Speculative, yes, but I keep seeing more and more ideas from parapsychology that jive up with the Multiverse in these ways, that one can't help but wonder and re-evaluate their position on the Multiverse.
EthanT, wanted to note that your connection between the multiverse and the paranormal is
something Josephson has also considered:
What are the implications for science of the fact that psychic functioning appears to be a real effect? These phenomena seem mysterious, but no more mysterious perhaps than strange phenomena of the past which science has now happily incorporated within its scope. What ideas might be relevant in the context of suitably extending science to take these phenomena into account? Two such concepts are those of the observer, and non-locality. The observer forces his way into modern science because the equations of quantum physics, if taken literally, imply a universe that is constantly splitting into separate branches, only one of which corresponds to our perceived reality. A process of "decoherence" has been invoked to stop two branches interfering with each other, but this still does not answer the question of why our experience is of one particular branch and not any other. Perhaps, despite the unpopularity of the idea, the experiencers of the reality are also the selectors.
The physicist Fred Alan Wolf also mentions this idea of
parallel realities being able to possibly account for paranormal phenomenon & experiences. (
Skeptiko thread here.)
While I'm very doubtful about the multiverse, one way I've thought about this - which admittedly is far out conjecture - is that both the "everything has happened" idea of a Block Universe and the Multiverse might both be true. So time is an illusion,
as Barbour claims, and yet consciousness is moving through these possibilities. Our decisions take us into what would otherwise be frozen, timeless existences. The 'I-thought' of self-awareness switches the tracks, so to speak, and makes the possible experience into an actual one. There's no branching in the sense that new universes are created - the Multiverse is extant but fallow until consciousness is conducted into a particular branch.
But are there separate conscious entities going their own way into these otherwise timeless possibilities, or are we all collectively on the same train? This makes me think of the conclusion to Schrodinger's
What is Life?, where he suggests that there is only one Mind going through the motions of living separate lives. A very Eastern take, but primarily motivated by the belief at the time that QM had no relation to macro-biology. But this idea, updated to account for quantum biology and coinciding with Morhoff's
aforementioned take on QM which suggests Sri Aurobindo's "Supermind" dividing itself to experience evolution, offers the suggestion that we are all in fact One Mind and thus on one train.
So the future is a set of destinations already extant, but not experienced. Which future we end up in collectively is based on our choices made in the present. Precognition would then be a sort of reverse morphic resonance, showing us a future that resonates closely with where we seem to be headed. I think this helps makes sense of things like warning synchronicities, especially if you factor in Carpenter's First Sight model.
As always, the usual caveats that things like morphic resonance or synchronicity might have mundane explanations applies.
Not to mention the philosophical issues one might see arising with morphic resonances concept of similarity....though it seems to me the concept of a universal mind - perhaps part of
Bohm's Unbroken Wholeness mentioned earlier in this thread - would alleviate the issue Braude has with any concept of similarity that doesn't include evaluation by consciousness.