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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

If we're going to talk about telepathy and all mean the same thing by it, we need a rigorous definition of the term. Does anyone have one?

If asked to guess, I'd start with "the communication of meaning among humans in the absence of signification", but I am unstudied in the field and have no idea what prior art exists.

edit: I did say "rigorous". Please cite your sources, and note that while I am admittedly guessing above, I'm borrowing the terms "meaning" and "signification" from the jargon of semiotics in order to do so; considering the subject matter, to raid a sort of philosophical "fringe science" for terminology seemed apropos.

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Telepathy is the ability to use your mind to reach out into the mind of another, thereby allowing you to passively observe and/or change the contents.

Telepathy would convey instant understanding in both the receiver and the sender. I don't think humans in their current form could handle it. We'd be completely exposed. It's not at all like verbal communication if you read accounts of NDEers.

telepathy does not always mean read access to the brain

at its most basic, it's an email

Parapsychology is what you're looking for.

Transfer of information not using the existing senses.

Is intuition a sense - or is that potentially some people excelling at reading physical cues that 99.999999% of people can't see or relate to what someone is then likely thinking?

Intuition isn’t a sense. There’s no data being measured. Intuition is a processing and synthesizing of past and sometimes presently sensed data into some meaning.

When I understand “sense” in this context I’m understanding “sensor.” A sensor is measuring something.

I think the closest I can get to telepathy without it being a completely wild paradigm shift in understanding is if we could implant technology directly into our brains, thus introducing new sensors.

There are "famous" people on YouTube who seem very telepathic-psychic - but I suppose people would really only become a believer if they have an anecdotal experience themselves that defies all odds.

If it’s real, it will survive scrutiny and people will believe the evidence.

There are all kinds of famous people, on Youtube and elsewhere, that believe (or claim to believe) the most absurd things.

Why would that matter in the slightest, especially given that their purported abilities all seem to flee to another dimension as soon as they're under scientific evaluation?

Intuition i think much more data driven than you say. I think probably it’s just subconscious calculations

I think this sort of negative definition is not very useful, though. As soon as telepathy is demonstrated, it becomes an existing sense. And that's not just word chopping, it's pretty evident that this is going to bother people and that they will believe it can't be "real" telepathy.

In a non-trivial way, this means that "telepathy" is defined as something that does not and can not exist. If it exists, it won't be telepathy, because it'll have to be something real, and as such, it won't be "real" telepathy.

If you do give it a concrete definition that permits it to exist, it is often the case that it turns out that we have it in the real world already, unless you define it as some sort of ability to invasively read people's minds or something, in which here's hoping it never exists in this universe.

Well said - more formally:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption

A fun question to cut through (or expose) intuitive/cultural heuristics: did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?

Yes, that’s essentially the whole point.

“Magic is just science we don’t yet understand” and all that.

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