Telepathy: Questions/Thots for believers.

D

Dinosaur

Rational Skeptic
Valued Senior Member
What is the transmission mechanism? Science knows of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong & the weak nuclear forces. Is there some 5th mechanism? If so, it seems strange that it is only detectible by the human brain.

What is the range of telepathic communication? Does it fall off linearly with distance? Is there an inverse square law degradation in the strength? Most of the articles I have read seem to imply that signal strength does not decrease as distance from the source increases.

When doctors or other investigators monitor brain activity, they attach detectors directly to the skull. As far as I know, brain activity is not detectable by scientific instruments at distances beyond inches or perhaps a few feet. Believers in telepathy do not report much (if any) degradation in signal strength when plotted versus distance.

When human abilities and/or characteristics are measured, a bell-shaped curve is usually the result. For some abilities, the plot is not symmetric, but is similar to a bell shape.

In all that I have read about telepathy (& other paranormal abilities), it is claimed that some folks have the ability & many do not. Not at all like the bell-shaped plot relating to other abilities. This seems very strange to me.
 
This thread makes as much sense as a thread trying to determine how fast a unicorn can gallop or the average weight of a leprechaun.
 
Too right, Bells. :D

Not claiming any territory here, but as far as the OP goes, any time I've ever had what you could call a telepathic moment, speed of propagation seems to be the same as the speed of quantum entanglement, instantaneous.
 
There are a few people who have abilities that make it seem they have "magical" abilities. A 6th sense is one ability that we all can understand for many have that ability and have used it during their lifetime. While it cannot be proven that anyone has the telepathic ability there have been people claiming to have that and clairvoyance. Since there isn't any documented proof that all scientists want, it is hard to prove it actually is there. Nostradamus comes to mind when he saw the future and was right many times in what the future was.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus&ei=8OKCVfmzIYm3sAXPmIPgBA&usg=AFQjCNE-6dQv8nweORG2vq69isrQpoJdXg
 
cosmictraveler said:
There are a few people who have abilities that make it seem they have "magical" abilities. A 6th sense is one ability that we all can understand for many have that ability and have used it during their lifetime. While it cannot be proven that anyone has the telepathic ability there have been people claiming to have that and clairvoyance. Since there isn't any documented proof that all scientists want, it is hard to prove it actually is there. Nostradamus comes to mind when he saw the future and was right many times in what the future was.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus&ei=8OKCVfmzIYm3sAXPmIPgBA&usg=AFQjCNE-6dQv8nweORG2vq69isrQpoJdXg
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Nostradamus never predicted anything. People simply looked at events that happened and then in hindsight attributed one of his oh so vague quatrains to it. Just more of the paranormal silliness.
 
Telepathy may be more like quantum entanglement in which two states effect each other irrelevant of spatial location or time. Here's an aspect of it called telesomatic experience:

"A mother was writing a letter to her daughter when her right hand began burning intensely and she dropped the pen. Less than an hour later she got a phone call telling her that her daughter’s right hand was severely burned by acid in a laboratory accident.

A family living on a farm in upstate New York began their day’s work, but all returned to the house later in the morning after experiencing a strange feeling. All eight family members felt an intense foreboding, each without being aware the others felt the same. That day, in Michigan, a son in the family died in an accident.

A woman felt a pain in her chest and said her sister had been hurt. The woman later found out that her sister was in a fatal car accident at the same time; her chest had been crushed by the steering wheel.

These stories go well beyond empathy. They are about feeling the pain of a loved one at a distance, without the conscious knowledge that that person is suffering. “Even when it happens between a mother and child, it likely goes beyond the stock phrase ‘a mother’s intuition,’” said Michael Jawer, a researcher interested in the mind-body connection who co-authored the book “The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense” with Marc Micozzi, MD, PhD.

The first two stories were recounted in Dr. Larry Dossey’s books “Healing Beyond the Body” and “Reinventing Medicine” respectively. The third was told by the late Dr. Ian Stevenson, former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and quoted by Jawer.

Dr. Dossey calls these experiences telesomatic events. The word telesomatic comes from Greek words for “the distant body.” He wrote in “Healing the Mind” that such events are usually positive. A woman who feels a suffocating sensation, for example, and senses that her child is drowning may run out to the swimming pool in time to save the child. Sometimes, however, they can be damaging. For example, a soldier had his legs blown off and a loved one’s legs became paralyzed for no apparent reason..."===http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/810...at-a-distance-a-seemingly-psychic-connection/
 
Magical Realist said:
Telepathy may be more like quantum entanglement in which two states effect each other irrelevant of spatial location or time. Here's an aspect of it called telesomatic experience:
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gleason-video-clips.jpg

And away we go!:rolleyes:
 
Dinosaur said:
What is the transmission mechanism? Science knows of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong & the weak nuclear forces. Is there some 5th mechanism? If so, it seems strange that it is only detectible by the human brain.
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That a mediating agency would be necessary as an additional contributing or causal factor for telepathy, rather just leaving it at the superficial explanation of a rare brain function or a "it just happens" emergent augmentation of human abilities, is appealing to a particular worldview or principle or both. Which is to say, there are increasingly indolent camps out there which may demand a reason for why more complicated elucidations should be sought for certain items.

Yitzhak Melamed: "The Principle of Sufficient Reason [or explanation] is a powerful and controversial philosophical principle stipulating that everything must have a[n adequate] reason or cause. This simple demand for thoroughgoing intelligibility yields some of the boldest and most challenging theses in the history of metaphysics and epistemology. One of the most interesting questions regarding the PSR is why to accept it at all. Insofar as the PSR stipulates that all facts must be explainable, it seems that the PSR itself demands an explanation just as much." --The Principle of Sufficient Reason, SEP

However, to answer that question: In the context of a mechanistic materialism paradigm, PSR does seem to fall out of or be supported by the interdependence of the universe's diverse furniture. Or nature regarded as a closed network of interacting entities (no reliable miracles or brute occurrences).

So assuming that telepathy was the case, simply as an excuse to explore whether or not PSR really is [in practice] consistently applied to everything...

PSR doesn't seem to be a concern for those who dismiss the hard problem of consciousness. Even though the pre-20th century mystery of biological "matter" and operation ultimately had to recruit the components, agencies, and properties of chemistry and physics to resolve itself, those who pretend that there's nothing puzzling about experience are often content to leave it as a feat of brute emergence confined completely to the upper level of neural or electronic organization. Even functional arrangements of clockwork mechanisms and hydraulic systems would suffice for detouring away from a deeper explanation, if a giant robot with sensory and thought manifestations could be realized by such variable macroscopic substrates. Not to mention a vast number of individual humans serving as an interconnected social correlate for an experience supervening on them (an instance of phenomenal consciousness).

Thus, if the mental visual showing of Mount Fuji and the qualitatively exhibited odor of lilacs merely have to correspond to an abstract pattern (with the choice of "stuff" dynamically composing the latter deemed irrelevant)... Then telepathic communications might likewise elude need of any further explanation than a person's brain having either a mutated or overly exercised region which possessed the function of brutely apprehending ridiculously weak and low frequency electromagnetic brain waves from other brains.

"Function", don't you know, is the magic buzz-word that instantly repels any restrictions of physics, chemistry, physicalist beliefs, etc from interfering in the specialized turf of neurobiology, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, the social sciences, etc. New abilities / capacities and ontological affairs simply emerge minus being fully explainable in terms of antecedent circumstances or reducible to lower-level precursors. Declaring that it is just the "function" of _X_ to yield _Y_ banishes the principle of sufficient reason like garlic scares off a vampire. Whenever it's more convenient to be intellectually and experimentally lazy than tackle and more deeply solve a formidable challenge. (Of course, the dubiousness of non-artificial "telepathy" is hardly being referenced any longer at this point, barring it eventually becoming as blatantly inescapable as perceptions, bodily feelings and thoughts having various modes of manifested content.)
 
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Dinosaur said:
What is the transmission mechanism?
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It hasn't been established that telepathy exists. If it doesn't exist, then it doesn't have a transmission mechanism.

If you are asking what hypothetical transmission mechanism might it have if it does exist, the answer at this point would have to be 'that's unknown'.

Science knows of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong & the weak nuclear forces. Is there some 5th mechanism? If so, it seems strange that it is only detectible by the human brain.
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Dunno. Assuming for the sake of argument that telepathy exists, the radio-transmitter model might not be the best way to think of it. Maybe something else is happening.

What is the range of telepathic communication? Does it fall off linearly with distance? Is there an inverse square law degradation in the strength?
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The whole thing is kind of stuck on showing that telepathy exists. It's never moved on to discovering its characteristics (if it has them).

When doctors or other investigators monitor brain activity, they attach detectors directly to the skull. As far as I know, brain activity is not detectable by scientific instruments at distances beyond inches or perhaps a few feet. Believers in telepathy do not report much (if any) degradation in signal strength when plotted versus distance.
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Just speculating, telepathy might not have anything to do with the brain transmitting and receiving signals. Maybe its some kind of synchronicity thing. And one might want to argue that it is associated with mind, as opposed to brain, which would suggest some kind of dualist or idealist ontology.

When human abilities and/or characteristics are measured, a bell-shaped curve is usually the result. For some abilities, the plot is not symmetric, but is similar to a bell shape. In all that I have read about telepathy (& other paranormal abilities), it is claimed that some folks have the ability & many do not. Not at all like the bell-shaped plot relating to other abilities. This seems very strange to me.
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Speculating again, maybe it's a threshold thing. Maybe everyone has the underlying ability, whatever that is, but it only makes itself manifest in those who have it to a sufficient degree.
 
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there is no transmission, just shared truths. whatever truths you hold that match the other persons truth will be the determining factor of the strength of telepathic communication between you.
 
Magical Realist said:
Telepathy may be more like quantum entanglement in which two states effect each other irrelevant of spatial location or time. Here's an aspect of it called telesomatic experience:...
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Meh, you call it telesomatic experience, I call it coincidence.

Humans are inherently pattern-seeking machines, so given the sheer number of things that happen to each individual on the planet each day, is it any wonder that, in pure obeyance of the laws of probability, some times there are some occurrences in which we see the appearance of something more?
 
akoreamerican said:
there is no transmission, just shared truths. whatever truths you hold that match the other persons truth will be the determining factor of the strength of telepathic communication between you.
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Firstly, this statement suggests that truth is relative or subjective. I would take issue with that. If there is more than one version of "truth", then at least one of them is not "truth" but something weaker.

Secondly, what evidence do you have for your statement that strength of telepathic communication depends on "shared truths" (whatever they may be)?
 
exchemist said:
Firstly, this statement suggests that truth is relative or subjective. I would take issue with that.
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So would I.

If there is more than one version of "truth", then at least one of them is not "truth" but something weaker.
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I suspect that the word that akoreamerican had in mind there was 'thoughts' or 'ideas', as opposed to 'truths'. Making that substitution would avoid the epistemological problems.

Secondly, what evidence do you have for your statement that strength of telepathic communication depends on "shared truths" (whatever they may be)?
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Nobody possesses any instrument capable of measuring telepathic signal strength. We don't even know if there are telepathic signals, or what their nature might be if there are.

So if telepathy exists, how might telepathic strength be estimated? Presumably by the size of the information flow/sharing between the individuals in telepathic contact. How might we estimate that? Presumably by how many ideas/thoughts the individuals share in common.
 
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exchemist said:
Firstly, this statement suggests that truth is relative or subjective. I would take issue with that. If there is more than one version of "truth", then at least one of them is not "truth" but something weaker.
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sorry if it sounded that way. i actually mean the actual truth. whatever thoughts you may have is influenced by whatever knowledge you have. how many truths(things you believe that actually exist) you hold in your knowledge that matches up with the other person.
 
akoreamerican said:
sorry if it sounded that way. i actually mean the actual truth. whatever thoughts you may have is influenced by whatever knowledge you have. how many truths(things you believe that actually exist) you hold in your knowledge that matches up with the other person.
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OK, thanks for clarifying.

What about evidence? Because I do not believe there is any. Which would mean that your assertion is a mere speculation of yours and not a factual statement.
 
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