[ExI] Sigh

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/29/2011 9:38 AM, David Lubkin wrote:
> Take telepathy. I see three ways you might be able to read another
> persons thoughts:
>
> (a) classic telepathy -- through mutation or biological alteration,
> a human acquires the ability
>
> (b) technological equivalent -- A and B both have computer-brain
> interfaces with read/write capabilities. A's thoughts are converted
> to a data stream, which is transmitted to B. B's processor converts
> A's thoughts into an audio feed. Or overlays B's visual image of
> A with closed captions. Or, more ambitiously, writes A's thoughts
> into B's short- or long-term memories.
>
> (c) augmented nature -- humans now, or through *biological*
> alteration, have an ability that could read human thought but isn't
> powerful enough. Technological means amplify our senses,
> making an inherent ability potent enough to be usable.

One interesting aspect of this kind of question is the variety of 
"normal" ways people experience their inner life. As I've probably 
mentioned before, I am somewhat unusual in having almost zero mental 
pictorial imagery. It turns out a surprisingly large number of humans 
share this deficit, but hardly anyone ever talks about it. For years I 
assumed words like "mental picture" or "image" were metaphors of a 
slightly mysterious kind. I knew what a picture or image was: what you 
saw in the light via your eyes. You could also get something much 
fainter and more abstract by pressing hard on your closed eyelids, or 
letting a very bright light shine on closed eyelids. I eventually 
learned that these were ways of stimulating the rods and cones of the 
eye. Then I found that for most people, a mental image was... a goddam 
picture, fainter perhaps than seeing something with the eyes but capable 
of rotation, change of color, etc. Several friends who are fiction 
writers tell me they just sit down and transcribe the "scenes" they 
watch and hear in a kind of imaginary movie. This would sound psychotic 
to me if it wasn't so commonplace.

But I know that some people *do* have psychotic experiences in which 
they "hear" voices speaking to them clearly, or see odd things that 
aren't really there. I've experienced optical illusions, and rarely 
"heard" voices utter a word or two as I went to sleep (hypnagogic 
hallucination), so I can imagine how that might be. These events are 
obvious repurposing existing neurological processes. I suppose telepathy 
could exist that does something similar. Science fiction psi ranges from 
what amounts to acoustic hallucinations that mimic conversation with a 
person who isn't there, to brief flashes of indistinct images, to 
wholesale emulated experiences like dreams (as in the TV show MEDIUM).

What the lab evidence suggests to me is that real "telepathy" is not 
experienced as a communication channel akin to hearing and speaking but 
rather as a *feeling* (as the name implies): a sudden unbidden thought 
or mental image, a burst of excitement or foreboding, etc--just the kind 
of thing one might get from a subliminal affect using the senses.

Excellent trained remote viewers like Joe McMoneagle tend to be very 
visual and their output (when tasked to identify some distant or future 
target) is a series of sketches, often capturing partial "glimpses" of 
the target, with a few jotted words that seem not to be "heard" but 
rather are annotations to the pictures. The state of mind conducive to 
psi in this mode seems to be something like free-floating dissociative 
imagining that is nevertheless disciplined enough to allow direction 
(without front loading or feedback) and reporting of the experience as 
it happens. Far from easy. Nothing at all like Alfred Bester's THE 
DEMOLISHED MAN, say, even though Alfie imagined a world of "espers" who 
wove mental images and pun rather than linear streams of words.

Damien Broderick