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, rather of a certain future, would not, and does not, constitute precognition. Anyone with a vivid enough imagination can envisage a possible future event - but such a possible future event would have to correspond to an actual future event for this envisaging to be a potential act of precognition, and this would have to take place far more often than might occur by chance for it to be genuine, and for the seer to be able to claim, truthfully, to have the gift of precognition. The testing of it could only happen when the future events became present events, of course.

So: quantum uncertainty - meaning Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - and free will. How does precognition, if it exists, get round these seemingly insuperable objections? I do not know. Perhaps the advocates of the alleged phenomenon have a better idea than I do. I would very much like to hear from them.

The situation is, in fact, far worse: if God (assuming he exists) has foreknowledge, he would be the pre-cogniser par excellence. Theodicy, however, would be rendered a total impossibility - for how could a supposedly omnibenevolent deity, endowed with omnipotence, knowing from all eternity what the Nazis intended to do in the concentration camps, or what Stalin intended in the Gulag, or Pol Pot in the Killing Fields of Cambodia (one could go on), not have acted to prevent such evil?

The 'free will' defence is not available in such a case - because free will is ruled out. Everything is pre-determined in the universe envisaged here. There is thus no moral responsibility, which is wholly dependent on the concept of free will, and thus no criminal responsibility, either. Every criminal justice system on the planet is based on a false assumption, and all criminals are merely badly programmed robots, whereas law-abiding citizens are well-programmed ones. God, it turns out, is responsible for evil, as well as good, or - if not God - then mere physical causality.

The believers in precognition have not, in my estimation, thought through the implications of their belief. If the future is fixed and pre-determined, and there is nothing that anyone can do to change it, we are not free, but slaves, and all our striving is utterly futile. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,/They kill us for their sport."