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I can’t claim to have discovered the secret I’m touting. It was discovered—or, if you prefer, invented—about half a century ago by the founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. They made a basic distinction between “zero-sum” games and “non-zero-sum” games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant’s gain is the other’s loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player’s gain needn’t be bad news for the other(s). Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players’ interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero-sum game, because the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad. (It was equally good.)
An attitude of care for oneself and others is what creates the fertile ground for precognition to manifest, and a conscientious, ethical mindset goes along with this. A growing body of psychological research in the area of prospection (thinking about the future) is worth mentioning here. The extent to which people feel a sense of connection to their future selves appears to predict how well they make life decisions like saving for retirement, taking care of their health, and so on. Prospection includes anticipating how we will think back on our present from a future standpoint—for instance, imagining future regrets-and this kind of thinking has implications for ethical decision-making too.
Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self
Eric Wargo
Someone once did a series of jokey organization charts for major corporations, and Microsoft, famous for its infighting, was depicted as a circular firing squad. Our minds aren’t that torn by internal strife, but they’re sometimes as close to that as to Microsoft’s official organization chart. Gazzaniga, the split-brain experiment pioneer, has written, “While hierarchical processing takes place within the modules, it is looking like there is no hierarchy among the modules. All these modules are not reporting to a department head—it is a free-for-all, self-organizing system.”
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
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