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One of the curses of
being a well-known science-fiction writer is that unsophisticated people
assume you to be soft in the head. They come to you for refuge from a hard
and skeptical world. Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't
you believe in telepathy? - in ancient astronauts? - in the Bermuda triangle?
in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out. "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes," I said. "I believe
evidence. I believe observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by
independent observation. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and
ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something
is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
For instance, where do I stand on telepathy, which I consider among the less
wild suggestions along the fringes of knowledge? I don't consider telepathy
to be intrinsically impossible. After all the brain produces a small
electromagnetic field and the intensity of it wavers, rising and falling
in irregular fashion, but with noticeable periodicities. These
"brain waves" can be, and are, observed and measured
by the technique of encephalography.
To be sure, the brain -waves are the overall product of some ten billion
neurons, so that trying to make sense of them is like trying to make sense
of the noise of the world's population all talking at once in all their various
languages. In listening to the world's overall human noise,we could tell
the subsidence into a soft, drowsy hum when night covers a region; or the
rise into loud discordance at the coming of catastrophe. In the case of
encephalography, there are changes from waking to sleeping, and vice versa,
that can be detected. One can also detect the presence of a tumor or an epileptic
seizure.
But we want something better than that; we want something that would be analogous
to hearing the world's noise and picking out an individual conversation.
Might not specific thoughts affect the brain-wave pattern? Might not the
wavering electromagnetic field then impress itself upon a neighbor-brain
and induce that same thought upon it. It is conceivable that this might
happen, but the question is, is it conceivable that it does happen?
Can one person detect another person's thoughts in actual practice?
Of course we can read thoughts indirectly. From the tone of a person's voice,
from the expression of a person's face, from bits of a person's unconscious
behavior, we can sometimes tell if that person is lying. We might even be
able to make a shrewd guess as to what he (or she) is thinking. The more
experienced we are, and the better we know the person we are studying, the
more likely we are to guess his thoughts. But that is not what we mean by
telepathy. Can one person sense another's thoughts directly?
Well, consider - If you were born with the ability to sense the thoughts
of others, surely that would give you a considerable advantage. To sense
what others don't realize is being sensed, to have advance warnings of others'
intentions, to find that no secret is hidden - surely that would increase
your security no end. It seems to me, then, that telepathic ability has great
survival value, and that even a very limited and rudimentary telepathic ability
would have considerable survival value. Telepaths would be better off, would
live longer, and would have more children (who would also be telepathic,
most likely). The principles of natural selection, it seems to me, would
surely see to it that more and more people would be more and more efficiently
telepathic as time went on.
In fact, we might liken telepathy to vision. The ability to sense light and
analyze it for information about one's surroundings offers such an advantage
that almost all life-forms, even quite primitive ones, have eyes of one sort
or another. Very efficient eyes long antedate humanity itself.
Therefore, the mere fact that we are now trying to find out if telepathy
exists, that there is any question of it at all, is, in itself, very strong
evidence that it does not exist. If it did exist, it would by now
be an overriding ability that we would all take for granted.
- But wait, I may be going too far. Animals that live out their lives in
, total darkness are not likely to have eyes. It may be that telepathy has
never developed on Earth because there have never been brains on Earth
sufficiently complex to produce brain-waves worth detection, or to receive
them, once produced. Only now, in the case of Homo sapiens, are the conditions
right, and that just barely. Therefore, we are only now beginning to develop
telepathy , so that very primitive effects are sometimes barely detectable
in some people.
I find that hard to accept. Even simple brains have thoughts that could be
powerful and worth receiving. The predator sneaking up on his prey must be
thinking, at the very least, the equivalent of " - food - food - food-."
If the prey sees, hears, or smells the approaching predator,it is off at
once, but surely that is not enough. The predator may be hidden, noiseless,
and moving upwind. Would it not be useful for the prey to detect that -"food-"
pulsing in the other brain?
I see a value to telepathy, an overriding survival value, that should have
developed the ability in organisms with brains far too simple to develop
complex ideas. We might as well argue that all animals but human beings should
be deaf, since none of them have brains complex enough to be able to talk;
or blind, since none of them have brains complex enough to be able to read.
Hearing and sight have other, and more fundamental, functions than speaking
and reading, and telepathy might well have other, and more fundamental, functions
than carrying on an abstract conversation.
But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps telepathy simply requires a more complex brain
than sight and hearing do, and not all the need in the universe will force
it into existence until the brain reaches a certain pitch of development.
That would be why we're just beginning to detect it in a few quite rudimentary
cases.
If that is so, doesn't it make sense to suppose that it is likely to show
up in people with particularly efficient and complex brains? Yes,I know there
are "idiot savants" who can do amazing things, but if telepathy can develop
in backward brains, we're instantly back to wondering why it didn't develop
in the lower animals.
If telepathy required advanced brains, it will show up in particularly
intelligent, shrewd, forceful, charismatic individuals, it seems to me. What's
more, it would surely give them, even if it is present in only rudimentary
form, a powerful advantage over others. Might it not be, then, that telepathic
powers explain how the leaders in politics, business, religion, science,
and so on, come to be leaders?
Might it not be lust the touch of telepathy that does it?
I might believe that were it not that the world's leaders in every field,
have always shown a perfectly human capacity to be fooled, deceived, and
betrayed. Julius Caesar clearly didn't know what was in the mind of Brutus.
Napoleon I surely did not suspect his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to be
playing the role of double agent for years. Hitler certainly didn't suspect
that a bomb had been planted a few feet from him on July 20, 1944.
In other words, whether we consider the situation from the standpoint of
biology or history, we see a world that simply doesn't make sense if telepathy
exists.
I therefore conclude that the odds are enormously against the existence
of telepathy.
In order to make me believe that telepathy exists, despite the evidence of
the world around me, I would need very strong evidence, together with foolproof
reasoning, and this simply doesn't exist.
All that the proponents of telepathy can offer are anecdotal evidence and
the kind of statistical analysis of guessing games that
J.B. Rhine used to present. In these
things, the possibilities of lies, hoaxes, or just honest distortion and
wishful thinking are great enough to reduce it all to worthlessness in the
face of the overwhelming evidence of the world we experience. This is not
to say that telepathy may not be possible sometime in the future. Conceivably,
something of the sort may yet evolve as brains become still more complex.
Much more likely, in my opinion, is the chance that we may learn how to amplify,
analyze, and interpret brain-waves to the point where we can "read minds"
by instrument. I can even imagine people having combination amplifier/analyzers
strapped unobtrusively behind the ear with fine leads attached to appropriate
places on the skull, so that each person can broadcast his own thoughts and
read those of others. This, however, would be high technology and would not
be the kind of telepathy that unsophisticated people ask me to "believe"
in.
[Current experiments with "bionic ears" and "bionic eyes" provision the person
with electrodes connected to brain tissue.In these cases small computer systems
are passing signals to the brain,rather than reading from it.Some work has
been done on interpreting electric signals from plants,and in recreating
sonic languages of killer whales and dolphins,but as far as I am aware no
one has yet interpreted a brain wave,though military experiments have used
thoughts to produce crude steering from thought patterns,though so far it
seems it's much easier to use your hands!
Roger Penrose suggests thoughts cannot escape the brain - I love his work - I am his biggest fan - but I disagree - not because I can defeat his maths or arguments - because I know ESP exists - this is why:
I
had parked my bike up at a bike park area close to a shopping area whilst
I shopped - my bike has a 4 digit codelock. I approached my bike and as I
came nearer a man was sat on the wall opposite - he was muttering out loud
to himself - as I came closer I could hear him saying things that sounded
like responses to one side of a conversation - like: "I don't think so,but
she might if you tell her" - as someone walked past. then "well,not if you
keep carrying on with that idea"....and such stuff - one comment each time
someone passed him. As I came closer the man looked me straight in the eye
and spoke 3 of the 4 digits of my bike lock code out loud in the correct
order - I am into maths and know there is no way he could have happened on
those by happenstance. Oddly,I never went and spoke to him and never thought
it odd until I left. He was either a human with ESP or some "visitor" in
human guise. ESP definitely exists on this planet. This is a true story as
it happened to me - no BS. Before it happened I would have denounced ESP
has nonexistent. -LB]
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