Places
Cobalt Hotel: 12:30PM-1:30PM
Miki shared: "Am 4 month pregnant. approximately 1 month ago a police officer threw me down and if I did not put my hand out to stop me from smashing my face I would have been seriously hurt".
the London Hotel - "My foot has shards of glass in the bottom of my feet from the glass window that was shattered by a staff member as he throw an object against it from the top of the roof.
Carnegie: 4PM-7PM Rider: "fabric painting, screen stencil, mask making".
Artroom - Haisla, John
Safari Cafe: Adam - Organic Coffee & Bun
the Rider Backwards Show
BACKWARDS OFFICIAL TRAILER
Are you looking for videos now! Backwards The Movie
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrf8xoQJ5Ms
Mar 2, 2012 - Uploaded by myLetsRow
Release Date: 2012 Summer, just in time for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Genre: Sports/ Romance ...
adj.
1. Directed or facing toward the back or rear.
2. Done or arranged in a manner or order that is opposite to previous occurrence or normal use.
3. Unwilling to act; reluctant; shy.
4. Behind others in progress or development: The technology was backward, but the system worked.
adv. or
back·wards (-w
rdz)
1. To or toward the back or rear.
2. With the back leading.
3. In a reverse manner or order.
4. To, toward, or into the past.
5. Toward a worse or less advanced condition.
back
ward·ly adv.
backward·ness n.
Usage Note: The adverb may be spelled backward or backwards, and these forms are interchangeable: stepped backward; a mirror facing backwards. In Standard English, however, the adjective has no -s: a backward view.
The
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published
by
Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
backwards [ˈbækwədz], backward
adv
1. towards the rear
2. with the back foremost
3. in the reverse of usual order or direction
4. to or towards the past
5. into a worse state the patient was slipping backwards
6. towards the point of origin
bend, lean, or fall over backwards Informal to make a special effort, esp in order to please
know backwards Informal to understand completely
Precognition and Backwards Causation
by Keith Seddon
This paper argues that whatever mechanism is responsible for
precognition, at least one can be ruled out on conceptual grounds. That
mechanism is backwards causation. If it is possible that events can have
causes occurring later than the time they happen, it would be possible
that our perceptions be caused earlier than the events they are
perceptions of. This is shown to constitute a successful objection to
Beloff’s view that there are circumstances imaginable which call for a
backwards causation explanation. It is claimed that a backwards-process
is nonsensical, in which case backwards-causal candidates cannot be tied
to their effects. The concept of cause arises from our interest and
ability to tamper with natural events. These points, considered jointly,
show that the idea of backwards causation can have no explanatory
power. – Keith Seddon
As a philosopher, I am not concerned to establish the validity of
purported cases of precognition. That precognition may in fact have
occurred is obviously not necessary for the truth, if it be one, that
precognition be possible. The idea that empirical evidence per se
can establish the fact of precognition seems to me to be a mistake,
because evidence can count for or against an alleged phenomenon only to
the extent that we already have a theory (even a very crude one) by
which the evidence can be interpreted. No empirical facts can count for
precognition unless we already have a concept of what precognition is
and unless we already hold the assumption that precognition be a
possible phenomenon. The idea that that assumption itself can be
established by empirical evidence just seems wrong to me.
There is one view which supposes that a precognition is a future
event causing the subject to previously make a precognition-claim about
it. In investigating the conceptual issues involved in the idea of
precognition, I claim to have found good reasons for rejecting this
view, and I shall show what they are in the course of this paper.
Regardless of whatever mechanisms may be put forward to explain the
operation of precognition, my view is that there is at least one which
fails on logical grounds, and that mechanism is the one which
understands future events to (sometimes) cause previous events. This
leaves the question open as to whether there are other mechanisms which
are logically tenable which can explain precognition. I shall have
nothing to say about that here.
Let us be clear about some helpful jargon. A precognition-claim is
the occurrence of some statement which makes explicit reference to, and
states some fact about, a future event. Not all statements which do this
are precognition-claims, of course. Common-or-garden predictions which
we make all the time, such as “The kettle will boil in three minutes”,
are obviously not precognitionclaims. If evidence is readily available
to someone in the present which indicates the likelihood that their
statement about the future is true, or will be made true, then that
statement cannot be entertained as a candidate for a precognitionclaim.
What distinguishes precognition-claims from other sorts of statement
about the future, is that there is no evidence in the present which
speaks for the truth of such a claim, although there may be evidence which seemingly speaks against
it. (For instance, someone might make the precognition-claim that A
will die from natural causes in six months, whilst the evidence
currently available indicates that A is in the best of health.) The
other sort of statement that has to be ruled out as inadmissible is the
guess: precognition-claims are not guesses or hunches. Not all
precognition-claims succeed in describing the future, but in so far as
the person who made the claim had the belief that they were saying
something about the future, we shall include the claim under this
heading, because their belief has the same character as that of the
person who makes a precognition-claim which does describe some
future event. A precognition-claim which succeeds in describing the
future I will call a precognition. This provides for the necessary
allowance that not all precognition-claims need be precognitions. This
distinction between precognition-claims and precognitions has a precise
analogy with statements about the past derived from memory: not all our
memory-claims are memories, because sometimes people make statements
about the past, relying on their memories, which although they think
them true are in fact false.
What makes a precognition-claim true is the fact that it matches (to
some acceptable extent) a future event; it is then a precognition. This
is not enough to make the precognition-claim knowledge, because on such a
criterion guesses and hunches which turn out to be correct would also
constitute knowledge, and this obviously should be resisted. The
tendency then is to point out that since it is true that we afford to
ordinary statements of perception the status of knowledge because those
statements are caused by the events they are about, likewise,
precognitions constitute knowledge because they too are caused by the
events they are about. Whether or not plain precognition-claims (which
are not also precognitions) are caused by anything is left an open
question.
There are two ways in which a precognition might be supposed to
acquire the status of knowledge. One way, already mentioned, is that it
is caused by the future event it describes. The other way in which a
precognition can claim to be knowledge is parallel to the way in which
someone who intends to perform a certain action can be said to have
‘intentional knowledge’ of that action and that event which they have
reason to believe will result from the action. On this view the
precognition is not really a precognition at all. It supposes that an
agent has an unconscious intention to later influence circumstances such
that A later occurs (whatever sort of event that might be). The
precognition that A will occur constitutes ‘intentional knowledge’ that A
will occur: between that time and A’s happening the agent performs
actions that in the circumstances result in A. Thus, for example, an
agent could be said to have ‘intentional knowledge’ that such and such
aeroplane will crash, if he has the intention, for instance, to sabotage
the plane. If that intention is unconscious, and he does unconsciously
sabotage the plane such that the plane crashes, any manifestation of the
original intention (perhaps in the form of a dream) would appear to be a
precognition of the future. To use this account to explain many actual
cases of alleged precognition, it would also have to be supposed that
agents can influence distant objects by means of psycho-kinesis (ie
‘psychically’ affecting objects, sometimes distant, by merely intending
to do so : some researchers claim to have established ‘P.K.’ as a fact).
Whether or not the idea of ‘action at a distance’ perpetrated by people
makes sense, I shall leave for another time.
I aim to show now that whether or not there really is anything which,
when added to a precognition-claim matching a future event, turns that
claim into a precognition which has the status of knowledge, it cannot
be that the precognitionclaim be caused by the future event.
John Beloff [1] suggests that the concept of backwards
causation might be practically useful, such that in exceptional but
perfectly imaginable circumstances, we would feel compelled to say that
backwards causation was the best explanation of those circumstances. He
cites an example of Dummett’s [2]. Here a man discovers by
trial and error that if he claps his hands before opening the post he
always finds a cheque made out to him, but never gets a cheque on those
occasions when he forgets to clap his hands. Beloff wishes to claim that
if we were in such a situation, whatever our philosophical inclinations
about backwards causation, we would not refrain from clapping our
hands. That being so, he thinks that none of us could honestly deny that
clapping our hands when we did was a necessary condition “or cause” of
the cheque having been put into that particular envelope. The general
claim that we can derive from this example is that what happened in the
past might not have happened had it not been for some action or event in
the present.
One reply is to say that this example does not in the least show what
Beloff believes it to show. I, for a start, would not feel compelled to
believe that my clapping had anything whatever to do with causing any
turn of circumstance in the past. The difficulty comes in finding
reasons that support this reply. It is very tempting to say that, at any
particular time, no cheque could have been put into its envelope unless
all those circumstances necessary and jointly sufficient for that
occurrence obtained at that time. To say that unfortunately is to deny
just what Beloff wants to assert, which is that a necessary condition
for a particular event can occur after the event. My reply succeeds only in begging the question.
Here is an approach which I think is more successful. If we are to
entertain the idea that events can have causes occurring later than the
time they happen, we have to entertain at one and the same time the idea
that the perceptions we are caused to have can occur earlier than the
events they are perceptions of. That means the temporal order in which
we perceive events is necessarily no guide to the actual temporal order
of those events [3]. There is therefore no point in even
attempting to talk about the temporal or causal priority of events. If
backwards causation were a possibility, Beloff would have no reason to
believe that his clapping his hands was a later necessary (causal)
condition for someone’s earlier inserting the cheque into the envelope,
because under the backwards causation hypothesis he can have no reason
for favouring that particular sequence of events with their particular
causal relations over any other possible sequence. The assumption of
backwards causation implies our being unable to determine with
reliability which events are causally or backwards causally connected
with which events and which events are causally or backwards causally
connected to our perceptions. And that implies the further fact that the
temporal sequence of events would be different from the sequence we
perceive and necessarily undiscoverable. This shows that the idea of
backwards causation cannot be introduced as a mechanism to explain
Beloff’s cheque-in-the-envelope experiences, and therefore, generally,
it cannot be entertained as the mechanism behind any phenomena.
This view can be filled in further by imagining a sequence of two sorts of events:
B A B A B B B A B A A A
The earlier event is on the left, the later on the right. If it helps
we may consider the B’s to represent the insertions of cheques into
envelopes, and the A’s to represent Beloff clapping. It seems to me that
an awkward question arises. Which A’s cause which B’s? We can pair the
A’s and B’s off, because the example shows six of each. But what reason
would we have for saying that the last A caused the first B prior to it
rather than any of the others? No reason at all. Perhaps I have cheated
by forcing the time separations between A’s and B’s to be different for
each pair no matter which possible pairing of the whole sequence we
adopt. Perhaps it should be like this:
B1 A1 B2 A2 B3 A3 B4 A4 B5 A5 B6 A6
This is no good either. Why should we think that A1 causes B1 and A2
causes B2 any more than we think that A2 causes B1 and B4 causes A2?
What is missing here are the processes which extend between the
causally connected events. In ordinary forwards causation, if X causes Y
but Y occurs some time after X, then some intermediary process has
developed in the time between X’s finishing and Y’s occurring. Future
cause A and its past effect B must similarly be mediated by a process
which A ‘begins’ and which ‘results’ in B. The idea of such a backwards
process is beyond conception. If I now perceive event A happening, that
is because light rays are reflected off the surfaces of those objects
doing whatever they are doing which constitutes A’s taking place, such
that the light affects what sort of impulses the retinas in my eyes send
to my brain. The idea that someone can precognise a future event
because light being reflected from objects is going backwards in time to
affect the precognisor long before the event’s occurring is plainly
absurd. But unless we can identify the process involved, if we were to
maintain that precognitions are caused by future events, it is not clear
why future events should always, or even sometimes, cause precognitions
of themselves rather than precognition of other events, or hallucinations of goblins for instance, or any other mental or nonmental phenomena.
The most instructive approach to this issue is to think about why we
are interested in causes, how we come to have the concept of causation
and how we come to learn the use of the term ‘cause’. I agree with
Mellor, when he says that our “interest in events and in causation stems
entirely from wanting to affect the world and to find out what goes on
in it” [4]. Mellor’s view is that in particular
circumstances, causes make their effects more likely to occur than if
they hadn’t happened. Thus we would not say that the brick’s striking
the window is the cause of the window breaking if we did not accept that
the brick’s striking the window, in the circumstances, made the
breaking of the window more likely than otherwise. What is also true is
that when an agent believes that A causes B, and he wants B, he does A
because he thinks that in so doing he will be more likely to get B than
if he does something else or nothing. Because of the regularity that
obtains in the world regarding what sort of event results in which other
sort of event, we are able to discover the full extent of this
regularity by deliberately trying out various actions and seeing what we
get in consequence, and we are able to purposely pull causal levers as
it were to make circumstances go rather as we wish them to go instead of
any other way. I don’t see that there can be any dispute about that.
Dummett is bearing this in mind when he says:
“ … to suppose that the occurrence of an event could ever be
explained by reference to a subsequent event involves that it might also
be reasonable to bring about an event in order that a past
event should have occurred, an event previous to the action. To attempt
to do this would plainly be nonsensical, and hence the idea of
explaining an event by reference to a later event is nonsensical in its
turn.” [5]
This obviously draws on the same intuitions that led Gale to argue
that we cannot intend to bring about something in the past, because we
cannot deliberate about performing an action if we already know whether
the action will be successful or unsuccessful. Since what has already
happened in the past is known, we cannot act intentionally to have made
something happen[6]. Brier, however, is not convinced by
this. He says that if as a matter of fact we do not know for sure the
future outcome of an action, it makes sense to deliberate about
performing it. Since we very rarely (if ever) know the future outcomes
of our actions, our deliberation is entirely warranted. Brier applies
the logic of acting towards the future to acting towards the past, and
says that if as a matter of fact we do not know that Jones was killed
(for example) it makes sense for us to deliberate about doing something
now to have saved him via backwards causation, and similarly for all
other past events which as a matter of fact we are ignorant about [7].
I don’t think this makes any sense at all, because whether or not an
agent knows the facts about the occurrence of some past event, he cannot
believe that by acting in the present he can make it more likely than
not that that past event occurred. If the event did happen, there is
nothing now that can be done to make it more likely that it happened.
Let me sum up my position on this issue. I argued earlier that if
backwards causation were a fact then the world we perceived would not
show the features of regularity which I believe it must show for our
being able to develop the concept of cause and our being able to
manipulate circumstances to our own advantages. The point of introducing
the concept of precognition is, I take it, part of the overall aim of
discovering regularities about our experiences, with the view to
explaining why we experience what we do at the times we do, as well as
predicting what we are likely to experience next. That aim, I have tried
to argue, would be undermined if we postulated backwards causation as
the mechanism behind precognition (or any other phenomena).
Notes :
1. John Beloff, ‘Backward Causation’, The Philosophy of Parapsychology, New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1977, pp37-46.
2. M.A.E. Dummett, ‘Can An Effect Precede its Cause?’, Aristotelian Society Proceedings, Supp.27, 1954, pp27-44. Beloff (who mistakenly attributes the example to Bob Brier, Precognition and the Philosophy of Science,
New York: Humanities Press, 1974 – when Brier is in fact citing
Dummett) somewhat alters the example whilst retaining its logical
character.
3. cf. D.H. Mellor, Real Time, C.U.P. 1981, Chapter 10.
4. ibid. p121.
5. M.A.E. Dummett, ‘Can an Effect Precede its Cause?’ op.cit. pp34-5.
6. R.M. Gale, The Language of Time, New York: Humanities Press, 1968, Chap. 7.
7. Bob Brier, Precognition and the Philosophy of Science, New York: Humanities Press, 1974.
© Dr. Keith Seddon 1991
Keith Seddon teaches at Hatfield Polytechnic. He is the author of Time : A Philosophical Treatment (Croom Helm, 1987).
k
