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ABSTRACT: This paper reviews six clairvoyance experiments and two precognition ones. In essence, all eight studies use an unbalanced deck of some kind in which one or more items in the deck (will) appear more frequently than others. Traditionally, results from the six clairvoyance experiments have been thought to support each other; the current assessment, however, reveals that the findings are not as complementary as might first be imagined. Although all authors believe that psi operates globally in their experiments by scanning the whole target set, at least four different models are offered to explain how global psi might work. None of these models can explain all the results. A review of the two precognition experiments reveals that they fad to address the questions they sought to answer. Moreover, if global psi extends over time as well as space, the variety of models used to explain the clairvoyance studies may also be pertinent to the precognition experiments. A number of potential research questions are identified and a series of experiments is devised to answer the question of whether precognition foresees events that will be or whether it looks forward to what will be decided, It is hoped that this review will promote more conceptually rigorous research.
Conceptually, precognition is a notoriously difficult topic. Not only does it appear to imply backwards causation because a future event seems to impinge on my present mental activity, but it also seems to imply that future events are fixed, because if the future can have an impact on ary brain state, the future must have sufficient reality in order to make that impact in the first place. These and similar issues have been debated extensively in both the philosophical (e.g., Broad, 1937; Dummett, 1954; Rankin, 1957) and parapsychological (e.g., Beloff, 1990: Roberts, 1993; Struckneyer, 1970) literature.
Experimentally, the problem of whether foreseen events are fixed or alterable has been examined by distinguishing between actual and probable futures. Such precognition experiments have some items in their target pool that are more likely to become the target than others. The concept is that if participants in these experiments make more calls on the high-probability targets than on the low-probability ones, the idea that precognition directs itself towards probable (hence, preventable)...