Prescience

Origin

Middle English, from Late Latin praescientia, from Latin praescient-, praesciens, present participle of praescire to know beforehand, from prae- + scire to know

• 14th Century

Definitions

• 1: foreknowledge of events:

a : divine omniscience

b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight

Description

In parapsychology, precognition (from the Latin præ-, “before,” + cognitio, “acquiring knowledge”), also called future sight, and second sight, is a type of extrasensory perception that would involve the acquisition or effect of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information or laws of physics and/or nature. A premonition (from the Latin praemonēre) and a presentiment are information about future events that is perceived as emotion.

The existence of precognition, as with other forms of extrasensory perception, is not accepted as other than a purely psychological process by the mainstream scientific community because no replicable demonstration, "on demand", has ever been achieved.

Scientific investigation of extrasensory perception (ESP) is complicated by the definition which implies that the phenomena go against established principles of science. Specifically, precognition would violate the principle that an effect cannot occur before its cause. However, there are established biases, affecting human memory and judgment of probability, that create convincing but false impressions of precognition.

One class of theories – principally as discussed, albeit in quite disparate ways, by Dunne (1927) and Saltmarsh (1938) – supposes that awareness is fundamentally trans-temporal, acquiring information beyond the "specious present" of information that is typically available for immediate awareness. While we are only ever consciously aware of some limited temporal range of information, these theories assert that, unconsciously, a much wider temporal range of information is sampled and used for the benefit of the organism.

Another class of theories is based on the block universe model, in which future events already exist in spacetime, according to the special theory of relativity. The theories explain precognition as the retrieval of memories from the brain in the future, which could occur in a similar way to that in which ordinary memories are retrieved from the brain in the past.

The theory proposed by Jon Taylor is based on David Bohm's theory of the implicate order, which suggests that if similar structures are created at different places and different times, the structures resonate with a tendency to become more closely similar to one another. Taylor applies the principles to the neuronal spatiotemporal patterns that are activated in the brain, to show how an information transfer could be produced. For example, a precognition would occur when the pattern activated at the time of the future experience of an event resonates with any similar pattern that is spontaneously activated in the present. This might enable the present activation to be sustained until it produces the conscious awareness of an event similar to the one that will be experienced in the future.[1]