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 quantum 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 books.
I 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 event.
What 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 F.W.H. 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 more than a century of occultist, Theosophical and New Age romantic reifications as well as speculations from quantum physicists who have glibly invoked the term.
I 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 quantum physics too. Wargo grounds his "time loops" hypothesis about precognition/retrocausation 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 change.
Perhaps 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 author.
C.G. 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 beetle.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the book is the summary of findings and theories in quantum physics that describe time as capable of flowing in both directions. Admittedly most of this is still more 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 quantum physics. The author devotes many pages to a deep and detailed distillation of notions and findings in quantum physics in an engaging way. However, this is also the weakness of the book. The author is not a quantum 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 more and more 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 quantum 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's.
Retrocausation 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 happy.
The 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 complicated.
If 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 Amazon 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 judiciously.
Final 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 H.M.S. 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.
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