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Telepathy

Fudbucker said:
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.
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You're equivocating between vision and memory. Vision is orders of magnitude more reliable than telepathy.

Color blindness is an identifiable, testable condition, because the mechanisms of vision are predictable and function in a reliable. Even their failure modes can be understood. Graphic design is a productive discipline, contributing to every area of human commerce, because vision is reliable. Headlights, traffic signals, and reflective license plates have evolved as part of our system of automobile management, because vision is reliable.

This manual (PDF) exists because vision is reliable. The multi billion dollar monitor industry exists because vision is reliable. Written language exists because vision. Is. Reliable.

Vision is not perfect. But humanity has evolved no telepathic arts. Humanity has produced no engines of commerce or tools of war that exploit the telepathic sense. Because the telepathic sense can't even be measured to exist. Compared to telepathy, vision is absolutely a bastion of reliability.

Did you even stop to think how reliable your sense of sight must be, just for you to be able to accomplish even the simplest tasks throughout the day? You just take that reliability so thoroughly for granted that you forget it even exists.
 
Fudbucker said:
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.
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Not so unreliable that you could not communicate all that poison into the well.
 
Yeggster said:
I thought the same thing, but his OP seems to indicate he wants to be tested ...
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The opening post you quoted says he wants skeptics to be tested, not himself. "Anyone here want to run a test, employing skeptics as the subjects??"

He claims to have become convinced that telepathy is some kind of real phenomenon, but I do not see where he claims that he personally is telepathic.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
He claims to have become convinced that telepathy is some kind of real phenomenon, but I do not see where he claims that he personally is telepathic.
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He hinted at it here:

King of the Americas said:
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.
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King of the Americas said:
So, anyone want to help run an experiment?
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Sure.

Lets get a bunch of strangers, say 20, and randomly pair them up. The receiver will wear blindfolds and ear plugs. The sender is seated directly across the receiver. Neither are allowed to make a sound. The sender will randomly choose a card from either a deck of playing cards, a deck of index cards with 4 digit numbers or a deck of index cards with obscure words on them. The sender will then concentrate on what's on the card and try to send it to the receiver for 30 seconds. The receiver will get a tap on the shoulder when it's time to guess. Do 10 trials of 10 guesses. Only exact matches will count as hits ("contemporaneous" will not count at all towards "contemptuous"). Crunch the numbers and look for significance. Be extremely disappointed that nothing was found.
 
xjx388 said:
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 . . .
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I got this;

One red reverse uno card and a get out of jail free monopoly card.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
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.
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It would account for supposed paranormal accounts that otherwise reliable people have reported. A teacher I've worked with for over a decade swears her daughter saw grandma walking down the hallway right around the same time she died in the hospital. And the daughter, who later became a teacher I also worked with, verified the whole thing.

Either every account like that (and there are countless anecdotes) are all lies, which is absurd, or people are grossly mistaken about what they're seeing, which doesn't help the whole "senses are reliable" argument, or something genuinely strange sometimes happens to people.

It also could be that telepathy happens all the time, but our brains do it automatically, below the conscious level, so it goes unnoticed, like digestion. And occasionally it percolates to the conscious, and you have a genuine moment of precognition or whatever. The causal mechanism would be unknown, but then that's true of lots of things.
 
Fudbucker said:
It would account for supposed paranormal accounts that otherwise reliable people have reported. A teacher I've worked with for over a decade swears her daughter saw grandma walking down the hallway right around the same time she died in the hospital. And the daughter, who later became a teacher I also worked with, verified the whole thing.

Either every account like that (and there are countless anecdotes) are all lies, which is absurd, or people are grossly mistaken about what they're seeing, which doesn't help the whole "senses are reliable" argument, or something genuinely strange sometimes happens to people.

It also could be that telepathy happens all the time, but our brains do it automatically, below the conscious level, so it goes unnoticed, like digestion. And occasionally it percolates to the conscious, and you have a genuine moment of precognition or whatever. The causal mechanism would be unknown, but then that's true of lots of things.
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Sadly a supernatural telepathy can't exist. We unfortunately - in the sense of no more of a gap for a hope to hide in - now know that there is simply no mechanism by which supernatural telepathy could work. Whilst there are huge areas in which we lack knowledge this is not one of them. We know how all the forces at the scales claimed by supernatural telepathy work and the constraints on them. Anything of a an "unknown" communication from brain to brain would not be what is claimed to be supernatural telepathy.

If humanity continues with technological progress I am sure we will have non-supernatural telepathy within only a few generations. Moving the smart phone directly into the brain is already technologically feasible.
 
Darat said:
Sadly a supernatural telepathy can't exist. We unfortunately - in the sense of no more of a gap for a hope to hide in - now know that there is simply no mechanism by which supernatural telepathy could work. Whilst there are huge areas in which we lack knowledge this is not one of them. We know how all the forces at the scales claimed by supernatural telepathy work and the constraints on them. Anything of a an "unknown" communication from brain to brain would not be what is claimed to be supernatural telepathy.

If humanity continues with technological progress I am sure we will have non-supernatural telepathy within only a few generations. Moving the smart phone directly into the brain is already technologically feasible.
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You assert that. What we think we know and what turns out to be the case are often two different things.
 
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