Telepathy

[Bikewer]

Not all animals have or have developed these abilities.

People get killed by bullets, arrows, bombs, and impacts of all sorts. Sometimes though...people stop and avoid it.

The hair on your neck creeps up, and there is a sense of heightened awareness...and the outcome is at your hand.

As a cornerback, I could tell when the play was coming my way. Maybe that was me reading how most of the line was positioning their feet, or which direction everyone was looking, but I knew. If I was certain I'd call, "strong side lean," then left or right. Never did it often, but I was never wrong.

Telepathy is not necessary to explain such things. We know that subliminal inputs can warn us of things before we become consciously aware of the cause. I've experienced this myself.

Athletes refer to being "in the zone" when it's like the body is running itself at a high level of performance.
Skilled martial artists often appear to "know what the opponent is going to do" before he does it. This is just long experience and the ability to read subtle body cues and facial expression, further developed by years of training.

 

[Crossbow]

Because it isn't reliable, predictable, or consistent in any way.

Practicing is a form of manipulation and people who are the best at it, don't want to draw attention to themselves.

How would one use telepathy to make money, besides working as a magician?

If a person actually had telepathic powers, then there would be any number of ways that such a person could use his powers to make oodles of money. Playing cards, espionage, being a police investigator, being a lawyer, being a reporter, and so on.

 

[Dumb All Over]

Hi, King of the Americas. Welcome back.

I did what you asked. I named my terms, just like you said. OK, let's get it going with Randi's test. How would you like to proceed?

 

[fagin]

KOTA is presumably picking up posts telepathically.

Or he lost interest on page 1.

Spooky, did he read my mind?

 

[Cosmic Yak]

How would one use telepathy to make money, besides working as a magician?

Playing poker.

Spy.
Detective.
Business negotiator.
Heck, you could even be a really good prostitute.

 

[theprestige]

Now, I'm no G.I. Joe, but I've never heard of any kind of version of unarmed combat or take-downs that stress not to focus on the back of someone's head in case they sense it. That's just odd.

It could have been a fragment of an old Atlantean Kung Fu manual. The half-menorah is the symbol for "don't look at the back of a Spaniard's head when planning a takedown." But the fragment was found off the coast of Morocco, not Spain, which casts doubt on the translation.

 

[theprestige]

Look, I am a grad student. This is an internet message board. I could care less about full citations and holding your hand through the intertubes.

What you are discussing is intuition...and ABSOLUTELY, some athletes can "read" setups better than others. The best athletes seem to "predict" better than others.

Humans are good at pattern recognition.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Humans are good at pattern recognition.

For example, most of us can probably tell where this thread is going.

Dave

 

[theprestige]

How would one use telepathy to make money, besides working as a magician?

Stage magicians don't make money by practicing real magic. They make money by entertaining people with illusions. The whole point of a magic show is that it's fun because you know it's an illusion but you don't see the mechanism.

Doing real magic on stage would be depressing, boring, and probably not very lucrative. Your income would be limited to whatever a good illusionist normally earns. As a mentalist, you wouldn't even be saving much on props and apparatus. In order to earn more, you'd have to improve your patter, marketing, and stage presence--all things that any illusionist must do, even without real magic.

No, for a *real* mind-reader, the big money is gonna be made far, far away from the stage.

Here's another one: If telepathy were real, why does the CIA still **** around with waterboarding? If telepathy were real, why don't all our histories of warfare include accounts of skilled interrogators reading the minds of captured enemies?

 

[theprestige]

Because it isn't reliable, predictable, or consistent in any way.

This property--reliable, predictable, consistent--is a property of real things that do useful work in the real world.

At the most basic level, telepathy isn't real because it cannot be tested. If the test fails, "oh, it's not reliable." If the prediction is wrong, "oh, it's not predictable." If the results look like noise, "oh, it's not consistent."

 

[xjx388]

Simple telepathy test. I will hold two playing cards in my hand and concentrate on them. The telepath will divine which two cards are in my hand. Only exact matches will count. We will conduct 100 trials and a success will be declared if the telepath gets 90 out of the 100 correct.

When do we start? If this **** works, I will soon be the most famous poker player of all time . . .

 

[fagin]

Er um ok...

 

[jrhowell]

As a cornerback, I could tell when the play was coming my way. Maybe that was me reading how most of the line was positioning their feet, or which direction everyone was looking, but I knew. If I was certain I'd call, "strong side lean," then left or right. Never did it often, but I was never wrong.

That is testable. Go to a football game and put on a blindfold and earplugs so that you do not pick up any regular sensory information about the game. Then call off the plays that you are sure of as they occur and have someone score you on how many you get right. "Never wrong" should be easy to prove.

 

[Crossbow]

Because it isn't reliable, predictable, or consistent in any way.

Practicing is a form of manipulation and people who are the best at it, don't want to draw attention to themselves.

How would one use telepathy to make money, besides working as a magician?

And by the way, ...

If I actually had telepathic powers, then I expect that I would be much better at picking up girls in bars.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Because it isn't reliable, predictable, or consistent in any way.

How fortunate we are that our other (i.e. real) senses and brain functions do not work like this.
If telepathy is real, and a function of the human brain, why does it not behave like all our other functions? Imagine if your eyesight wasn't reliable, predictable or consistent iin any way.

 

[Fudbucker]

How fortunate we are that our other (i.e. real) senses and brain functions do not work like this.
If telepathy is real, and a function of the human brain, why does it not behave like all our other functions? Imagine if your eyesight wasn't reliable, predictable or consistent iin any way.

That's a valid question to ask, although it doesn't preclude the existence of psi powers. It just means they would work differently than our other senses.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

That's a valid question to ask, although it doesn't preclude the existence of psi powers. It just means they would work differently than our other senses.

It doesn't, but then we are skirting dangerously close to special pleading.

 

[Fudbucker]

It doesn't, but then we are skirting dangerously close to special pleading.

Close, but our senses (and the brain that sifts through the information) are notoriously unreliable. Eyewitness testimony is laughably unreliable. Don't make it sound like we're bastions of reliability. If 20 people told you they saw Jesus return and walk on water, you probably wouldn't believe them.

 

[Loss Leader]

Very simply -

KotA, are you interested in conducting a properly controlled test of your telepathy or not?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

There's a substantial difference between the (notoriously inaccurate) task of recalling experiences in detail and the reliability with which our various senses perceive the experiences in the first place. They're quite distinct tasks. In any case, there's no need to invoke some hypothetical and still undefined extra sense since none is required to explain our present abilities and no rigorous search for extra abilities has found anything to require another explanation.