But this precognition seems to extend only about a couple of seconds into the future.
I am not talking about elaborate and specific predictions (that, in principle, may or may not come-true), I am instead talking about fore-knowledge - knowledge of what we know-will-happen.
Indeed, it is characteristic of everyday precognition that we only know something will happen in connection to its actual happening - the knowledge and its fulfillment are not separable - and indeed they could not be separable, if that knowledge really was to be certain.
I will give a couple of example - one common, one unusual.
The common one is the experience of being in a room full of conversing people - a café for example - and hearing the talk only as a background buzz. When somebody says some-thing of relevance and interest (e.g.. mentions your own name or somebody familiar); and suddenly you attend to that conversation.
But the way that this happens is that you are first suddenly aware of somebody speaking a sentence that then, after a second or two, he mentions the known-name; so that you hear the context of their remark leading-up to the name, rather than the name and what is spoken afterwards.
The experience is of knowing, a couple of seconds ahead; what is going on in the conversations - and when something relevant is predicted, tuning-in to be able to hear it.
An unusual example was when I narrowly avoided a serious road accident - which might have become a multiple-pile-up. I was driving, alone, on a motorway which swept over the crest of a hill and to the left, so that I had zero visibility of the road ahead.
As I came over the crest and around the corner - at about 60 mph - I suddenly saw directly in front of me a stationary line of cars; but found that I was already - automatically, and without thought or will - taking appropriate evasive action by braking hard and steering around the stationary line (into an outer lane that was still clear).
The experience was that I knew, again a couple of seconds ahead, what was happening on the road and within my field of attention - that I had precognition of what I would soon know. Consequently, I had sufficient time to take evasive action.
I think this kind of thing is normal and essential, because without this predictive precognition our lives would be spent trying to react to changes that had already happened; and therefore we would often find ourselves unable to respond to our environment sufficiently quickly.
It is a (sort of) power of 'prediction' - and would usually be explained in terms of us having predictive mechanisms that extrapolate from past observations into the future; but I am suggesting such prediction would itself be too slow, and too unreliable to account for observations - and, in fact, we simply know what is going to happen in the near future. We have fore-knowledge.
To link back to yesterday's post about Time; I am not positing anything at all about Time as an abstract concept - because I do not believe Time has this nature. Instead I am describing a property of living, conscious beings.
I am saying that precognition ought to be an assumption.
Beings have different degrees of precognitive knowledge - but all beings have it; and must have it - if beings are to interact with other beings.
Thus, precognition is simply an attribute of being - of life, and consciousness.
Precognition is therefore a metaphysical fact concerning the nature of ultimate reality; a fact that can be confirmed by specific observations, but is not derived from, nor dependent-upon, observations.
In different words: we must take account of the near future if we are to be functional beings; and I am suggesting that this predictive functionality is based upon knowledge, not upon inference.
