, see Premonition (disambiguation).
Part of a series on the
Paranormal

As with other paranormal phenomena, there is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition is a real effect and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Precognition also appears to violate the principle of causality, that an effect cannot occur before its cause.

Precognition has been widely believed throughout history. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people believe it to be real; it is widely reported and remains a topic of research and discussion within the parapsychology community.

History

Antiquity

Since ancient times, precognition has been associated with trance and dream states involved in phenomena such as prophecy, fortune telling and second sight, as well as waking premonitions. These phenomena were widely accepted and reports have persisted throughout history, with most instances appearing in dreams.[1]

Such claims of seeing the future have never been without their sceptical critics. Aristotle carried out an inquiry into allegedly prophetic dreams in his On Divination in Sleep. He accepted that "it is quite conceivable that some dreams may be tokens and causes [of future events]" but also believed that "most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...". Where Democritus had suggested that emanations from future events could be sent back to the dreamer, Aristotle proposed that it was, rather, the dreamer's sense impressions which reached forward to the event.[2]

17th–19th centuries

The term "precognition" first appeared in the 17th century but did not come into common use among investigators until much later.[1]

An early investigation into claims of precognition was published by the missionary Fr. P. Boilat in 1883. He claimed to have put an unspoken question to an African witch-doctor whom he mistrusted. Contrary to his expectations, the witch-doctor gave him the correct answer without ever having heard the question.[1]

Early 20th century

In the early 20th century J. W. Dunne, a British aeronautics engineer, experienced several dreams which he regarded as precognitive. He developed techniques to record and analyse them, identifying any correspondences between his future experiences and his recorded dreams. He reported his findings in his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. In it he alleges that 10% of his dreams appeared to include some element of future experience. He also persuaded some friends to try the experiment on themselves, with mixed results. Dunne concluded that precognitive elements in dreams are common and that many people unknowingly have them.[3][4] He suggested also that dream precognition did not reference any kind of future event, but specifically the future experiences of the dreamer. He was led to this idea when he found that a dream of a volcanic eruption appeared to foresee not the disaster itself but his subsequent misreading of an inaccurate account in a newspaper.[3] In 1932 he helped the Society for Psychical Research to conduct a more formal experiment, but he and the Society's lead researcher Theodore Besterman failed to agree on the significance of the results.[5][6] Nevertheless, the Philosopher C. D. Broad remarked that, "The only theory known to me which seems worth consideration is that proposed by Mr. Dunne in his Experiment with Time."[7]

In 1932 Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped, murdered and buried among trees. The psychologists Henry Murray and D. R. Wheeler tested precognitive dreams by inviting the public to report any dreams of the child. A total of 1,300 dreams were reported. Only five percent envisioned the child dead and only 4 of the 1,300 envisioned the location of the grave as amongst trees. This number was no better than chance.[8]

The first ongoing and organized research program on precognition was instituted by Joseph Banks Rhine in the 1930s at Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory. Rhine used a method of forced-choice matching in which participants guessed the order of a deck of 25 cards, each five of which bore one of five geometrical symbols. Although his results were positive and gained some academic acceptance, his methods were later shown to be badly flawed and subsequent researchers using more rigorous procedures were unable to reproduce his results. His mathematics was sometimes flawed, the experiments were not double-blinded or even necessarily single-blinded and some of the cards to be guessed were so thin that the symbol could be seen through the backing.[9][10][11]

Samuel G. Soal was described by Rhine as one of his harshest critics, running many similar experiments with wholly negative results. However, from around 1940 he ran forced-choice ESP experiments in which a subject attempted to identify which of five animal pictures a subject in another room was looking at. Their performance on this task was at chance, but when the scores were matched with the card that came after the target card, three of the thirteen subjects showed a very high hit rate.[12] Rhine now described Soal's work as "a milestone in the field".[12] However analyses of Soal's findings, conducted several years later, concluded that the positive results were more likely the result of deliberate fraud.[13][13] The controversy continued for many years more.[12] In 1978 the statistician and paragnost Betty Markwick, while seeking to vindicate Soal, discovered that he had tampered with his data.[13] The untainted experimental results showed no evidence of precognition.[12][14]

Late 20th century

As more modern technology became available, more automated techniques of experimentation were developed that did not rely on hand-scoring of equivalence between targets and guesses, and in which the targets could be more reliably and readily tested at random. In 1969 Helmut Schmidt introduced the use of high-speed random event generators (REG) for precognition testing, and experiments were also conducted at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab.[15] Once again, flaws were found in all of Schmidt's experiments, when the psychologist C. E. M. Hansel found that several necessary precautions were not taken.[16]

In 1963 the BBC television programme Monitor broadcast an appeal by the writer J.B. Priestley for experiences which challenged our understanding of Time. He received hundreds of letters in reply and believed that many of them described genuine precognitive dreams.[17][18] In 2014 the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Francis Spufford revisited Priestley's work and its relation to the ideas of J.W. Dunne.[19]

David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these reports, but claimed that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.[20]

G. W. Lambert, a former Council member of the SPR, proposed five criteria that needed to be met before an account of a precognitive dream could be regarded as credible:[1]

  1. The dream should be reported to a credible witness before the event.
  2. The time interval between the dream and the event should be short.
  3. The event should be unexpected at the time of the dream.
  4. The description should be of an event destined literally, and not symbolically, to happen.
  5. The details of dream and event should tally.

21st century

In 2011 the psychologist Daryl Bem, a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, published findings showing statistical evidence for precognition in an upper tier journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.[21] The paper was heavily criticised and the criticism widened to include the journal itself and the validity of the peer review process.[22][23] Public controversy over the paper continued until in 2012 the results were published of an independent attempt to reproduce Bem's results, which failed to do so.[24][25][26][27][28]

Scientific criticism

Claims of precognition are, like any other claims, open to scientific criticism. However the nature of the criticism must adapt to the nature of the claim.[29]

Claims of precognition are criticised on two main grounds:

  • There is no known scientific mechanism which would allow precognition. It appears to require either action-at-a-distance or telepathic effects, which break known scientific laws.[30]
  • A large body of experimental work has produced no accepted scientific evidence that precognition exists.

Consequently, precognition is widely considered to be pseudoscience.[31][32][33]

Violation of natural law

Precognition would violate the principle of antecedence (causality), that an effect does not happen before its cause.[34][29] Information passing backwards in time would need to be carried by physical particles doing the same. Experimental evidence from high-energy physics suggests that this cannot happen. There is therefore no direct justification for precognition from physics."[35]

Precognition contradicts "most of the neuroscience and psychology literature, from electrophysiology and neuroimaging to temporal effects found in psychophysical research."[36] It is considered a delusion by mainstream psychiatry.[37]

The relatively new discovery of evidence for quantum retrocausality is sometimes suggested as a possible mechanism for precognition.[38] However it is generally held that such "quantum weirdness", even if it is shown to exist, cannot carry information at a macroscopic level.

Lack of evidence

A great deal of evidence for precognition has been put forward, both as witnessed anecdotes and as experimental results, but none has yet been accepted as rigorous scientific proof of the phenomenon.

Alternative explanations

Various known psychological processes have been put forward to explain experiences of apparent precognition. These include:

  • Déjà vu or identifying paramnesia, where people conjure up a false memory of a vision having occurred before the actual event.
  • Unconscious perception, where people unconsciously infer, from data they have unconsciously learned, that a certain event will probably happen in a certain context. When the event occurs, the former knowledge appears to have been acquired without the aid of recognized channels of information.
  • Self-fulfilling prophecy and unconscious enactment, where people unconsciously bring about events which they have previously imagined.
  • Memory biases, where people selectively distort past experiences to match subsequent events.[39] In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.[40]
  • Coincidence, where apparent instances of precognition in fact arise from the law of large numbers.[41][42]
  • Retrofitting, which involves after-the-fact matching of an event to an imprecise previous prediction. Retrofitting provides an explanation for the supposed accuracy of Nostradamus's vague prediction. For example, quatrain I:60 states "A ruler born near Italy...He's less a prince than a butcher." The phrase "near Italy" can be construed as covering a very broad range of geography, while no details are provided by Nostradamus regarding the era when this ruler will live. Because of this vagueness, and the flexibility of retrofitting, this quatrain has been interpreted by some as referring to Napoleon, but by others as referring to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, and by others still as a reference to Hitler.[43]

Cultural impact

Premonitions have sometimes affected the course of important historical events. Related activities such as prophecy and fortune telling have been practised throughout history and are still popular today.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people still believe in precognition.[18][44] A 1978 poll found that 37% of Americans surveyed believed in it.[45] According to some psychologists, belief is greater in college women than in men, and a 2007 poll found that women were more prone to superstitious beliefs in general.[46] Some studies have been carried out on psychological reasons for such a belief. One such study suggested that greater belief in precognition was held by those who feel low in control, and the belief can act as a psychological coping mechanism.[47]

Literary reference

J. W. Dunne's main work An Experiment with Time was widely read and "undoubtedly helped to form something of the imaginative climate of [the interwar] years", influencing many writers of both fact and fiction both then and since.[48] Major writers whose work was significantly influenced by his ideas on precognition in dreams and visions include H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley and Vladimir Nabokov.[49][50]

Precognition is sometimes used as a plot device in F&SF fiction. Olaf Stapledon used it to explain his future histories Last and First Men and Last Men in London.[51] The American Robert Heinlein employed it in his short stories Elsewhen and Lost Legacy (republished in his 1953 collection Assignment in Eternity), while Philip K Dick is known for use of precognition,[52] especially as a central plot element in his 1956 science fiction short story The Minority Report [53] and in his 1956 novel The World Jones Made.[54]

gollark: If the EATW people somehow got DC's code for hatching handling, then that'd be bad, but deduction via observation being banned is too loose.
gollark: I measured how many ridgewings came out certain colors.
gollark: So my ridgewing study is then?
gollark: What?
gollark: Probably just "oh no. Actual numbers behind dragon raising. Evil". And that.

See also

References

Notes
  1. Inglis (1985), Chapter on "Precognition"
  2. Aristotle. (350 BC). On Prophesying by Dreams. Trans. J.I. Beare, MIT. (Retrieved 5 September 2018).
  3. Dunne (1927).
  4. Flew, Antony; "The Sources of Serialism, in Shivesh Thakur (Ed). Philosophy and Psychical Research, George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1976, pp. 81–96. ISBN 0-04-100041-2
  5. Brian Inglis; The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena. Paladin (Grafton), 1986, p.92.
  6. Dunne (1927), 3rd Edition, Faber, 1934, Appendix III: The new experiment.
  7. C. D. Broad; "The Philosophical Implications of Foreknowledge", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 16, Knowledge and Foreknowledge (1937), pp. 177–209
  8. Murray, H. A.; Wheeler, D. R. (1937). "A Note on the Possible Clairvoyance of Dreams". Journal of Psychology. 3 (2): 309–313. doi:10.1080/00223980.1937.9917500.
  9. Harold Gulliksen. (1938). Extra-Sensory Perception: What Is It?. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 43, No. 4. pp. 623–634.
  10. Wynn & Wiggins (2001), p. 156.
  11. Hines (2003), pp. 78–81.
  12. Colman, Andrew M. (1988). Facts, Fallacies and Frauds in Psychology. Unwin Hyman. pp. 175–180. ISBN 978-0-04-445289-8.
  13. Hyman, Ray (2007). "Evaluating Parapsychological Claims". In Robert J. Sternberg; Henry L. Roediger; Diane F. Halpern (eds.). Critical Thinking in Psychology. Cambridge University Press. pp. 219–223. ISBN 978-0-521-60834-3.
  14. Betty Markwick. (1985). The establishment of data manipulation in the Soal-Shackleton experiments. In Paul Kurtz. A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 287–312. ISBN 0-87975-300-5
  15. Odling-Smee, Lucy (March 1, 2007). "The lab that asked the wrong questions". Nature. 446 (7131): 10–11. Bibcode:2007Natur.446...10O. doi:10.1038/446010a. PMID 17330012.
  16. C. E. M. Hansel. (1980). ESP and Parapsychology: A Critical Re-Evaluation. Prometheus Books. pp. 222–232. Hansel found that in the experiments of Schmidt there was no presence of an observer or second-experimenter in any of the experiments, no counterchecking of the records and no separate machines used for high and low score attempts.
  17. Brian Inglis; The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena. Paladin (Grafton), 1986, p.90.
  18. Priestley (1964).
  19. Francis Spufford, "I Have Been Here Before", Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 14 Sep 2014.
  20. Ryback, David, PhD. "Dreams That Came True". New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1988.
  21. Bem, DJ (March 2011). "Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect" (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 100 (3): 407–25. doi:10.1037/a0021524. PMID 21280961. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-01-03. Retrieved 2013-09-10.
  22. James Alcock, Back from the Future: Parapsychology and the Bem Affair Archived 2011-12-31 at the Wayback Machine, March/April 2011 Skeptical Inquirer, January 6, 2011.
  23. "Room for Debate: When Peer Review Falters". The New York Times. January 7, 2011.
  24. Rouder, J.; Morey, R. (2011). "A Bayes factor meta-analysis of Bem's ESP claim" (PDF). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 18 (4): 682–689. doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0088-7. PMID 21573926.
  25. Bem, Daryl (6 January 2011). "Response to Alcock's "Back from the Future: Comments on Bem"". Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  26. Alcock, James (6 January 2011). "Response to Bem's Comments". Retrieved 31 January 2012.
  27. Galak, J.; LeBoeuf, R. A.; Nelson, L. D.; Simmons, J. P. (2012). "Correcting the past: Failures to replicate psi". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 103 (6): 933–948. doi:10.1037/a0029709. PMID 22924750.
  28. Frazier, Kendrick (2013). "Failure to Replicate Results of Bem Parapsychology Experiments Published by Same Journal". csicop.org. Retrieved 7 August 2013.
  29. Hyman, Ray (2007). "Evaluating Parapsychological Claims". In Robert J. Sternberg; Henry J. Roediger III; Diane F. Halpern (eds.). Critical Thinking in Psychology. Cambridge University Press. p. 217. ISBN 978-0-521-60834-3.
  30. Wynn & Wiggins (2001), p. 165.
  31. Alcock, James. (1981). Parapsychology-Science Or Magic?: A Psychological Perspective Pergamon Press. pp. 3–6. ISBN 978-0080257730
  32. Zusne, Leonard; Jones, Warren H. (1989). Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-805-80507-9
  33. Ciccarelli, Saundra E; Meyer, Glenn E. Psychology. (2007). Prentice Hall Higher Education. p. 118. ISBN 978-0136030638 "Precognition is the supposed ability to know something in advance of its occurrence or to predict a future event."
  34. Bunge, Mario. (1983). Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Volume 6: Epistemology & Methodology II: Understanding the World. Springer. pp. 225–226. ISBN 978-9027716347
  35. Taylor, John. (1980). Science and the Supernatural: An Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena Including Psychic Healing, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, and Precognition by a Distinguished Physicist and Mathematician. Temple Smith. p. 83. ISBN 0-85117-191-5.
  36. Schwarzkopf, Samuel (2014). "We Should Have Seen This Coming". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 8: 332. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00332. PMC 4034337. PMID 24904372.
  37. Greenaway, Katharine H.; Louis, Winnifred R.; Hornsey, Matthew J. (7 August 2013). Krueger, Frank (ed.). "Loss of Control Increases Belief in Precognition and Belief in Precognition Increases Control". PLOS ONE. Public Library of Science (PLoS). 8 (8): e71327. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...871327G. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071327. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 3737190. PMID 23951136.
  38. Merali, Zeeya. "Back From the Future". Discover, April 2010. (recovered 5 September 2018).
  39. Hines (2003).
  40. Alcock, James E. (1981). Parapsychology: Science or Magic?: a psychological perspective. Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 978-0-08-025773-0. via Hines (2003).
  41. Wiseman, Richard. (2011). Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There. Macmillan. pp. 163-167. ISBN 978-0-230-75298-6
  42. Sutherland, Stuart. (1994). Irrationality: The Enemy Within. pp. 312–313. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-016726-9
  43. Nickell, Joe (2019). "Premonition! Foreseeing what cannot be seen". Skeptical Inquirer. 43 (4): 17–20.
  44. Peake, Anthony; The Labyrinth of Time, Arcturus, 2012, Chapter 10: "Dreams and precognition".
  45. American Bar Association (December 1978), ABA Journal, American Bar Association, pp. 1847–, ISSN 0747-0088
  46. Stuart A. Vyse (1 September 2013), Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition – Updated Edition, Oxford University Press, USA, pp. 45–, ISBN 978-0-19-999693-3
  47. Greenaway, KH; Louis, WR; Hornsey, MJ (2013). "Loss of Control Increases Belief in Precognition and Belief in Precognition Increases Control". PLOS ONE. 8 (8): e71327. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...871327G. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071327. PMC 3737190. PMID 23951136.
  48. Anon,; "Obituary: Mr. J. W. Dunne, Philosopher and Airman", The Times, August 27, 1949, Page 7.
  49. Stewart, V.; "J. W. Dunne and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s", Literature and History, Volume 17, Number 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 62–81, Manchester University Press.
  50. Vladimir Nabokov (ed. Gennady Barabtarlo); Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, Princeton University Press, 2018.
  51. Verlyn Flieger; A Question of Time: JRR Tolkien's Road to Faërie, Kent State University Press, 1997. Page 136.
  52. LeGuin, Ursula K. (1984). "Science Fiction as Prophesy". In Stine, J.C.; Marowski, D.G. (eds.). Contemporary Literary Criticism. 30. Detroit, MI: Gale Research.
  53. Kellman, Steven G., ed. (2006). Magill's Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition. Salem Press. ISBN 978-1587652851.
  54. "The World Jones Made (195) A Novel by Philip K Dick". fantasticfiction.com. Retrieved 2019-12-05.

Bibliography
  • Dunne, J. W. (1927). An Experiment With Time. A. C. Black.
  • Hines, Terence (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-57392-979-0.
  • Inglis, Brian. (1985). The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena. Paladin.
  • Priestley, J.B. Man and Time. Aldus 1964, 2nd Edition Bloomsbury 1989.
  • Wynn, Charles M., and Wiggins, Arthur W. (2001). Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends...and Pseudoscience Begins. Joseph Henry Press. ISBN 978-0-309-07309-7

Further reading
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