Never quite made it into the respectable hard sciences

June 17, 2024 12:54 AM

Telepathy might initially seem a much softer, psychological proposition, tainted with a sense of the supernatural. Yet both Campbell and Clarke were lifelong advocates of the view that telepathy was highly probable, the scientific proof of its existence likely just around the corner. The promise of telepathy – soon to be achieved, not far off, only a few test subjects away – feels very familiar when reading Musk’s boosterish announcements on Neuralink’s latest breakthroughs. The promise that telepathy is just about to be realised is not confined to entrepreneurs and science-fiction writers alone. For more than a century, there have consistently been figures in the scientific establishment who have entertained similar hopes that telepathy would soon reach the threshold of proof, promising everything from opening a new evolutionary phase of human development to a new psychic front in the global arms race. from Tomorrow People [Aeon; ungated]
posted by chavenet (35 comments total)

Susan Blackmore is elided... [Scientific American: How to Be a Mystical Skeptic]
posted by HearHere at 1:22 AM on June 17 [2 favorites]

...something something more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
posted by The Tensor at 1:41 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]

The boosterish announcement link is dead for me
posted by waving at 1:43 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]

The boosterish announcement link is dead for me

You just aren't opening your mind wide enough.

(It seems broken for me, too, third eye be damned!)
posted by Literaryhero at 1:50 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]

(It seems broken for me, too, third eye be damned!)

Try this link or this one: What It’s like to Live with a Brain Chip, according to Neuralink’s First User
posted by chavenet at 1:56 AM on June 17

Cordwainer Smith's hiering and spieking comes to mind.
posted by y2karl at 3:16 AM on June 17 [4 favorites]

Wow all respect to Noland Arbaugh for being willing to be a test subject for this. I hope it continues to help him.

For some reason the charging hat seems really freaky to me!
posted by Zumbador at 3:22 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]

ramez naam's nexus series goes deep.
posted by kliuless at 5:16 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]

Sean Carroll: Parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:38 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]

From what I recall of freshman psych, they said the issue was that they could never consistently replicate the results.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:49 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]

The fact that no one ever claimed James Randi's One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge prize always seemed particularly damning evidence to me.
posted by fairmettle at 5:53 AM on June 17 [13 favorites]

Speaking of Neuralink, they've managed to get into another lawsuit (pregnancy discrimination this time, which seems both on and off brand for the owner.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:13 AM on June 17 [4 favorites]

thatwhichfalls' First Law states that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from the torture nexus," so I imagine that, if telepathy were real, it would be primarily used for hurting people.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:17 AM on June 17 [12 favorites]

This feels like a don't invent the torment nexus moment:
From Alpha Centauri:
Mind/machine interface:

The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons.

Got to love Pravin Lal, even if his faction was the boring one.

As for telepathy, it was always looking for statistical variance using cards, never anything useful. And for telekinesis/other physical effects it's always moving something small a short distance incredibly slowly. I know it's because it's all slight of hand, but even if it weren't, it'd still be useless. These practitioners have presumably been working on this for years. If this is only as good as they can get, then it literally is just parlor tricks.
posted by Hactar at 7:22 AM on June 17 [7 favorites]

I feel like this is conflating two unrelated concepts. By "telepathy" people usually mean transmission of thoughts via non-technical, non-physical means. I wouldn't call a device or system of devices that can transmit the output of one brain to another telepathy anymore than I would call viewing a television broadcast from another country remote viewing.

We already have many of the pieces of such a "telepathic" system at various stages (e.g., we already devices that can extract images from brain scan information, we have tested brain interface devices in monkeys that allow them to manipulate things with their thoughts, we obviously have the means to transmit data, etc.). In principle we already know it's possible to build such a system, however difficult that may be in practice in humans (at least in a safe, scalable way).
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:54 AM on June 17 [11 favorites]

Wow all respect to Noland Arbaugh for being willing to be a test subject for this.

He's the first approved human trial user in the US but one can't help but wonder if there isn't a pile of previous "users" in some desperately poor place who had the "privilege" of advancing the early research that these companies are less eager to issue press releases about.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:17 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]

> Got to love Pravin Lal, even if his faction was the boring one.

you can rail against mmi all you want i’d still provost zacharov you and everyone else so hard that we all become a unitary worm-fungus entity that’s had the collective knowledge of humanity blasted through it without a moment’s hesitation
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:43 AM on June 17 [8 favorites]

okay so as a tangent i’ve been thinking pretty hard for the last few minutes about the potential for achieving quasi-immortality through using telepathy to overwrite someone else’s mind with your own and upon consideration in certain limited (but easily produceable!) cases i’d be for it. don’t get me wrong I’m certainly not saying i’d be for it in all cases — it’s what doro in that one octavia butler novel does and he is a truly vile monster — but i think i’d be totally fine with telepathically consuming the mind of a newborn

anyway
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:46 AM on June 17 [5 favorites]

There's a reason that Professor X is often portrayed as a villain. The temptation to just screw with people's heads, even well-intentioned screwing, is just too great.
posted by SPrintF at 8:47 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]

I used to long to know what people really thought and every day now I'm glad I don't. Because if my own weird, selfish, unkind, distracted thoughts are any indication it would be really insulting and/or boring and/or horrifying. Our minds are swampy places that no one else needs to see.
posted by emjaybee at 8:47 AM on June 17 [5 favorites]

yes but the inside of my mind is a place that everyone wants to see like seriously it is exquisite in here.

unrelatedly i want to make it clear that the two acceptable scenarios for telepathically consuming and then replacing the mind of a newborn are as follows:

1. the newborn is vat-grown
2. you’re good enough at playacting as an infant, toddler, and then child and teenager that you could brain-swipe a random baby without the parents ever guessing that you’re a nigh-immortal changeling/baby-eater. telepathic baby-eaters should get a life or two to practice but no more than that

ps they may already exist so if you know anyone who for example learned to read when startlingly young like two years old say then you may have an explanation
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:59 AM on June 17 [4 favorites]

Surprised to not see subvocal recognition getting a shoutout here. Seems like if we can just perfect intercepting subvocal signals to the throat muscles, it would obviate the need to literally shove chips into people's heads to do effectively the same thing. The problem is that the people pushing for the telepathy tech are all super-horny to be cyborgs, and the idea of a simple wearable subvocal throat mic is just too normcore for the wannabe transhuman crowd.
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:11 AM on June 17 [3 favorites]

achieving quasi-immortality through using telepathy to overwrite someone else’s mind with your own

colonialism writ small

or at least lowercase
posted by flabdablet at 9:13 AM on June 17 [5 favorites]

Surprised to not see subvocal recognition getting a shoutout here

Or, you know, just talking with people.
posted by flabdablet at 9:15 AM on June 17

Or, you know, just talking with people.

Nah, you're misunderstanding. We already have things like Siri that let you use voice commands, however imperfectly. It would be neat to be able to do that silently for both privacy and courtesy reasons. Or it's 3am and you're rocking your infant to sleep while listening to a podcast and want to rewind or do some other command without disturbing the baby.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:41 AM on June 17 [2 favorites]

ps they may already exist
Poor Things
posted by HearHere at 11:03 AM on June 17

I'm not sure a baby brain could serve as a platform for a fully formed adult consciousness, could it? In any event, I don't think I would be terribly happy to wake up in the body of an infant, and I suspect I would be quite insane well before I remastered walking. Probably what you want, optimally, is a situation like the gholas in the Dune series, clones of dead people whose past life memories are made manifest sometime in early adolescence. That way, you don't have a person who has to go through all the leveling up bullshit of childhood, and who also feels comfortable in their environment, especially useful if many years have passed since the death of the original.

Would I trust any of this to Elon Musk? I absolutely would not. I wouldn't trust his people to wash their hands before performing brain surgery, to be honest.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:15 AM on June 17 [6 favorites]

Or, you know, just talking with people.

Nah, you're misunderstanding. We already have things like Siri that let you use voice commands, however imperfectly. It would be neat to be able to do that silently for both privacy and courtesy reasons.

A common use case for subvocal communications in SF/technothriller lit is to allow silent conversations between individuals in situations where normal speech or text communications are difficult. Not so much mind-reading as being able to let people know what's on your mind, without having to overtly speak out loud or send a text.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:10 PM on June 17 [3 favorites]

bombastic lowercase pronouncements > ps [telepathic baby-eaters] may already exist so if you know anyone who for example learned to read when startlingly young like two years old say then you may have an explanation

I taught myself to read somewhere before kindergarten but if this explains it I have apparently chosen to forget everything I knew before I ate the mind of this body.
posted by egypturnash at 2:24 PM on June 17 [2 favorites]

I saw the Telepathic Baby Eaters at the Nectarine Ballroom in Ann Arbor MI in 1987. Not a bad show, for a band without umlauts.

But any science fiction that brings up psionics is always going to be terrible science fiction, that's for sure.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 3:12 PM on June 17 [3 favorites]

> I taught myself to read somewhere before kindergarten but if this explains it I have apparently chosen to forget everything I knew before I ate the mind of this body.

uh huh
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:15 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]

I don't think I would be terribly happy to wake up in the body of an infant

If the noises they make are any guide, it seems that most infants agree with you.
posted by flabdablet at 3:26 AM on June 18 [2 favorites]

it's 3am and you're rocking your infant to sleep while listening to a podcast and want to rewind or do some other command without disturbing the baby

Seems to me that given a suitable HID driver, a Dance Dance Revolution floor mat or some descendant thereof could cover that use case at much lower personal and financial cost than a brain implant.
posted by flabdablet at 3:29 AM on June 18

I wouldn't call a device or system of devices that can transmit the output of one brain to another telepathy anymore than I would call viewing a television broadcast from another country remote viewing.

I, on the other hand, would.

Hand me the remote viewer remote.
posted by y2karl at 7:05 PM on June 18

What, remotely? No can do. I haven't even mastered staring goats to death or walking through walls yet.
posted by flabdablet at 12:09 AM on June 19