The Premonition Bureau

With time, once an unlikely occurrence is incorporated into the story of a life, or a death, it becomes almost impossible to see the alternative possibilities that once existed. Storytelling itself is also an act of narrowing, of eliminating branching futures, until there is only one way that things were ever going to go. We confer meaning to control our existence. It makes life liveable. The alternative is frightening. Randomness is banal. It diminishes us. But the truth is that we resist meaning almost as often as we insist upon it. We refuse its presence to make life simpler and to spare ourselves. There was no way we could have seen that coming. We didn’t stand a chance. It is easier to be a mole who knows nothing about the habits of birds. Letting things go, surrendering to chance, is its own narrative act but we talk about it much less. The magpies that alight in the garden and go uncounted; the visions that we wave away; the associations that we refuse to acknowledge; the tragedies that were unstoppable. How we distinguish the chances that signify and the ones that do not, and the decisions that we make in our lives as a result, is the kind of question that turns in on itself and might be impossible for us, as individuals, to answer. We cannot stand outside our own lives. We would not want to.

Part of our attachment to entropy is evident in our constant fight against it. We tidy the house. We elect new presidents. We dead-head the roses. We go to couples therapy. We try and put things back as they were, even when they will not go. Karl Friston, the neuro-imaging pioneer whose work has been central to the theory of the predictive brain, is deeply occupied by entropy. He sees reducing entropy, resisting disorder, as the goal of all forms of life. Friston calls this idea ‘the free energy principle’, a phrase also used by Freud, which expresses how our brains are always trying to conserve energy, and therefore unnecessary decay, in every mental process. Logic says that the more accurately we can predict the world, the less energy we will expend in coping and adapting to its vicissitudes, and the longer and more fruitfully we will live. ‘Minimizing entropy corresponds to suppressing surprise over time,’ Friston wrote in 2009. The free energy principle drives our memories, intuition and expectations to generate the smoothest experience of reality as it hits us. More than that, it governs our actions as well, as we struggle to bend that reality, to manage it and make it conform to our cognition. The entropy of the universe will not decrease. All of us must die. But seeing things before they happen is how we, as mortal souls, can seek to slow down time.