When Remote Viewing Becomes Future Knowing

Introduction

Remote viewing is often presented as an attempt to describe a hidden target that already exists somewhere else. However, some experimental designs change the claim in a fundamental way. If the target is not selected until after the viewing session has been completed, the participant is no longer attempting to perceive a currently hidden object or location. Instead, the task becomes one of allegedly obtaining information about a future event. In parapsychology, that shifts the claim from clairvoyance towards precognition—the purported acquisition of information before the relevant event has occurred. This distinction matters because it changes both the theoretical claim and the practical difficulties of interpreting the results.[CIA]cia.govAN EVALUATION OF REMOTE VIEWING: RESEARCH…There is compelling evidence that precognition, in which the target is selected after the…

Current hidden targets versus future targets

A conventional remote-viewing experiment assumes that the target already exists when the session takes place. For example, a participant may attempt to describe a photograph sealed in an envelope or a location currently being visited by another person. If an effect were genuine, proponents usually classify it as clairvoyance because the information is assumed to exist at the time of the session.

Future-target protocols alter that assumption. A participant records impressions before anyone has decided which photograph, location or event will become the official target. Only afterwards is a target randomly selected or revealed. Under this design, there is no fixed present-day object that could have been perceived in the ordinary sense. The only event that eventually links the session to a target is the later act of random selection or feedback.[CIA]cia.govAN EVALUATION OF REMOTE VIEWING: RESEARCH…There is compelling evidence that precognition, in which the target is selected after the…

Supporters of remote viewing often argue that this distinction is not problematic because they view “psi” as independent of ordinary concepts of time. Critics respond that, if the target literally did not exist as the experimental target during the session, the experiment is no longer testing perception of a hidden present object. It is instead testing whether future information can somehow influence present performance.[CIA]cia.govAN EVALUATION OF REMOTE VIEWING: RESEARCH…There is compelling evidence that precognition, in which the target is selected after the…

Why later target selection changes the claim

The timing of target selection is not a minor procedural detail. It changes the mechanism that would have to explain any apparent success.

If the target is chosen after the session, several interpretations become possible:

Within parapsychology, later target selection has sometimes been viewed as an advantage because it reduces concerns that subtle sensory cues from an existing target influenced the session. Jessica Utts noted in her evaluation of the US government’s remote-viewing programme that some experiments reporting positive results used targets selected after the description had already been produced, treating these as precognition experiments rather than conventional clairvoyance.[CIA]cia.govAN EVALUATION OF REMOTE VIEWING: RESEARCH…There is compelling evidence that precognition, in which the target is selected after the…

For sceptics, however, removing an existing target does not simplify the claim. Instead, it requires acceptance of an even stronger proposition: information must somehow travel backwards in time or become available before the future event defining the target has occurred. Because no accepted physical mechanism explains such information transfer, critics argue that the theoretical burden becomes greater rather than smaller.[Wikipedia]WikipediaRay HymanRay Hyman

The scoring problem for future-linked sessions

Future-target experiments introduce an additional challenge: determining exactly what the participant should be judged against.

Remote-viewing transcripts are usually composed of sketches, brief sensory impressions and isolated descriptive phrases rather than precise statements. Judges compare these transcripts with one or more candidate targets and decide which target appears to fit best.

When the target is selected after the session, several methodological questions become especially important:

• Was the judging procedure fixed before the experiment began?

These questions matter because vague descriptions such as “water”, “metal”, “curved object” or “bright structure” may seem impressive after the correct target is known, especially if judges have considerable freedom in deciding what counts as a correspondence. Critics have argued that subjective matching and multiple opportunities for interpretation can inflate apparent success rates unless scoring rules are tightly controlled in advance.[Wikipedia]WikipediaRemote viewingRemote viewing

Earlier remote-viewing research also demonstrated how apparently minor procedural details could influence judging. Analyses by David Marks and Richard Kammann found that some early experiments contained inadvertent cues within transcripts that allowed judges to infer target order without any paranormal explanation. Although these criticisms addressed conventional remote-viewing studies rather than specifically future-target designs, they illustrate why rigorous blinding and pre-specified scoring are considered essential whenever ambiguous descriptions are evaluated.[Wikipedia]WikipediaRemote viewingRemote viewing

Why the debate remains unresolved

Parapsychologists who support remote viewing generally regard precognitive protocols as evidence that any reported effects are not dependent on distance or on the physical existence of a current target. Some modern reviews even compare precognitive and clairvoyant protocols as variations of the same broader phenomenon rather than fundamentally different experiments.[ResearchGate]researchgate.net369604750 Remote Viewing a 1974 2022 systematic review and meta analysisResearchGate(PDF) Remote Viewing: a 1974-2022 systematic review…March 20, 2023 — This is the first meta-analysis of all studies relate…Published: March 20, 2023

Mainstream scientific evaluations reach a different conclusion. The 1995 review commissioned for the US government concluded that although some datasets appeared statistically unusual, the evidence was insufficient to establish operational usefulness or to demonstrate paranormal functioning. Ray Hyman argued that apparent effects did not justify concluding that precognition had been demonstrated and emphasised the need for independent replication under increasingly rigorous controls.[CIA+2Wikipedia]cia.govAN EVALUATION OF REMOTE VIEWING: RESEARCH…There is compelling evidence that precognition, in which the target is selected after the…

As a result, future-target remote viewing occupies a distinctive position within the wider debate. It is not merely another form of describing hidden information. By postponing target selection until after the viewing session, the experiment changes from a claim about perceiving something concealed in the present into a claim about acquiring information from the future—a substantially stronger and more controversial proposition whose interpretation depends heavily on careful experimental design and scoring.

Amazon book picks

Further Reading

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The conscious universe

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First published 1997. Subjects: Parapsychology, Case studies, Cas, Études de, Paranormale verschijnselen, Parapsychologie.

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First published 2018. Subjects: Parapsychology, Magic, Telepathy.

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Endnotes

1. Source: cia.gov
Link:https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000200180006-4

2. Source: Wikipedia
Title: Ray Hyman
Link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Hyman

3. Source: Wikipedia
Title: [Stargate]({{ ‘stargate/’ | relative_url }}) Project (U.S. Army unit)
Link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_%28U.S._Army_unit%29

4. Source: Wikipedia
Title: Remote viewing
Link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing

5. Source: researchgate.net
Title: 369604750 Remote Viewing a 1974 2022 systematic review and [meta analysis]({{ ‘meta-analysis/’ | relative_url }})
Link:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369604750_Remote_Viewing_a_1974-2022_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis

Published: March 20, 2023

Additional References

6. Source: reddit.com
Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/1lt63k0/what_is_really_going_on_in_remote_viewingone_idea/

7. Source: scispace.com
Link:https://scispace.com/pdf/remote-viewing-the-future-with-a-[tasking

8. Source: facebook.com
Link:https://www.facebook.com/100090372200308/posts/during-the-cold-war-the-cia-funded-research-into-what-they-called-remote-viewing/937678002587931/

9. Source: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Title: PMCFollow‐up on the U.S
Link:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10275521/

10. Source: psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk
Title: Psi Encyclopedia Remote Viewing
Link:https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/remote-viewing/

11. Source: ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu
Title: sa jan02srm01
Link:https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/sa/sa_jan02srm01.html

12. Source: youtube.com
Title: Remote Viewing: The Evidence with Jimmy Akin
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph-kd1Igwzs

13. Source: youtube.com
Title: Communicating with Your Future Self with Lori Williams
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6qLT6rUs0k

14. Source: youtube.com
Title: Dean Radin on the Science of Psychic Phenomena
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edWrufOe55Q

15. Source: youtube.com
Title: The Science of Remote Viewing and Precognition
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgyYms376Mg