The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience | Hacker News Reader

The Telepathy Tapes: A Dangerous Cornucopia of Pseudoscience

skepticalinquirer.org

3 pointssxp7 comments

It's funny to me because I practice mediumship and believe it is a helpful practice (one of very few healing methodology that was used in most of human history and certainly long before that; people will probably still be using it in 40,000 years if people are still around.) I think many of the problems people have today that are intractable (climate change, pathological politics, the perception that "the economy sucks", maybe even the agony of a parent who has an autistic child) are intractable because they are spiritual problems that can't be addressed by material means.

It boggles my mind that there was a time that you could convince people you were talking to the dead (boy it is fun to lift a table though) but by the mid 20th century that was gone and it was all the White Brotherhood (not racist) and Edgar Cayce and Seth and such. For most of history though and in the backwaters of China, persecuted by both Republicans and Communists, people have manifested animal spirits.

On the other hand, I don't believe in telepathy, precognition and such (even though my slightly defective nervous system is inclined to have unusual experiences like that.) I'm not in competition with physics or western religion; if somebody gets something out of going to church I celebrate that, but I have a call to the ministry to reach people who the church can't reach.

I found the idea of entanglement rather than telemetry compelling.

Maybe we can get “mixed up” and hear in our mind as a subflow. Some populations may be more sensitive or less conditioned to filter for normality (normalcy?)

I didn’t find the authors “incredulity” very scientific, though the presentation in the tapes is quite shabby. I could have laughed milk out my nose when they used math. Who knows what else they goofed up right?

I was looking for some supplies at the occult shop at the mall last weekend and was telling them that, from my point of view as a cond-mat PhD,is that the greatest miracle of quantum entanglement is that thanks to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics

solid matter is possible, and secondarily

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statisti...

makes the laser possible. All that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Podolsky%E2%8...

people are fascinated with is a distant third if that. I have to admit that I've had some of the weirdest coincidences such as my mother dying the day after I got married in secret and that whenever I cast the I Ching in grad school I always got

https://divination.com/iching/lookup/23-2/

which was interpreted quite a bit more negatively in the two translations I had, particularly in that the current goal was impossible and it was necessary for the situation to blow over before you could progress. (e.g. newer translations try to be a lot more upbeat than the old ones)

Well I think what was interpreted wrongly was that information could not propagate faster than light.

The argument is that before time-space the Universe is a hyper dimensional. Vibration and periodicity giving way to the kind of probabilistic divergence described by D.D. In The Fabric of Reality. The entire universe might well spring from this vibrational axis giving rise to all. Space time would emerge from the entropic dilation.

If entanglement was the synchronization of vibrational coordinates, that “vector” could have one resolved state. I would not rule out instantaneous communication by that principle alone.

Even with quantum entanglement, information cannot propagate faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. This has already been experimentally verified, and the light-speed limit itself is one of the most thoroughly well proven concepts in physics. Here are two sources but you can find plenty of others [0,1].

[0]https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-e...

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/05/04/the-real-r...

Personally I think it's deeper than that. In God's geometry I think there is no way to say "faster than light".

During the pandemic Steve Wolfram went off on a vainglorious scheme to unify physics (kinda doomed) but I appreciated his approach to "superspace" (the configurations of space/time that one might want to write a wavefunction over) in that causal networks must exist: e.g. two points have a spacelike relation or one is in the future of the other)

From the podcast's website:

> The documentary will culminate in groundbreaking, tightly controlled telepathy experiments conducted in university labs with multiple scientists, led by Dr. Diane Powell. These experiments—conducted in Faraday cages and designed to be peer-reviewed—have been Dr. Powell’s dream for over a decade. This revolutionary research will validate what we’ve seen in early tests and bring it to the masses, shining a light on the incredible abilities of non-speakers.

> Please note: the tests featured in our “test library” were conducted by Ky Dickens with a small crew in non-speakers’ homes to confirm the validity of telepathy and ensure this was a story worth pursuing and that the phenomena was real. Now, it’s time to take this work to the next level and formally capture these experiments for the world to see.

A lot of the linked critique boils down to "the tests talked about in the tapes are invalid because they aren't following rigorous protocols." They are seeking funding to finish the documentary and to perform more rigorous tests. The people behind it all, whether they're correct or not, are earnest in their belief and not grifters. I'd love to see that experiment happen.

https://thetelepathytapes.com/donate

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