There is no Possibility of True Precognition:
​David Ray Griffin
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Note from Jay McDaniel: David Ray Griffin is well known in process-philosophy circles for showing how Whitehead’s philosophy can affirm and illuminate many forms of psi—including telepathy, out-of-body experiences, memories of past lives, psychokinesis, and apparitions. One aspect of psychical research he rejected, however, was what he called “true precognition”: the direct apprehension of a future event that has already been completely determined.

This page presents excerpts from an article in which Griffin makes the case against true precognition while leaving room for other forms of anticipation and paranormal knowledge. All excerpts below are taken from:

David Ray Griffin, “Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87, no. 3 (July 1993): 217–288.

Can an Effect exist before its Cause? David Ray Griffin

True precognition, most commentators agree, would imply backward causation that the precognized event caused the precognition of it, which would mean that the “effect” existed before its “cause."

No Possibility of True Precognition from a Whiteheadian Perspective
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...there is no possibility of true precognition from a Whiteheadian perspective: There is no possibility of retrocausation and therefore preprehension; nor is time ultimately unreal, so that all events—conventionally distinguished as past, present, and future—would exist eternally. The types of experiences often classified as precognition must, accordingly, be at most called apparent precognition and must be explained in other ways.

Four Reasons to Oppose Precognition: David Ray Griffin

First, an occasion of experience cannot perceive an event in its future because that event does not yet exist and therefore cannot exert causal influence upon the present percipient.

Second, the impossibility of backward causation aside, the present experience cannot infallibly “know” exactly what is going to happen in a few years, weeks, days, hours, or even minutes: What is going to happen is not yet fully determined, because of the self-determination that will be involved in the event and in a whole series of intervening events. Propositions about future contingencies are not yet either true or false (except insofar as certain abstract features of the future events may already be settled); their truth-status is still indeterminate.

Third, Whitehead removes the basis for saying that time is unreal for the objects studied by physics and, therefore, ultimately unreal. A subatomic particle such as an electron is a series of actual occasions, each of which incorporates its predecessors into itself. An electron, accordingly, cannot “go backward in time,” because the temporal process is cumulative. Time’s arrow is not a contingent feature of our world, due perhaps to the direction of entropy. It is as real for an individual electron as it is for us with our asymmetrical relation to the past and the future. We remember the past, but only anticipate the future, and therefore we prehend the past in a way that we do not prehend the future. The same is true, at a much more elementary level of course, for an electron (Griffin, 1986).

Fourth, there is, furthermore, no perspective from which all of history is laid out to be viewed in one glance. God may be said to be omniscient, but omniscience does not include knowledge of the future: omniscience is the capacity to know everything that is knowable, and the future does not yet exist to be known. A mystical prehension of the divine mind by a human mind would not, accordingly, provide a basis for prophecy in the sense of precognition taken literally.

Thirteen Ways of Explaining Apparent Precognition: David Ray Griffin

1. Coincidence. Although it would strain statistics, and therefore credulity, to suggest that all instances could be explained away as mere coincidences, meaning that there was no causal explanation to be sought, it is probable that some instances should be so categorized.

2. Unconscious knowledge of one’s own state or unconscious intentions leading to unconscious inference plus dramatization. For example, one might have a dream of one’s own death, a dream that “comes true” in three years. The dream could have been created by the unconscious (used here as shorthand for the unconscious portion of experience) on the basis of unconscious knowledge of, say, the precancerous state of one’s body or of an unconscious death-wish that effects its goal.

3. Subliminal sensory perception leading to unconscious inference plus dramatization. For example, a welder has a dream in which a ship on which he had worked many months ago sinks, and then it does. The explanation could be that he subliminally noticed a flaw in the hull while he was working on it, then made the unconscious inference that the ship would develop a leak in a few months that would cause it to sink, and finally produced a dream that brought this unconscious inference to the attention of his conscious experience.

4.  Hallucinated fulfillment. For example, a woman has a dream in which a man wearing a topcoat and a derby is feeding a strawberry icecream cone to a St. Bernard in a department store; when she goes to the department store in a few days, she “sees” this same scene, thanks to a hallucination. Such an event would not, of course, be on any list of well-attested events, because even if she had previously told someone about her dream, no one else would (by hypothesis) have “seen” its fulfillment. The event, however, would probably be quite convincing to the woman herself.

5.  Fulfillment with multiple hallucination. As a first example of explanations with a verified paranormal element, we can simply assume that the woman in the previous case had told some of her friends about the dream, that these friends accompanied her to the department store, and then that she induced the hallucinated vision in her friends through thought-transference.

6.  Clairvoyance of virtually present conditions plus unconscious inference and dramatization. This explanation is the same as Number 3, except here the unconscious knowledge is acquired paranormally. A person could acquire through clairvoyance the knowledge that the ship has a structural defect that will eventually cause the ship to sink if it is not repaired. The resulting vision of the ship sinking might occur several days, weeks, or even months before the ship actually sinks. The causal influence runs not from the future to the present, but from immediately past (which I have called the virtually present) conditions to the present.

7.   Unconscious telepathic knowledge of other human souls, plus unconscious inference and dramatization. At least three variations on this possibility could occur, (a) Telepathy could produce unconscious knowledge of another’s knowledge. For example, a person on shore could pick up telepathically the knowledge, conscious or unconscious, of a crew member on a ship that the ship has a structural problem, and out of this produce a dream of the ship’s sinking. Or one could learn telepathically of another person’s unconscious knowledge of his or her precancerous condition, (b) Telepathy could produce knowledge of the intentions of other human beings, conscious or unconscious. A woman could learn telepathically, for example, that her brother, who was in a remote, isolated place, had a death wish sometime before he became consciously aware of this fact and committed suicide. Accordingly, she might have a dream of his death and record it in her diary long before his death, even before the date at which thoughts of suicide began to appear in his own diary, (c) The telepathy could produce unconscious knowledge of another person’s feelings. For example, such knowledge of a man’s strong hatred for another person could lead to an apparently precognitive dream in which the man murdered someone.

8.   Unconscious telepathic knowledge from a discarnate spirit leading to unconscious inference plus dramatization. Again, the knowledge could be about facts, or, assuming that discarnate spirits can act psychokinetically, about things the spirit intends to do. This explanation will seem more fanciful to those who do not believe in discarnate spirits or who are at least doubtful of their capacity to communicate with us and otherwise to act in our world. Be that as it may, this explanation is not, unlike that employing the notion of backward causation, strictly nonsensical.

9.   Unconscious prehensive knowledge of the knowledge or intentions of a soul of the planet (a sentient Gaia) leading to unconscious inference plus dramatization. A caveat similar to that added to the previous point would be in order.

10.   Unconscious prehensive knowledge of God’s knowledge and/or intention plus the same dynamics. Regarding divine knowledge: As already indicated, God does not (by hypothesis) literally know the future in its concrete details, because it does not exist to be known. But certain more-or-less abstract features of the future are already determined (the more remote the future in question, the more abstract the details that are already determined), and God, being omniscient, would know these. Even with regard to abstract features of the future that are not yet completely settled, probabilities exist, and God would know these. The idea of prophecy about the future that has a high degree of probability and that is based upon a direct experience of God is, accordingly, not ruled out. With regard to divine intentions: Because the individuals making up the world have their own twofold power of self-determination and efficient causation, which cannot be overridden by God, the fact that God intended something in a certain situation would not necessarily mean that it was going to occur. Nevertheless, insight into divine intentions might increase the likelihood that a “prophetic vision” of the future would be fulfilled.

11.  Direct unconscious knowledge of objective probabilities about the future plus the same dynamics. According to Whitehead, objective probabilities about the future do exist (1929/1978, p. 207), and they can in principle be directly intuited. Accordingly, the idea that apparent precognition might in fact be based upon knowledge about present probabilities can be used without bringing telepathic knowledge of God or discarnate souls into the discussion. In any case, the explanation of so-called precognitive intuitions in terms of probabilities seems to fit the experience of at least many people who regularly have such intuitions, because they have the sense that the announced event will happen unless action is taken to prevent it. Many “prophecies” are issued as warnings, which would make no sense if the predicted event had “already happened” in a timeless noumenal realm, or were going to occur no matter what J. R. Smythies (1967) is one of many who have said that the future precognized might be only the most probable future—which would mean that one is not perceiving future events at all, but only the tendencies and probabilities inherent in the present (or, strictly speaking, the immediate past).

12.  A discarnate spirit learns the content of a person’s dream telepathically and then brings about an event corresponding to it. The discarnate might be a misguided spirit who believes in the reality of true precognition and wants others to believe accordingly; or he or she might simply be a fun-loving spirit doing this for kicks. I mention this possible explanation because, fanciful as it is, to accept it would require less of an adjustment in the notions we ordinarily presuppose than would the idea of backward causation.

13.  The experience of having a vision of an event, whether in a dream or a waking state, itself brings about an event corresponding to the vision. For example, the woman’s dream mentioned in Example 4 causes a man who often wears a topcoat and a derby while walking his St. Bernard in the neighborhood of a department store, and whom the woman has often seen in this area (although she does not consciously recall this fact), to enter the store, buy a strawberry ice cream cone, and feed it to his St. Bernard. This explanation is, of course, the “active” or PK theory of apparent precognition, perhaps first suggested by A. Tanagras (1949, 1967) as the theory of “psychobolie,” then revived by Jule Eisenbud (1982; 1983, pp. 44-46, 87-98, 137-145) and others (Braude, 1986, pp. 256-277; Roll, 1961, pp. 115-128). This explanation seems less implausible to the degree that one knows about, and synthesizes, the following facts: the power of unconscious images and intentions to bring about extraordinary PK effects, such as in so-called poltergeist cases; the power of suggestion under hypnosis and in posthypnotic situations to cause people to act out bizarre sequences of behavior; and the capacity to induce hypnotic states telepathically. One needs to remember, furthermore, that to invoke this explanation for some cases of apparent precognition does not mean that it must be invoked for, and seem plausible in relation to, all such cases