Precognition, The Future, Determinism and Free Will.
Precognition is the alleged ability to foresee the future, and I shall take it to mean that. It thus implies that there is such a thing as 'the' future, and that the future is something fixed and pre-determined, just as the past has already been determined. Without prejudice to the facts, which must be decided on their own account, it must be stated that the existence of precognition would, ipso facto , be entirely fatal to any notion of 'free will', which would be ruled out by the determinism implied by the existence, if proved, of precognition. What we would be left with, in fact, is exactly the kind of 'block universe' depicted by Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski in their visualisation of the Special Theory of Relativity, with all past, present and future events in space-time pre-determined from the very first instant of time. However, this leaves no room for quantum uncertainty, let alone free will. It is clear that visualisation of possible futures ,