Retrocausal Information Flow: What are the Consequences of Knowing the Future?
York H. Dobyns
This paper discusses experimental findings from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research project supporting the existence of retrocausal information flow. Possible alternative explanations to retrocausation are examined for each experiment. In each case it can be shown that retrocausal information flow is either a parsimonious explanation, or the only currently available explanation, for the observational data. Gedankenexperiments are then examined to demonstrate that regardless of observational effect size, empirical phenomena of the type seen in these experiments cannot produce time paradoxes.The theoretical discussion pursuant to the experimental data covers some of the basic problems in the physical representation of time. Human perception of time incorporates a dichotomy: the past is known but cannot be changed, the future is presumed to be indeterminate and hence controllable but unknowable in advance. Physical formalisms have difficulty in representing this dichotomy, arriving in the most extreme case at the completely deterministic Einsteinian block universe view of spacetime. Strict physical determinism, however, currently seems implausible due to apparently essential indeterminism at the quantum scale.Retrocausal phenomena attack the dichotomy on empirical rather than theoretical grounds, since if past events can be causally influenced by future events either the past is malleable or the future is knowable. This approach allows a resolution of the past/future dichotomy by additional approaches other than strict determinism: the past may be indeterminate, or both past and future can contain a mixture of deterministic and indeterminate events.
AIP conference proceedings•Jan 1, 2006•3 citations