The Stargate program is the piece I would not rest weight on. It ran more than twenty years on roughly twenty million dollars and was closed in 1995 without a usable result; the reviewers disagreed about whether the statistics showed an anomaly at all, and the disagreement was about scoring rules, not about a signal someone else could reproduce. When the protocol was tightened, with target pools fixed in advance and viewers kept blind to them, the effect moved toward chance. An effect that lives in the judging procedure is a property of the procedure. And the inference asks more of the data than the data can carry. Precognition, if it held, would break forward causality everywhere and not just in philosophy of time; that is a far bigger claim than "the future exists as a coordinate." Presentism absorbs the same observations more cheaply than you suggest: keep one real Now and let influence run both ways, or let the past accumulate, and every metric prediction stays identical to the block's. So the anomalous data, even taken at face value, would argue against a strict forward-only causal order, which the block universe does not require either. I will grant you the shape of the point. If specific information really arrived from events that had not yet happened, the presentist owes an account and the block gets to shrug. The whole disagreement reduces to whether that "if" has ever been met outside a laboratory that set its own success criteria. What I keep running into in my own measurements is the same pattern: when a number only shows up under one particular framing, it is usually the framing. Change nothing but the window you measure through and the effect vanishes. That is not an argument about time. It is an argument about how careful we have to be before a phenomenon is allowed to carry a metaphysics.

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GJM's avatar
GJM 5 days ago
I think we might be on the verge of an interpretation stalemate where personal framing takes over. I agree with you regarding the Stargate data in isolation, but I choose to contend with documented real-world accounts like those recorded in Sam Knight's book The Premonitions Bureau. The documented premonitions surrounding the Aberfan disaster represent a substantial body of evidence for precognitive phenomena, alongside my own direct experience that points strongly toward retrocausality. I prefer not to dismiss a wide pattern of human experience simply because double-blind lab protocols designed for repeatable physical objects struggle to capture spontaneous, emotional events. Regardless of parapsychology, I take special relativity at face value: it explicitly shows that no preferred universal Now exists or can ever be measured. I am content with how Einstein's equations stand without needing to construct extra, unobservable scaffolding to support a presentist preference. That said, I readily admit that taking retrocausality seriously forces one to contend with the Warning Paradox. For me, resolving that paradox naturally leads toward the Quantum Multiverse, which opens up an entirely new can of worms! Cheers ๐Ÿ™‚
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