One of the things that I don't understand about the idea of 'seeing the future', is it doesn't seem to me that the future exists from the standpoint of the present. If there is any freedom at all in the present, the future is not yet entirely determined. And even if there were no freedom at all, it seems to me that the only way to determine the future would be to allow actual events to unfold and see what happens. because any predictive model that was less complete than the world itself would be inadequate. Yet the future is not determined solely by seeing what develops from the present, because precognition is not strictly of the present, and it influences what can happen.

One thought that people have is that precognition shows what is 'likely' to happen in the future, based on the past. But it appears to me that the past physical state of affairs must not be the only thing that makes a particular outcome 'likely', because some foreseen events are not of a kind that can be plausibly extrapolated from the present. For example when one foresees a freak accident that happens to someone else.

When telling a story, certain events are likely to happen later in the story not because they're predictable from what happens earlier in the story, but because they're part of the story. Suppose you're trying to tell a story where the events in the story have to be consistent with each other down to the last atom. Since everything is interrelated, small events have to be coordinated with other small events so that larger events work out also. Given that precognition is possible, there must be a story, so there must be such coordination.

Who is telling the story? If we have any freedom at all, then we are part of who is telling the story. But as individual people we are aware only of objects and events that pertain to us personally. And since those things are of necessity in agreement with objects in events in other people's lives, from an individual standpoint it looks like most things happen for reasons outside of our control. If we think we see the reasons, things appear to be compelled by circumstance, and where we don't see the reasons, things seem to be random. From that standpoint life appears less like a story, because so many of the details appear either forced or unintelligible.

Suppose that for a moment you view life not from your standpoint as an individual person, but from a standpoint spanning more than one person. From this standpoint you are still one individual, but two or more people are a part of you, as different parts of your mind. From that standpoint some larger scale aspects of the story are no longer factors outside of your control, they are your story. And your story only makes sense if certain events happen soon, events that coordinate the smaller scale story telling of the individuals who are a part of you.

As a single person you can't foresee such events because they don't yet exist, and the scope of your personal power and freedom isn't sufficient to tell them as a part of your story. If you did have such power and freedom as a person, it wouldn't be a premonition, it would just be thinking about what you plan to do and then doing it. But from a more shared standpoint you have some freedom and power on a broader scale than you have as a person, even though you are still constrained by considerations beyond that standpoint. At every level you may imagine "I am doing this", but what you are capable of imagining doing is limited by conditions outside of your awareness.

The idea that life is a collective dream is hardly a new of course. (Row row row your boat.) My main thought here is that "the future" develops as an act of will, and the way that it seems partially foreordained is a consequence of how details have to be brought into focus across different scales of experience. This also explains or describes why premonitions and 'shared' thought experiences seem to be closely related for some of us. When two people 'share' a dream that's connected to an impending event, another way to look at this is that a part of the collective mind is planning what is going to happen, and hasn't brought it completely into existence yet. The dream itself is also a kind of event of course, and can be viewed as a part of the larger event.

In my thought of this, what may be thought of as natural law would be a consequence of the same process. Its not that the universe is designed, or works a certain way from chance, so much as that the unity of will across different scales requires there to be physical law. Other physical laws are presumably possible, depending on the story being told, but they would tend to share some characteristics out of necessity. Likewise for more subtle dynamics like karmic law. To change the law, you have to be able to imagine an alternative law in a way that actually works, and you have to be able to do this from your current standpoint. Most hypothetical alternative ways for things to work won't actually work, hence the failure of utopian religious and political experiments.

(A big part of 'my story', as an individual, is trying to help find an alternative story that works better. A better kind of karmic law so to speak, one in which the development of intelligent life involves a lot less treachery and misery. This story is a part of a larger, more collective story, and its not a story that will be brought to a successful climax any time soon, if ever. To what extent my part of this is beautiful or epically stupid remains to be seen I guess.)