Sensing the future – the Precognition Machine and process philosophy

I was sent a link to an article about research at Princeton into the 'Precognition Machine'. The machine is a random event generator (basically it generates 0 and 1 randomly), and ought over a period of time produce a flat line when its output is represented graphically. And usually that's exactly what it does.

The interesting thing though is that it has produced clear and significant spikes at specific times, including 4 hours before the 9-11 strikes, during Princess Diana's funeral, and shortly before the Boxing Day Tsunami. In other words, it seems to respond differently when certain global events are occurring. And it seems to respond in advance of their occurrence.

Scientists are, inevitably, divided on the significance of the results, but the close merging of slightly future events with the present strikes a strong resonance with some theoreticians working in the area of process philosophy, otherwise known as 'event ontology'. The process position – very roughly put – posits that reality is comprised of events rather than of 'things'. The 'present' is the static output of a process of 'coming into being' (event) and that each new moment is the self-generation of a subjectively centred reality, an 'emerging into existence'. It is the 'act of becoming' that is primary. Process philosophers regard the future as necessarily fluid, since a key aspect of the philosophy as developed by Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality is that each entity creatively inserts novelty into its own process. Some process thinkers, Lewis Ford notably among them, have pushed these ideas to suggest that, in the process of becoming, the future is treated as a continuum of future possibility. The nearer to a future moment we are, then the more determinate that future is. The further into the future we look, then the more indeterminate that future is. This is somewhat obvious, but in process thinking it opens possibilities of creatively directing how the future becomes the present. By our present acts we generate and shape the range of future realities. We can – in theory – shape these in any way we want. The catch is that the closer we are to a specific future moment, the smaller the range of options available. In Ford's world, the future is a blurred map, becoming ever more blurred the further we look into it. The long term future is wholly indeterminate. The very near future is pretty much certain (but not completely). But in moving into each future moment we necessarily have to connect with what is still technically future in order to incorporate it into what will become our 'present'. Otherwise our world would dissolve into incoherence. We have choice in how we creatively develop, but it is limited by the need to conform with the broad reality in which we walk.

In the context of the Princeton work, process thought might offer clues as to how the random event generator responds to the future. The generator itself (as with all things) needs to maintain a repeated process of coming into being (otherwise it would blink out of existence). To do this, it is necessarily merging with the immediate future. Given it's very limited range of creative possibility (generate a 0 or a 1), it is conceivable that the creative patterns of necessary coherence for the generator (how it continues to exist), under certain conditions, require it to generate specific rather than random events. It's the machine's way of staying coherent.

For more details of the Princeton work see this article.

For more about process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, pop over to my process philosophy resource page.

We dismember the past <<>> We re-member the future <<>> We are the present