Why did I write the novel?
The novel that I wrote was never intended to be published nor indeed to be written at all and yet it appeared almost of its own accord. I have mentioned that in writing it I disregarded the conventions concerning fiction writing and maybe to some extent I also disregarded other conventions about writing about the future, but it was my own future and of little consequence to anyone else. In fact I regard the objective of the whole experience as having been to learn something about my own existence and not to inform other people, which is why I have refrained from publishing this collection here for so long. Maybe it is of interest to others though. However, by sending the draft novel to selected people and posting portions of it and its revisions online I did ensure that its contents were registered as existing at specific times in reality to give them credence.
How did I write the novel?
These then are the bulk of my unusual experiences relating to my novel writing and a selection of others in my general life. No doubt others will occur in the future and I will add them when I can. I cannot state that I positively believe in the possible phenomenon that appears to bring them about but I am certainly forced to accept that it may well be real after eliminating the more conventional explanations. If so then I do not consider myself to be exceptional but suspect that it is something that exists in all of us but is so bound up with other more obvious causes and effects in our lives that we have difficulty in singling it out as an influence unless we examine many incidents as closely as I have tried to do. It does not after all directly cause anything to happen but only seems to modify the probably that it will. Therefore we each have to draw our own conclusions about its existence, preferably from our own experiences. Without the explanation that I have accepted here I am personally left with the totally unacceptable fact that I didn't in fact write it when I did despite having taken the precautions to assert that I did mentioned above, these precautions themselves potentially having been inspired by precognition of their future necessity.
Have I adequately considered scepticism in my assessment of the phenomenon?
One of the old-fashioned claims made by sceptics about such accounts is that their authors have false memories about events that occurred years ago. However, nowadays people record many details of their lives on computer media and I am no different, so this old claim has to be reconsidered in that light. Apart from my own memories I have an email archive that dates back at least to 2011, when I was writing to my friend in the USA about my writing activities and thoughts as they happened, plus all my notes and drafts written alongside my novel itself. In 2016 I posted on this website a detailed chronicle of events up to that year alongside my extensive speculation about those events as it then stood. Those documents went into far more detail than these now on the site but made heavy reading as a result and I removed them after my experiences in 2017 caused me to reconsider the nature of the phenomenon anyway. As I have gained more knowledge in later years my speculation may have changed to some extent but I can still validate it against these past records.
Apart from those earlier personal source documents and also online records, such as the writers’ forum in which I often reported my experiences as they happened from 2015 on, I have made use of my own memories to some extent, but these are not casual memories but an aspect of my rigorous way of working. This is something that sceptics looking for evidence often cannot find and verify in any other way and is the reason why I state that only firsthand experience is truly convincing. When working as a software developer I always paid careful attention to the reasons why I made specific decisions in the design of the software and also made a point of remembering these in case I needed to revise my decisions at a later stage. It is just too easy to change one’s mind about something because one has forgotten why one made a decision originally. For example, when choosing a new car one may be so attracted by desirable features that one’s old car doesn’t have that one fails to confirm that the new car has all the many desirable features that the old one does. Novel writing is similar to designing software in that there are many links between elements and making revisions later may break these links if one has forgotten that they were incorporated originally. Therefore I have retained clear memories of my reasoning behind many decisions made while writing my novel, even being able to recall my thoughts at the time of choosing apparently arbitrary names for my characters, those names and their possible later inspiration often being mentioned on this site. For this reason I can for example even now state with confidence that I had merely a particular feeling about a name that influenced my choice of it over a decade ago knowing that this was no false memory.
A key argument used by statisticians is the principle of very large numbers, that in a very large overall population someone is bound to experience even the number of strange coincidences that I have, but I suspect that that in itself may be a defensive measure to deter the recording of these coincidences so that they don’t reach the volumes where they challenge the assumption that statisticians appear to make that they are relatively rare occurrences. Many of us encounter them in our lives but think little of them, maybe just because we are persuaded not to. I think this may be a shame because whatever lies behind them may be a key aspect of what it is to be human.
Have I adequately considered the scientific opinion about the phenomenon?
Finally, I have tried to avoid attempting to justify through scientific argument, not being qualified to do so, the possibility of some prescient ability existing within people's minds but I have myself followed published research into such matters in an attempt to form my own layman’s opinion about it. I have no wish to impress this opinion on anyone else but I can at least speculate here as a final observation.
Jung proposed the idea of synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle but then also associated it with precognition. As a result of my specific original objectives I approached this in the opposite direction by initially observing the apparent precognitions in my behaviour and then noticing evidence of accompanying synchronicities. Consequently my perception of my experiences recorded here may be biased in that direction. However, precognition can be regarded as a process that lies entirely within the brain albeit crossing the alleged time barrier, which may itself possibly be breachable by quantum processes, so this phenomenon is not inherently acausal and remote but effectively local at least in space. The simultaneous events that suggest acausal coincidences may then simply be ones that materially affect the probability of the future experiences that initiate the precognitions. Hence synchronicities that also involve precognition cannot be regarded as acausal. In order to assess the probability of an identifiable synchronicity occurring as a consequence of such a temporal loop it is necessary to consider the effects of every component of the loop around its path from the causal relevance of the most significant originating remote event or events to the strength and reliability of the precognitive mechanism within the brain, which I suspect is significantly influenced by the emotional reaction that occurs at the future turning point of the loop, this reaction potentially being the force that creates the loop. Hence in my case my growing interest in the phenomenon and elation at each successive recognition of a relevant coincidence has sustained further occurrences like a tennis player focussing their mind on returning each ball that comes from the other side of the net.
Maybe this last observation is why controlled experiments often produce such marginally significant results, because the motivation for them is focussed at the past point in the temporal loop instead of the future point where it is most needed. Personally I tend to regard my spontaneous novel writing as having been unintentional documentation of the results of a future experiment in retrocausation that I hadn't yet conceived, which explains my confusion at that time in the past. Perhaps similar experiments in retrocausation can be planned without attracting accusations of falsification but I'm uncertain how.
Why isn't such a phenomenon more widely accepted?
The time barrier is conventionally defended by a majority of the scientific community, by most psychologists and by statisticians but wider society also tacitly accepts its existence simply because it is essential to our existing social structure. Without it I couldn’t even claim that I conceived an idea before I read about a similar one elsewhere if the order of these events was irrelevant and I was simply using foreknowledge of someone else’s idea that I wouldn't find out about until later. There are several examples on this site of my fiction writing apparently being influenced by then unpublished works or ones I simply hadn't know about but currently society is unlikely to view my work as plagiarism in retrospect. Also how could I in all honesty add to my novel a disclaimer stating that any resemblance of characters in it to living people was coincidence when on this site I personally accept the high probability that it wasn't even though I didn't know of their existence at the time? When one considers the wider implications across society the only way that it can remain stable is for there to be an accepted communal consciousness that disregards such possibilities while communally subconsciously such possibilities are exploited. In other words human society is apparently replicating what appears to happen within the brain by erecting internal barriers that limit the flow of information. As I mentioned in a early item on this site, I haven't consciously experienced any precognitions but only deduced their existence within my subconscious. For both my own sanity and equally that of society at large that is probably how things will always be.