Tomorrow people: For a century, it felt like telepathy was around the corner | Hacker News Reader

Tomorrow people: For a century, it felt like telepathy was around the corner

aeon.co

82 pointsCaiero223 comments

Alan Turing's paper in which he first lays out the idea of the Turing Test for AI is surprisingly prescient in many particulars. But one thing that stands out is when he is considering various arguments for why computers might not be able to pass the Turing Test, he considers the objection that humans will be able to display some telepathic abilities that computers won't as one of the strongest counter-arguments. He considers it nearly a given that these abilities exist.

I wonder if people who are less adept at non-verbal communication are more prone to believe that telepathy exists?

The article mentions Star Trek and Vulcan mind melds, which continue to be an important element of the franchise today, but misses a more obvious case: there was a lot of ESP and telekinesis motifs in the Original Series in the 60s, that were severely toned down or outright abandoned by the 90s. For example, you don't hear much about Gary Mitchel anymore, except for that one episode of Lower Decks.

Also, I think a lot of sci-fi shows had direct ESP references before mid-90s, then the trope suddenly died out.

> Also, I think a lot of sci-fi shows had direct ESP references before mid-90s, then the trope suddenly died out.

Everything parapsychology dies out very suddenly in the mid 1980s. Ghostbusters debuted June 8th, 1984, and within 18 months most universities had already gotten rid of the department. Intelligence agency experiments in remote viewing and such all just fade away nearly as quickly. Police departments using psychics for leads has a sharp downward trend from that date onward. About the only thing left was late-night 900 number commercials for Miss Cleo, that last until the mid-1990s.

Comedy is a powerful sociological weapon, able to obliterate entire memetic ecosystems.

It was always there, just that at some point in tng S2 telepathy became less of a prominent identity for characters who possessed it.

There was always this thread of exploring beyond the dimensions of space and time in star trek, beyond what our minds are capable of grasping, beyond the information channels that we can immediately perceive. Getting closer, occasionally with the help of other aliens who are on that same voyage, on the nature of reality that brought us all here.

"That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."

TNG has several species like the Q that have evolved to godlike abilities and there are episodes where a humanoid undergoes the final stage of physical evolution and then ascends to a higher plane of existence (becomes something like the Q). Star Trek Picard (relatively new show) had a lot about exploring internal conflict and I think even in TNG one of the final episodes has Q tell Picard that the final frontier is internal and doesn't involve mapping out stellar nebulae.

Other shows like Stargate also have the concept of "ascension" as a pivotal plot point of many episodes. Farscape covers this as well in several episodes. Things like mind melds and mind reading are pretty common in these shows once someone ascends.

There is a lot of "woo" in science fiction as it is kind of hard to still believe in gross limitations for us over a cosmic scale of thousands of millions of years. Assuming we don't die out, I'd believe our ultimate potential is unfathomable to us now.

There is definitely a difference between "these beings have become so advanced as to do things we would believe impossible like reading state directly out of our brains" and "for vague and in fact aggressively unspecified reasons this critter can read the 'minds' of those around them". When people pontificate about "brain uploading" they are certainly speaking of some physical process that does what is now currently impossible, but may not be impossible forever.

But perhaps the more relevant objection is that episodic television can't really be read for more than the vaguest of philosophical content across their wholes. One episode can be written by an ardent materialist and the next by a New Age guru writing a New Age story wrapped in science terminology, and as long as they do a good enough job in general writing ability and following the series bible for consistency, it might take a lot of analysis to notice. Such series aren't so much statements themselves as platforms.

We're on the same page. I don't disagree with anything you have here.

Babylon 5 has excellent an excellent ascension arc. One of the best.

I miss 90s Sci Fi.

Babylon 5 is THE best IMO. I just love all the little character dialogue that makes the universe so expansive. I miss scifi like that.

Wasn't there this woman with purple uniform, who's mother had a crush on Piccard, who could read peoples emotions from a great distance and speak in their heads?

I don't think I liked her character or episodes built around her. But I don't really remember why.

She was half human and half Betazoid, her empathic abilities coming from the non-human half. She only managed full telepathy in rare circumstances, like with a lover (Riker) or her mother (a full Betazoid).

GP is talking about characters who were 100% human - there was a second one in that same TOS episode, and they mentioned a standardized test all members of Starfleet were given to determine how strong their natural ESP abilities are.

Deanna Troi

Telepathy played a pretty big role in 90s Star Trek. TNG had Deanna Troi. It appears repeatedly in DS9. Voyager had Kes.

The idea of multi person “melds” abounds too: the Borg collective, the Contiuum.

Agree except about the Borg. They used technological assistance, something like subspace wifi.

Growing up I read a lot of “golden age” science fiction, and I remember realizing how many classic “hard” sci-fi novels and short stories feature super mental powers like telepathy, precognition, teleportation, etc.

- Asimov’s Foundation series

- Herbert’s Dune series

- Larry Niven’s Known Space stories

- Heinlein’s Stranger from a Strange Land

- Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man and Tiger Tiger

- Clarke’s Childhood’s End

I’m sure there are more that I forgot to mention.

It really did seem to be a pervasive expectation that the mind was the next frontier for seemingly magical scientific advancements. But it never panned out with actual results, and mental powers faded from hard sci-fi stories.

From a working author's PoV, super mental powers were great stuff. The "hard" SF audiences really liked the idea - I'm sure it helped that many of them imagined or fantasized themselves being somewhat "super" in the mental dept. Such powers add a bunch of (conveniently arbitrary) rules, which puzzle stories could be built around. Unlike (say) FTL drives, there was no expectation that the author should devise a detailed "how it works" backstory. Nor explain how the protagonist could manage to afford or invent it. And most mental powers are an easy short-cut to the character's emotional states. (Not to assert that sophisticated and nuanced character portrayal seemed a priority of most "hard" SF authors, back in the day.)

An interesting counterpoint to this is the use of telepathy in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish cycle, which is generally considered as more "soft" sci-fi. Several of the early books in the series revolve around "mindspeech", which is a form of telepathy in which it's impossible to knowingly lie:

> Mindspeech between two intelligences could be incoherent or insane, and could of course involve error, misbelief; but it could not be misused. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie. (City of Illusions)

In her later works in the same setting, Le Guin backed off from this, although she never explicitly retconned it out of existence:

> I couldn’t use it in a story any more, because when I began to think seriously about the incalculable effects mutual telepathy would have on a society, I could no longer, as it were, believe in it. I’d have to fake it.

https://reactormag.com/introduction-from-ursula-k-le-guin-th...

I really enjoyed Peter F. Hamilton’s take on this in the Night Dawn Trilogy, with his Edenists. A bit hopeful, but intriguing.

A lot of that was due to the influence of John W. Campbell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell

You can read a lot of the stories from Analog, the magazine that Campbell edited for many years, here: https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html. I was a fan back in the day, but going back now I see a lot not to like. And certainly many of the stories involved ESP.

That article links it back Joseph Rhine, and then to Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism. Ultimately maybe the blame lies with Emanuel Swedenborg for inspiring every kind of woo-woo.

True, the idea wasn't new. But Campbell made it part of classic SF rather than fantasy or "new age" mysticism as it was earlier.

Actually the mind control aspect of the Foundation series was my least favorite part. I know it was a big part of the storyline but I would’ve preferred a heavier emphasis on “psychohistory” and chaos theory. The telepathic element, especially in books 4 and 5 was left unexplained. The only thing that would make sense to me is if anyone with mind control powers was actually a robot.

Apparently Asimov linked the robots into Foundation some decades afterwards, so maybe he agreed with you. (I've not read past the original trilogy, so can't say for sure.)

He did! Foundation and Earth.

They were incorporated but there seemed to be a clear separation between Gaia (the planet where everyone had telepathy and they basically stored data inside of the rocks/earth’s core) and the robots. Maybe that was a misunderstanding on my part, and Gaia was a world of robots. Which would also imply that the Mule was a robot. That being said it would also imply many of the members of the second foundation were also robots. I don’t know if this is the right interpretation.

Major Spoilers Unmirror text to read.

Wɘ ʇinb oυt in tʜɘ ʇinɒl Azimov volυmɘ tʜɒt tʜɘ Mυlɘ wɒƨ ɒ Әɒiɒn, tʜoυϱʜ not ɒ ɿodot. Әɒiɒ wɒƨ ʇoυnbɘb dγ Я. Ⴇɒnɘɘl Olivɒw. Iʇ I ɿɘɔɒll it wɒƨ ɒ ƨibɘ dɘt iʇ tʜɘ ƨɘɔonb ʇoυnbɒtion bibn't ƨɒvɘ ʜυmɒnitγ.

That’s interesting, because I thought the person in question was supposed to represent a certain historical figure.

How can I unmirror this?

With great difficulty.

> We find out in the final Asimov volume that the Mule was a Gaian, though not a robot. Gaia was founded by R. Daneel Olivaw. If I recall it was a side bet if the second foundation didn't save humanity.

Do kids these days not know about rot13?

Great - you've literally revealed the spoiler. Do kids these days not know about internet etiquette?

Asimov actually invented the Black Swan Event half a century before Taleb.

Mind control was such an event that psychohistory could not account for. Sometimes things just happen and spoil our plans.

That’s a fair point. I just wish there was a clear cause and effect behind the black swan event. Part of what makes the big short so interesting to me is seeing exactly how the black swan event transpired in the 2008 housing crisis.

Asimov did eventually explore some of the ideas of the hidden causes/effects of that Black Swan Crisis in deep sequels and things you don't expect to be sequels ("The End of Eternity" for example). The answers basically boil down to "meddling from Robots and Aliens" both groups of whom the Empire worked to destroy and/or claimed/believed didn't exist (and so Hari Seldon was entirely blind to them as actors in galactic politics).

Though certainly at the time of writing Second Foundation he had no idea what caused it, was writing by the seat of his pants, and was just looking for a MacGuffin that would confuse everything he'd built in the first Foundation novel.

Yeah I think because the series was written so far apart, there were sacrifices made in the plot integrity (imo). I’m a big fan of Asimov mainly because of the concepts he explored but I would never compare the foundation series to the lord of the rings for example, which had a much more well thought out universe.

Sure, but to be fair, strong cohesive worldbuilding was never the goal with Foundation. It was a gedankenexperiment to take an impossible but scientifically plausible sounding technology (psychohistory) and find lots of ways to break it and/or explain it.

If you were actually looking for Asimov at his most "Lord of the Rings" I'd actually suggest probably "The Gods Themselves". There the worldbuilding was far more central and important to the narrative.

Thank you very much for the recommendation, I’ll check it out.

That makes sense that he was trying to find a way to break it, I just think chaos theory would break it very well on its own. It’s not possible to forecast weather accurately past what, two weeks? And the second foundation was going to predict the evolution of a million-planet galactic population 1000 years into the future? You don’t need mind control to poke a hole in that, lol.

I don't think that 2008 housing crisis had any serious black swans around it, instead of bad planning caused by chasing the dollar.

The point of a black swan that there doesn't have to be a cause.

> The point of a black swan that there doesn't have to be a cause.

That's the first I've heard that suggested.

It's a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight; based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did not exist which stopped being used that way in 1697 when people found actual black swans.

The point isn't that black swans don't have causes. The point is that nobody is expecting those particular causes at all when the event happens, due to prior assumptions being wrong.

If you want to portray some sort of "next step in human evolution", it's an easy thing to portray that audiences would have some understanding of from other media.

The more obvious choice of just portraying people as having extremely high intelligence, is unfortunately a bit of a trap. Authors generally fail at creating characters smarter than themselves, for perhaps obvious reasons.

This makes me wonder about AGI and super intelligences. Why would our brains be able to engineer something more intelligent than our brains?

The only room seems to be in emergence from incredible amounts of processing power and data or perhaps many brains working together can overcome the limitations of one brain.

This is a reasonable angle, but recall that some sunlight, dirt, and water managed (with a lot of compute) to emit something smarter than the sum of its parst.

I mean, people working together quite often overcome the limitations of one brain, especially when those working together are driven towards that goal.

Let's generalize the question. Why are our brains able to engineer machines that produce forces greater than a human body?

Because they understand the forces, and set them into motion with tiny efforts to build mechanisms that eventually unleash and reform large amounts of energy, creating the force.

And what if intelligence is another kind of force that can be created by taking tiny, human efforts, building a machine, then pumping huge amounts of energy into it, outputting the intelligent force?

Or let's consider evolution. How could it create intelligent brains from single celled organisms? Incrementally, as the organisms randomly accumulated mechanisms of adaptability and eventually sensing and cognition.

In the first view we see ourselves as engineers, building a vast engine that, through its sheer size and energy, and our basic understanding of fundamental laws of intelligence , produces an intelligent force greater than a human mind.

In the second view, we see ourselves as blind watchmakers, jamming AI components together at random, until, by accident, we get something smarter.

> Authors generally fail at creating characters smarter than themselves, for perhaps obvious reasons.

Hah, I've noticed that for years. Anderson's "Brain Wave", however, is a decent attempt at what more intelligent people would be like.

I always just thought of telepathy in science fiction as being like faster-than-light travel: clear nonsense, but a very convenient and interesting method of avoiding physical realities that interfere with telling certain types of stories. It's an aspect of the "fiction" part of science fiction.

But, relatedly, I think that a certain kind of category error happens that can play into this as well: a lot of science fiction is actually fantasy, just in a technological setting. Star Wars, for instance, is not science fiction so much as it's fantasy.

A lot of scifi is just westerns, with blasters replacing guns. See "The Mandalorean".

It took me a while to realize ST original series is just a western. It’s Captain Kirk and his gang of cowboys going from town to town.

Not a bad thing in any way.

It was originally "Wagon Train to the Stars".

A lot of westerns are just samurai movies, with guns replacing swords.

I mean how much of telepathy is in reach of science now? Think of two individuals with some kind of neurolink style device. Could they be able to communicate with just thought?

For a related but flipped perspective: imagine you were describing modern society and the ubiquity of texting. The speed and non-verbal aspects of it, coupled with some people's ability to multi-task texting in the middle of other conversation would be hard to describe to an audience in the 1950s or 1960s, but if you were going to describe it a lot of scifi descriptions of telepathy come close. Maybe we already invented "telepathy" in the future we are living in, it's just so ubiquitous and "dull" and "everyday" we underestimate how fantastic and weird it is from past perspectives?

I know it's not your main point, but I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible? Just because the technology is wrong doesn't mean the idea is not interesting.

I am a big sci-fi fan and I disagree here. I think there is a difference between soft and hard sci-fi, but that difference is more about how consistency with the rules is treated. Soft sci-fi can be thought of as fantasy with a future setting, while hard scifi sticks to it's own world rules tightly, and often explores the consequences of these rules and the characters are just a means for that. (Relatedly, I think there can be hard and soft fantasy as well)

Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi. His novels explore some very far out ideas in terms of how the world may work, but he sticks to the consistency and really explores the politics and consequences of that universe.

Clarke also does this, but to a somewhat lesser extent. In many of his stories, the world and its rules are the main character, and the actual beings are the supporting characters.

> Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi.

I'd also suggest a good look at Baxter's books and Robert L Forward's too.

I've jokingly called Forward's books science papers with a plot. Timemaster starts out with:

> There exist semieducated but obstinate people who have raised the concept of strict local causality to godhead, and attempt to use such words as "obviously" and "it only makes sense that ..." in an attempt to "prove" that their version of causality cannot be violated, and that any sort of time machine is logically impossible. From my reading of the scientific literature, they are wrong. If I receive a letter from this sort of person complaining about the "impossibility" of the time machines in this novel, I will throw the letter in the nearest wastebasket... unless the letter is accompanied by a reprint of a scientific paper published in Physical Review (or any other reputable, refereed scientific journal), written by the person writing the letter, which proves that the paper "Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves" by Friedman, Morris, Novikov, Echeverria, Klinkhammer, Thorne, and Yurtsever, is erroneous.

My take on it is more of a "what is the focus of the story?" Is it the soft sciences? Psychology and sociology and politics ... and the Foundation.

Or is it one more of challenges met with the STEM disciplines of physics and astronomy and biology?

It's also not a "it is either a this or that." Some books can be both and I think that Clarke is a prime example of this. 2001 is as much of a story of psychology as it is about astronomical distances and the ship needed to accomplish that goal. The Songs of Distant Earth is about two cultures clashing ... with the real problems of engineering a ship to travel (it's a softer story than it is hard).

Protector by Niven likewise scores high on both the soft and hard scales.

Foster tends to higher on the 'soft' side of the scale, though sometimes it edges up there with some real biology and the limits of technology are sometimes real limits.

And so, it is "are the challenges that the characters surmount solved with tools developed from the soft or hard sciences?"

"Use the Force Luke" is not a hard science solution.

> I've jokingly called Forward's books science papers with a plot.

All the biggest scientific achievements always occur in Canada. His stuff's solidly in the fantasy category.

I share a similar view to you on what is hard or soft science fiction, but it can be tricky to pin down. Star Trek to me is somewhat firm (in between) as the technology may as well be magic (Heisenberg compensators), but it tries to be consistent with the scientific rules within the show for the most part. Revelation Space more or less feels like a universe operating off the same principles as ours with a more reasonable assumption about the future (hard). Then you have things like Star Wars that are fun, but so ridiculous as to very much be on the soft side.

ST:TOS and ST:TNG era seemed to deal with some hard sci-fi ideas. Nothing I've watched in the last 20 years seemed hard sci-fi. Most of them seem to be "how can we work some action sequence into this story". Admittedly I haven't watched them all and I'm sure there are moments of hard sci-fi but my impression is it's devolved into space opera.

"Primer"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384

"The Man from Earth"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683

sorry I meant episodes of modern star trek. there are plenty of hard sci-fi movies. those two are great.

I'd add "Her" and "Ex Machina"

I really enjoyed both

Star Trek was always meant to be space opera, but yes... ironically TOS, considered the campy black sheep of the franchise now, is the one series that at least attempted to be harder than others would, with input from actual engineers and science fiction writers of the time. The episode with the introduction of the Romulan cloaking device, for instance, hinged on the actual laws of thermodynamics (a perfect cloak is impossible - it must be radiating something somewhere.) In modern Trek, they'd just something something subspace some bullshit.

It helped that Gene Roddenberry was in the Navy and that Trek was basically The Cold War In Space which is actually more of an interesting dynamic to me than Starfleet being basically invincible and everything running on space magic.

A lot of the campiness of the original series disappears when you watch it on a much smaller screen at a distance - which is how it was designed.

Lewis Carroll, writing as Charles Dodgson, in a review of a new university belfry tower described it as best viewed from such distance that perspective dwindled it to a point.

I agree that there's a clear difference between hard and soft science fiction. But in my mind, it's "hard" science fiction if the world is entirely consistent with physical reality as we know it.

There's basically little to no truly hard sci fi under that definition. Even the Martian fudges things to make the storm happen as the plot needs it to. I can't think of any other recent movies or books that fit your criteria, though I'm sure there are some books at least.

There has always been a lot less hard sci-fi than soft, true, and it used to be more common than it is now.

But the real dividing line in my mind isn't quite as stark as I made it sound. There's still a gray area. Unusual events that exist purely for plot purposes don't disqualify anything, for instance.

The differentiator I have in mind is more basic: if the story involves things that are simply not possible, it's not hard sci-fi. If it involves things that are very unlikely, but still within the realm of possibility, it can certainly still be "hard". Same if it involves things/effects that don't (as far as we know) exist, but wouldn't break the laws of physics if they did.

Can you give examples of works you consider to be hard sci-fi?

Off the top of my head, I'd count Asimov's Foundation, Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, Niven's Ringworld, Gibson's Neuromancer, Bear's Darwin's Radio, and Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Most Asimov's short stories about robots?

Those are literally just morality plays with no scientific grounding whatsoever. The "positronic brains" behind the robots only exist because Asimov thought it sounded cool and futuristic.

How does hard fantasy which also sticks to it's own world rules tightly factor into this?

Your understanding of the terminology sounds a lot different than mine. I always interpreted "hard" and "soft" to simply be references to "hard science" and "soft science."

In other words, I thought "hard sci-fi" means fiction that deals mostly with fictional facts in fields like physics, astronomy, geology, and biology, while "soft sci-fi" means fiction that deals mostly with fictional facts in fields like psychology, economics, and political science.

Yes this is a reasonable way to misunderstand given the way we refer to “hard sciences” and “soft sciences”, but it does not map to the terms “hard scifi” and “soft scifi” in common usage.

It’s not exactly about rules consistency either as stated by the GP, though that’s part of it. It’s more about strong consistent application of scientific principles even theoretical or untested principles.

This is in contrast to futuristic fantasy with no real focus on the science. But futuristic or space fantasy can be very consistent just like magical systems in fantasy can be very consistent. Hard scifi has to be constrained by plausible consistent science and that science is typically a main character in the story, or even THE main character.

I don't know if it's a misunderstanding, or if usage is just very mixed and inconsistent. Both Wikipedia articles provide both definitions, and both claim that usage is sometimes contradictory and not at all rigorous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction

> The complementary term soft science fiction, formed by analogy to the popular distinction between the "hard" (natural) and "soft" (social) sciences,[6] first appeared in the late 1970s. Though there are examples generally considered as "hard" science fiction such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, built on mathematical sociology,[7] science fiction critic Gary Westfahl argues that while neither term is part of a rigorous taxonomy, they are approximate ways of characterizing stories that reviewers and commentators have found useful.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction

> The term soft science fiction was formed as the complement of the earlier term hard science fiction.

> The earliest known citation for the term is in "1975: The Year in Science Fiction" by Peter Nicholls, in Nebula Award Stories 11 (1976). He wrote "The same list reveals that an already established shift from hard sf (chemistry, physics, astronomy, technology) to soft sf (psychology, biology, anthropology, sociology, and even [...] linguistics) is continuing more strongly than ever."

I've only ever heard Gattaca described as hard sci-fi and Star Wars as soft sci-fi.

I'll throw out one I expect I'll get lots of disagreement over. Firefly (the series, not the movie) seemed pretty "soft sci-fi" to me. They could have changed the setting to people in a Winnebago towing a trailer going from city to city on Earth and nothing would really have changed in at least the first 7 episodes.

Good one. I think it's generally considered a Western in a sci-fi setting. They did try to stick to self-consistent rules and a realistic "feel" with the technology, physics, special effects and so on (no sound in space, etc) which would put it on the harder side of the spectrum perhaps. But since the sci-fi elements barely interact with the story, and so there's no deeply-considered exploration of how those sci-fi elements are consequential to the story / characters / society of that world, it could also be considered soft.

> I think it's generally considered a Western in a sci-fi setting.

This is how I think of it as well. I actually don't really consider it science fiction, it just uses the scenery. Although I equally wouldn't say anyone who calls it "science fiction" is wrong.

That brings up another thing: I think a story can be science fiction without involving anything futuristic or space-related at all.

For me it’s soft sci-fi because the show was about the people. Space was just the backdrop.

Whereas something like Foundation is about the exploring the concept of psycho-history and galactic civilisations and the people are there to move that story forward.

The Foundation series is premised on an achievement in the social sciences (soft) but is considered "hard sci-fi".

It looks to me like both definitions are widely used. The first paragraph on Wikipedia claims that the term "hard sci-fi" was coined first, then "soft science fiction" was coined specifically to make the distinction between hard science and soft science. That paragraph also notes that there is no rigorous distinction, and mentions Foundation as a classic example.

I strongly disagree, I don't think the "soft-science fiction" and "hard-science fiction" meanings are widely used; if you use these meanings often then you'll probaby very frequently cause confusion and prompt discussions like this one. Almost everybody is using the other meanings, at least in recent years.

> Who knows what is and what will be possible?

I think this is a vast oversimplification of how knowledge works. Like yes, no one knows with perfect certainty what the laws of physics or whatever else are, but that hardly means _anything_ is plausible or worth entertaining.

I amuse myself with the foundations of physics and I'm so sure that FTL is impossible that I find science fiction that uses the idea almost tragically silly, simply unwilling to grapple with the limitations imposed on us by the vastness of space.

I agree, but also, it's really hard to have sci-fi without FTL. I feel that necessitates it being somewhat soft, but having every other character die when someone travels to another planet means you're basically tied to a space story without space travel.

> when someone travels to another planet

I think you mean solar system. While nobody has traveled to Mars, it is reasonable to suggest that is only because we haven't tried hard enough yet. There are problems in the way, but they seem like engineering things that we will figure out if we try. It is debatable if we can make a self supporting colony on Mars, but it getting there seems perfectly possible in reach. Venus is harder (getting there is easier, but reaching the surface is questionable), but we could probably do it.

Getting just the farthest planet in our solar system though is getting close to a lifetime. The nearest star to earth is 4 light years away, we have no hope of reaching it in a lifetime with any technology we know works (there are nuclear options that seem promising but we don't know if they work)

The milky way is 100k lightyears. Not possible to cross without FTL.

Its really not hard! I am with GP in that most scifi with FTL comes off as silly, perhaps fun and well written but not to be taken seriously in the sense of its worldbuilding being immersive or intriguing.

Almost all my favorite books almost exclusively occupy settings with laws of physics that are internally consistent and believable and therefore have no FTL. See "The Expanse", "Three Body", "Blindsight", "The Sunflower Cycle", "Rendezvous with Rama" and too many others to name.

Mild spoilers for The Expanse: It does have FTL travel, but it is presented as alien and has a limited impact on the day-to-day lives of characters. I get the feeling this was done for narrative reasons primarily, but it helps with "sci-fi hardness".

Generally I think the impact of instant communication and near-instant travel (or lack thereof) is not talked about enough. Most sci-fi stories derive from the present day, and keep this aspect of today (as do many fantasy stories, interestingly), but it's a narrative choice with large impacts.

The Expanse has FTL after a couple of books, though I enjoyed the pre-FTL parts more.

Yeah I guess it has FTL but its not really FTL in the same way I think GP meant. It could just as easily be simulation or something else. Its not warp or hyperdrive and it doesnt really violate the internal consistency of the world building since its totally alien clarketech

Three Body has FTL.

Does it? The sophons are capped at light speed though they communicate FTL. The whole curvature propulsion I thought had the ships moving at light speed, not exceeding it. Three Body has plenty of clarketech but most of the drama comes from it being grounded in something kind of like actual the laws of physics.

Communicating FTL breaks causality just like FTL travel does.

That's an incredibly compelling hook for a sci-fi story!

It is largely the premise for at least the beginning of Speaker for the Dead where the main character lives essentially a digital nomadic life traveling at almost light speed planet-to-planet. He knows he can never go back to any place he's been as everyone died of old age as soon as he left. It has FTL communication though.

Read some Greg Egan. It isn't really that hard.

See, I find this to be the core of what is wrong with the idea of "hard" sci-fi. The technology we have today is magic to a medieval peasant. Just because the explanation of how something works gets disproven, doesn't mean the invention itself won't happen.

Take FTL travel for instance. Sure, lightspeed is a hard limit, but we don't know yet whether wormholes are possible, which meanns warp drives are not impossible too.

But more than that, it's the effect that tech has on people that makes good sci-fi, not the tech itself. In this sense, even the technically impossible remains relevant. For instance, we'll (likely) never meet aliens, but most of us will one day be confronted with the themes of aliens stories, e.g. understanding people beyond our culture, dealing with the unfathomable, grieving our place in the universe, etc. "Hard"ness is just aesthetics.

Hard means it's kept within tasteful range of today's sense of technoplausibility.

Usually it also implies that it grapples with the nitty gritty details to "earn" the tech. Hohmann transfers vs. brachistochrone trajectories omg squee https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php

I tried to say this, but not nearly as eloquently as you.

A major part of the hard soft dichotomy is how the tech is treated and talked about in the story too though, not just the level of the tech. You could make a hard-scifi version of Star Wars, you'd just be expected to provide more justification and narrative around hyperdrives than you get in the current soft scifi version.

"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is the best hard scifi book ever written.

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...

When I was making the list above, I actually went and looked at my bookshelf of ancient sci-fi paperbacks. C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy is a nominally “science fiction” work that I excluded and would consider soft sci-fi. It’s set in space with aliens, but is really a fantastic story (in this case an allegory) that makes basically no attempt to extrapolate or connect with hard science as we understand it today.

A funny one is the Pern series, which starts out as a sword and dragon fantasy series, but then like 10 books in we find out it is actually hard sci-fi (!) with space ships, orbits, genetic engineering, computers, etc. But there is still that telepathic connection with the dragons…

>I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible?

It isn't about whether a technology is possible. "Soft SF" is SF where the actual scientific details don't matter. It is about people, their cultures, and their emotions. And really, just a metaphor for our own society. For example a story about how a future VR technology is addictive and causes people to interact less in real life could be just a metaphor for real life smartphone/Internet addiction. The story doesn't need to (and probably doesn't) explain how the VR tech works because it doesn't matter. "Hard SF" actually is based on actual science, and that is the focus of the story. It isn't that one is better than another, but they are different.

Aren't mental super powers pretty much ubiquitous in folk tradition in the form of magic, the working of miracles, or perhaps spiritually derived "powers" such as the siddhi of Indian tradition? (The traditional description of siddhi - i.e. 'attainments' or 'accomplishments' - may be the closest thing to a purported 'science' of such super powers within existing traditions. At least, it's a lot harder to find this kind of analysis in other plausible sources, such as from the Western esoteric tradition which is also a lot more obscure.) It seems weird to link these things so closely to 20th-c. hard sci-fi, when they are far from typical to that genre.

Dune is not hard sci-fi.

The whole series is filled with inexplicable "magic" and "just so" scenarios.

Akshually, spice, combined with genetic engineering like Paul's, is merely a nootropic which allows an overclocking of brainpower to the point where one knows how to shine light on the holographic universe's underlying 2D plane, changing qubits so as to effect 3D spacetime curvature allowing FTL travel (navigators) as well as how to code inject brains by adding certain inflections to your words (the voice) as well as calculate the branching paths of reality and probabilities thereof (seeing the future). No magic involved.

Shields though? No fucking idea. Okay, nevermind; it's soft sci-fi.

Dune is barely scifi, far more fantasy.

I also noticed that Starship Troopers threw in hypnosis among its many military technologies, for some reason, which feels like a related sci-fi concept.

I don't think teleportation counts. Feels like either Star Trek-type super-science or outright mysticism.

Starship Troopers also had "special talents" -- "sensers" capable of detecting and mapping Bug tunnels underground, "memory men", "lucky men", and telepaths.

Heinlein at least nods to the possibility that the sensers' abilities were the product of very powerful hearing, but telepathy would be tougher to explain that way.

> I’m sure there are more that I forgot to mention.

It's a primary theme in the Darkover books.

Those were kind of frustrating for me because I enjoyed the fantasy setting, but the author was very clear that what interested her was the conflict that occurred as it was contacted by spacefaring magicless future Earthlings.

Such powers are of course also major themes in traditional mythology. I like to note that modern time travel stories split over whether it's possible to alter the timeline, but time travel also features really prominently in traditional mythology and the message there is always that the timeline can never be altered by any means.

I'm curious what mythology has time travel? I can't think of any in Greek and Roman mythology. Celtic mythology doesn't seem to have time travel either, unless you count going forwards at different perceived speeds.

It's all over Greek mythology. When Althaea has a vision that tells her that her son's life will end at the point when the log in her fireplace burns away, that's time travel. When Laius learns he will be killed by his own son, that's time travel. When Agamemnon learns he will die with one foot on land and one in the water, that's time travel.

That's prophecy, not time travel. Where in Greek or any mythology does anyone travel back in time or otherwise alter causality?

It doesn't happen because the concept of time as variable, a "dimension" that can be "traveled in" like space, didn't even exist until modern science came along. Prophecy doesn't derive from the principle of time being variable but of fate being absolute and unavoidable by mortal cunning, sometimes (as in Norse mythology wrt Ragnarok) even by the gods themselves.

Myths were meant to teach stories about reality as people understood it, and in reality, you don't get a do-over. Within that framework, "time travel" as it exists in any modern science fiction story is nonsensical.

> That's prophecy, not time travel.

That is an incoherent statement. Prophecy is a form of time travel, in which information moves from the future to the past. It presents exactly the same questions that an object moving from the future to the past does, and is indistinguishable from that circumstance if the object has writing on it.

You might note that Frequency is a modern time travel story that is explicitly characterized in terms of time travel, while the only thing that can cross the time loop is a radio signal.

> Within that framework, "time travel" as it exists in any modern science fiction story is nonsensical.

I just observed that the ancient model is still a major prong of how time travel stories treat the subject today. They don't all use it, but many still do.

How in the world did you think it made sense to respond to this:

time travel also features really prominently in traditional mythology and the message there is always that the timeline can never be altered by any means.

with "where in Greek or any mythology does anyone [...] alter causality?" Why not read the comment before you respond to it?

>Prophecy is a form of time travel, in which information moves from the future to the past.

No, it isn't. You're thinking in a modern framework for which only physics and information are involved, but mythology presupposes metaphysics. Prophecy is not simply looking into the future, it's being aware of divine will. The information from prophecy doesn't come from the future, but the past, because the future it describes has already been predetermined.

Look at the common motif in mythology of the king/god whose child is destined to kill them. The prophecy in these myths are always set in general terms - a set of conditions that will be met, not specific information from the future but information about the future. At no point does information travel back in time.

>How in the world did you think it made sense to respond to this:

>>time travel also features really prominently in traditional mythology and the message there is always that the timeline can never be altered by any means.

>(...) Why not read the comment before you respond to it?

I did read it. I disagree with you that anything in mythology counts as time travel by any definition that would make sense to a modern science fiction reader, unless you stretch the term to near meaninglessness. Again, it isn't a matter of the future being fixed, but of information about the future not coming from the future.

> I did read it.

I see you intentionally omitted the specific part of my quote that made it plain you hadn't bothered to read it. You wanted me to provide an example of something I explicitly stated never happened... and you think that made sense?

Time travel is found in several mythologies. Some examples include the Hindu Mahabharata, the Greek tales around Chronos and Kairos, and the Irish tale of Naimh.

I know there are more, those are just the ones I thought of immediately.

Thought Slans by AE Van Voigt was one of the classics there. Non-A/Gilbert Gosseyn stuff was also up there in terms of mental powers SF.

The trouble with most mental powers is they violate physical laws like Conservation of Energy, and rely on unknown forces like anti-gravity.

Also, using your mind to move space ships. Again in Dune, but also other fare like We Are Not of Earth.

"Stranger in a Strange Land", not "...from...".

  But it never panned out with actual results, and mental powers faded from hard sci-fi stories.

.. and yet here I am reading everyone's thoughts about how telepathy isn't possible.

Just because it doesn't look like us holding our fingers to our temples, doesn't change the effect.

With neuralink it'll look even more like what you imagine.. wild to see the dismissal when its closer than ever.

I think cyberpunk made it a cheap trope, so we don't notice it anymore, it's just a depressing constant in stories, with grubby, real world consequences like having to live on a toxic cocktail of anti rejection drugs so your outdated Neuralink V implants don't go septic.

You don't need high concept telepathy. You just need an implant. Then you can hear your mission handler in your ear, feel the traumatizing sensorium of your attack drones as they get crippled by an ICE strike, or send your consciousness on a one last valiant cyber dive that inevitably leaves your body in a vegetable state.

Telepathy has become as cheap and lowdown as human life in this setting, so it no longer gives us wonder, but a self reproaching dread of, "are we really going to do this to our Bodies and Minds? I guess we are...."

Between smartphones and drones, everybody is now way ahead of what telepathy in SF was supposed to be able to do.

I mean, FAANG pissing people off at scale for clicks must be like the tutorial level in the telepathy game.

Even minor telepathy plot points seem miles ahead of that: didn't Spock's half-brother take over the entire spaceship by healing everyone's trauma[1]?

1: except for Kirk (of course :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

You have to contextualize it with the historical background.

The Cold War was ongoing and there was an arms race in research occurring between the Soviet Union and the United States with regards to directed energy weapons and influence/control of the mind.

Ultimately, the mind control vision came true far beyond those cold warriors' dreams. The answer wasn't chemical or subliminal or mind-ray like they thought, but tailored, addictive, adrenaline jolts of a/b tested, emotional, persusive jolts, infinitely scrolled in a social proof setting. And the victims seek it out, you don't have to force it on them.

I think you would be surprised as to how far the research has gotten.

But I get what you mean with social media / the modern internet. Probably the most direct way you can get without actual modulation of neurons.

Funny there was no mention of why this societal obsession mostly faded away in the 1980s and 1990s: Every single experiment into tele-whatever and psychic whichever under suitably controlled conditions revealed no result or outright fraud. No exceptions.

And the person responsible for defining suitably controlled conditions was magician James Randi. As a magician he recognized the tricks that con artists like Uri Geller were using. The scientists of that era like Puthoff and Targ had no understanding of perception hacking (which is what stage magicians do) so they were easily fooled by con artists who did know perception hacking.

James Randi put a stop to all that with several investigations of his own that made public fools of such scientists, and he funded a 1 million dollar prize for anyone who could prove they had psychic abilities under controlled conditions. The prize was never claimed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

James Randi was notoriously biased, stubborn, and dismissive of any evidence contrary towards his views.

His Million Dollar Challenge has been criticized for its lack of transparency and fairness. The challenge was not conducted under the auspices of an impartial third party. Instead, only Randi himself and his organization set the conditions and judged the outcomes. This raises questions about bias, as Randi had a vested interest in maintaining his stance that psi phenomena do not exist.

Despite the fact that several participants in the Stargate Project, such as remote viewer Ingo Swann, produced results that were statistically significant under controlled conditions, Randi dismissed these findings outright. He did not engage with the data or attempt to replicate the experiments. Instead, he simply declared that because psi phenomena _cannot exist according to his understanding of the laws of physics_, any positive results must be due to fraud or error.

Furthermore, Randi's challenge required 100% success rate for claimants to win the prize. In any scientific experiment, such a requirement is unreasonable as it does not account for statistical variance. Even established scientific phenomena cannot always be demonstrated with 100% accuracy due to various factors such as measurement errors or environmental influences.

Lastly, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that no one claimed Randi's prize does not conclusively prove that psi phenomena do not exist. It could simply mean that the conditions set for the challenge were too stringent or biased. Or... the sheep-goat effect really does exist, and the attitude & beliefs of the experimenter affect the result.

The application process for that prize is always brushed under the rug, and in general it doesn't surprise me no one has won it. The criteria set you up for failure, for example demanding a far higher success rate than the psychic claims themselves. Sometimes to the point where they'd have to go through months of continuous testing, then be disqualified by a single off day.

The obsession with telepathy via fiction is probably a large part of why people buy into Neuralink, despite it not actually doing anything new (other than eschewing ethical standards).

Musk's invasive BCI is so far, slightly less technically impressive than hobby toys you can build with exterior electrodes and nowhere near as impressive as the research from BrainGate that it builds off of.

It's baffling why anyone grounded in reality would lend credence to applying his "startup culture" approach to this field especially.

Given the 50% divorce rates, we don't seem to be able to handle our most intimate relationships right now. Being able to access people's naked thoughts sounds like a disaster. Both the perceiver and the thinker are going to need to be pretty saintly for this to be a positive experience. The relatively restrained Babylon 5 scenario seems to be on the pretty good side, and that seemed pretty dark.

Being able to access people's naked thoughts sounds like a disaster.

That's the part of it I can't quite get a grip on. If we end up with systems that perform "telepathy", what do they actually pick up? The active part of the mind that filters and decides (the "ego" if you will) or all the random noise and nonsense that's in there but not really willed or deliberate?

If all the random thoughts and impulses, critical voices, and what not were tapped into, a lot of people would be in huge trouble quickly, and not necessarily of their own volition.

Maybe the rate is 50% precisely because of ESP/etc People can’t turn the other persons disappointed thoughts off so they argue.

The premise seems pretty silly, as you’d expect some kind of jumping off point where remote mental telepathy could be possible. But, there is absolutely none. So it’s strange to think that “scientists” were testing for something completely made up and unobserved.

I stopped listening to him years ago because he became too unsufferable, but I remember Joe Rogan on his podcast frequently asserting that telepathy or some kind of mind-to-mind communication was always just a few years away...

I think that we, as a society, are really attached to language and convention. And telepathy is incompatible with that. So any evidence or argument for telepathy is voided.

There is a mountain of anecdote, however.

All of which can be adequately be explained for with unexpected physical nonverbal communication channels, confirmation bias and various other cognitive biases, and none of which reproducible in a methodologically correct setting, despite decades of trying.

"Adequate explanation" is a tool of relatively small scope, dependent upon the judgment of individuals, which is of relatively great scope. If many individuals judge it "telepathy" then that carries weight. Let's not put the cart before the horse.

> If many individuals judge it "telepathy" then that carries weight.

No, science is not a trial by popular vote. What carries weight are models, theories, experiments, and falsification.

This can include subjective reports, but the human mind, as brilliant as it can be, is also a never-ending source of biases and (conscious or unconscious) deception, which all need to be corrected for via proper experimental setup.

friends! let us have it both ways!

Humans have telepathy and cognitive biases!

What if collective cognitive biases are the result of telepathy?

It sure can, but whether your explanation is correct is the tricky part.

Luckily, most people can't realize this so the problem "doesn't exist", and "is" solved.

Not sure how I'd "realize correctness" of my explanation, but until I hear a more plausible one (in particular, that means one not introducing extraordinary other assumptions without extraordinary evidence for their existence), I'll stick with mine.

I remember growing up I watched a documentary on telekinesis. It concluded that people with high amounts of iron on their blood could move items from distance

I guess they have magnetic personalities.

Plato and many philosophers have a special disdain for poets(artists). Where they urge people to live among reality, artists paint a picture that can never be possible.

There are ideas like: "Who knows what war looks like, a soldier? Or an artist? We get false ideas of war, and it corrupts our minds. Let us not pretend that the brain can fully separate our fiction media from what we are told is 'close enough' to real to be entertaining.

I worry most when it comes to expectations of interpersonal relationships. What poison is happening to the population when they read/watch unrealistic romances?

A soldier telling a story from experience is a soldier artist.

If Plato's point is that knowledge can only be derived through direct experience, then one must endure war to know what war looks like.

If there is any value to be derived from the experiences of others, either through descriptions or related empathetic resonances, then those are dependent on communication and storytelling, and now we're in the realm of being effective at putting your reality into another's mind, and that is art. The authority or accuracy of your message doesn't negate that fact, and is entirely down to the individual in the receiving end in any case.

Funny to hear a philosopher, whose entire domain is abstract thought and whose power and relationship to the world is through the art of communication, be so petty. Maybe that quote has more context?

>If Plato's point is that knowledge can only be derived through direct experience

Its not. Its that poets corrupt.

I think empathy is a brain feature/circuitry which would be a foundation for anything resembling telepathy, and our societal development took us into the opposite direction of suppressing empathy, and thus further from any chance of telepathy/etc. Instead we’ll ultimately have AI guessing/calculating our thoughts better than any telepathy.

I agree, I also think empathy provides the clairvoyance capabilities of the force.

After reading her book on Nuclear War, I read Annie Jacobsen's Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. I recommend it.

I'm not sure what was going on with Pat Price, but those are some damn weird stories. The incident with the Church specifically was particularly interesting.

> In a separate outbounder-beacon experiment with Price, a more dramatic physiological event occurred. Green was in the car with an experimenter from SRI. They had opened their sealed envelope and were headed to the target when, “ten minutes into our drive, I said stop the car,” Green recalls. After his earlier experience with Uri Geller remotely viewing a page from one of the medical books in his CIA office, Green intended to devise a fail-safe remote-viewing test. This was it. The experimenter driving the car insisted that he wasn’t allowed to deviate from protocol. Green told him, “I’m the contract monitor, and I say stop the car.” So the experimenter stopped. “But I’m supposed to drive to the target,” he said.

> Green instructed the driver to back up. “I said, I want you to go to that church back there,” pointing to a small Episcopal church beside the road. The driver did as Green asked and pulled into the church parking lot. Green checked his watch and waited until the prearranged time. Then he got out of the car. “I crunched across the gravel and into an arbor,” Green recalls. “I caught my foot on something and nearly tripped. I walked down to the sacristy,” the room where the vestments were kept. “I opened a window. I turned around, walked into the nave, walked down the right-hand aisle. Stopped and stared at a beautiful rose window over the altar.” In this moment in the church, he says, he was reminded of his time in seminary school and the strange notion of how different his life might have been had he become a clergyman instead of joining the CIA. Green felt a wave of emotion and decided to pray. “I knelt down, said a prayer. There was this beautiful baptismal font in front of me. I leaned over and looked into it. Then I was done. I crunched across the gravel, went back to the car.” The two experimenters headed back to SRI.

> “Back at the lab, we went into the Faraday cage where the remote viewer [Price] had been [the entire time]. He was having a cardiac event,” Green recalls. “At minimum he was having an angina attack, and possibly he was having an MI [myocardial infarction],” more commonly known as a heart attack. After Price’s heart rate returned to normal, he turned to Green and said that that was the worst experiment he had ever done. Green recalls Price telling him, “It just made me so sick. You walked down an arbor. You almost tripped. You went into the most terrible building I’ve ever seen in my life. I saw you walk down an aisle and crumple to your knees. I began to worry about you. I saw you lean over and vomit into an octagonal basin. I began to feel nauseated. I got chest pains.”

> The experimenter driving the car insisted that he wasn’t allowed to deviate from protocol. Green told him, “I’m the contract monitor, and I say stop the car.” So the experimenter stopped. “But I’m supposed to drive to the target,” he said.

This breach of protocol makes the experiment near-worthless. Even if this anecdote is truthful, and even if there was no deliberate collusion: some impulse prompted Green to stop at the church. Was there a common event, earlier in the day, that led both to this conclusion?

> Green intended to devise a fail-safe remote-viewing test.

Rule of thumb: never trust a science experiment devised to prove something. Only trust one designed to disprove something.

We have telepathy, any unspoken private message is as good imo.

lol down vote, please someone define telepathy...

Telepathy is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction.

I mean come. on.

don't you use your eyes to read that private message?

"as good" not a direct replacement*

Telepathy is around the corner, with Neuralink it will be possible somehow.

No it isn't. We have absolutely no way to transmit messages to the brain yet, we've barely only been able to go brain -> computer interface so far. The other way around we don't even know how to do.

Would cochlear implants qualify as transmitting to the brain?

In the same sense that a Bluetooth headset is transmitting information to the brain?

I assume people mean without going through one of the existing senses, although I wonder if it would really feel like telepathy. If you suddenly had a sense for magnetism would that just feel like a new addition to your ordinary senses, for instance?

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/15999544/biohacking-finge...

What will we exchange? Language? Memories? Streams of sensory stuff?

Because language is, in the big picture, very very small.

And if we were going to exchange memories etc, we might have to encode it.

> language is, in the big picture, very very small

You may enjoy Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" [1][2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

Insightful question...unless something emergent came along with Neuralink for free, we have a hard problem of how to figure out how to use the new bandwidth. And both ends need to be able to encode and decode, and understand the result, with multiple levels of error handling.

An exception: high resolution transmission of emotions could be revolutionary.

It would change the art world for sure.

Why craft emotionally evocative images or sounds when you can deliver it directly?

Heh this reminds me of a joke from an old colleague, who would say, "forget working on a great demo! let's work on technology that makes you feel like you've just seen a great demo!"

Hey, Total Recall. The movie. They did a thing like that.

Better than talking and being overheard. Also, with telepathy you could have any voice of your choice, with any sound effects.

Yeah, you could buy the Morgan Freeman voice pack for only 20$

Odors. Smellepethy.

The future William Castle saw for us. Um . . . sniffed for us.

In just 20 years, we’ll have fusion-powered telepathy.

<snark>

In space in the metaverse on the blockchain!

</snark>

Well I can app/sms my GF in other room without yelling already. The same with sending her notes on situation in a crowded room or on a bus/train without strangers knowing.

I feel like I have it covered without implanting stuff in my head.

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