Interesting talk about human telepathy & Earth's magnetic field

Is a very interesting watch. What do you think?

https://youtu.be/9l6VPpDublg

About a year back, I had what was (to me) a very intense and real experience with telepathy. I could hear what everyone was thinking, I could understand animals and communicate with them, billions of different voices all talking at the same time, non stop - 24/7. Even when I was asleep it was a non stop melee of thoughts, ideas, plans, dreams, and ambitions.

It slowly drove me into psychosis and I had to be hospitalized.

Psychiatry says that hearing voices is indicative of mental illness, common conditions of which are Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder. The reality may be that these brains are able to tune into telepathic channels, or it may indeed be the current understanding that there is a flawed chemistry within the brain which results in psychotic paranoia & hallucinations.

I don't think there is any real, scientific way to prove either to be true.

What I will tell you, from experience is that going through it was horrifying. While it was fun at first to think that here I was, transcending past the human condition into a greater level of existence - after the first few hours it became a realization that I now had to hear, see, think, and feel everything that those around me did as well. There were no thoughts which were reserved or made private - either mine or theirs.

I would just offer a key piece of advice - If you think you want something, really think about what it means. Because if you get what you are looking for, it may not be what you were expecting and you might not be able to undo the consequences.

I think that is pseudo-science in its highest perfection.

Recognize the pattern: There is a mixture of claims and scientific looking explanations.
Real science is not interested in either of these. It postulates hypotheses and radically tests them, dismissing the non-reproducable. Explanation stories are fun, but not necessary.

Persinger's stuff is apparently usually not reproducable.

First thought was literally "Oh, another one of those..." :silly:

In all seriousness though, I am by no means an expert on electromagnetism, let alone neurobiology. I took an introductory class in the latter, a full class in experimental electromagnetism and about half a class' worth in theoretical electrodynamics and at about the 4 minute mark, when he stops with the pseudo-science and first gets on to "experiences" I have yet to hear anything that wasn't utter gibberish. So I'm sitting thinking to myself "alright, buddy, show me the math". And that wish evidently was telepathically transfered to the video for as I skip to the Q&A segment, at around 40min into the video, Mr. Persinger actually finally touches chalk... to demonstrate how full of it he is:
At any given time, he says, with our thinking there is associated an energy of some 10^-20J or thereabouts. I'll give the fellow the benefit of the doubt and say that he means a finite amount of time and not a moment, because energy over time is power, of course. I'll forgive him a slip of the tongue again, as he comments "single action potential" which is first of all a voltage, not an energy and measured on the order of 10^-2 Volts per neuron and with his esimated 10 billion neurons (finally a reasonable number) that would give us a total action potential of a staggering 10¹⁸V or 1EV. That's 1 Exavolt or 1 quintillion Volts. That is a voltage powerful enough to not just kill a person, but evaporate them on the spot, in an instant. Fortunately, of course, Mr. Persinger is full of poop and neurons don't all fire at the same time.
So in the next line he multiplies his 10^-10J with 10Hz where Hz is a Hertz, defined as s^-1 or 1/s to get 10^-9J because apparently 1J/s=1J which would mean that either s=1 or J=0 both of which is false. For the record, 1J/s=1W, the unit of power. Now he does later multiply by 10⁹s which gets us back to the Joule, so we can dismiss all of this as sloppiness and only remember that the 10^-20J number was pulled straight out of his bottom. The next number he pulls out of the same place is the earth's magnetic field "capacity", again, measured in Joules for some obscure reason and clocking in at about 10¹⁸J when in reality the field is as strong as some 10^-4T with the unit Tesla known as 1T=1JA^-1m^-2 and even given the magnetic constant's order of mangitude of -7 wouldn't get us anywhere near +18 no matter what we did to it...
He goes on to underestimate the number of synapses by one to two orders of magnitude and somehow equates them to storage capacity, as apparently everything else is, and at that point I closed the window because life is too short to be wasted on sharlatans and their garbage.

waaaayyyy too much advanced mathematics for me :sick:

my theory of telepathy involves cognitive skills combined with observational skills....many people can communicate wordlessly, expressing whole phrases or entire concepts with nothing more than a glance (which some of us can then add a voice to)...all living things emit energy, this energy fluctuates and vibrates, other living things can detect this. if this sensory input is combined with the input from other senses (sight/sound/etc) the brain can then predict/forecast/etc...there are many things with human behavior that cannot be explained scientifically....we can defy logic...

Here is another talk but this time by Gregg Braden. Talks about coherence & chaotic heart waves & how we can emapthicly "talk" empathicly to other beings. What you guys think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8w8KBf-Wzo

Kaccani wrote: I think that is pseudo-science in its highest perfection.

Recognize the pattern: There is a mixture of claims and scientific looking explanations.
Real science is not interested in either of these. It postulates hypotheses and radically tests them, dismissing the non-reproducable. Explanation stories are fun, but not necessary.

Persinger's stuff is apparently usually not reproducable.

What if there are events that defy previously tested theories, but because they are unstable, they can not be reproduced? Meaning, they happen, but science will never have the opportunity to prove it.

Telepathy is outside of the realm of science.
I don't mean to say that it's greater or lesser than science, only that it is fundamentally impossible to demonstrate telepathy in a scientific setting. Any mind reading, precognition, etc. could easily be written away as fraudulent claims or lucky guesses. Moreover, there is no way in or outside of science (other than telepathy, supposedly) to access the thoughts of another person. There would be no way to verify that thoughts have been exchanged. The thought may be recognized in some machine as electrical activity in the brain, but how it got there and what happens to it when the thought is over are two things that we couldn't analyze.
Unless someone could invent a machine which presents the thoughts of an individual in sentences on a screen, I don't think telepathy can be studied in a scientific way.

I need to correct myself. I earlier said that 10^-2V x 10¹⁰ = 10¹⁸V and identified that as an Exavolt. Of course it would only be 10⁸V, a "mere" 100MV or 100 Megavolts. Still quite enough to evaporate a person, but also a voltage that can actually be produced unlike the 10¹⁸V

RyuJin wrote: ... this energy fluctuates and vibrates...

What does this mean? If living things can detect this, why can't detectors?

there are many things with human behavior that cannot be explained scientifically.

Name one, please.

we can defy logic...

Depends on what you mean by logic and by defy, respectively.

rugadd wrote: What if there are events that defy previously tested theories, but because they are unstable, they can not be reproduced?

Easy. That means that the theory we have for the time being, is incomplete. Every prediction any scientific model makes is probabilistic. Some are more precise than others, too. Some dynamic systems are chaotic, meaning that a slight change in the starting parameters can mean a big change in outcome soon after. Making reliable predictions about such systems is limited to short periods in the future and even then requires precise measurement of the starting parameters. That is why weather predictions for the upcoming hours can be fairly accurate, but the forecast for a week in advance is almost worthless.

Meaning, they happen, but science will never have the opportunity to prove it.

Yea, see, that's not what it means. Science is not blind to events that aren't predicted by its models because pretty much no single outcome fits the prediction in a perfectly exact way. The unexpected is - ironically - quite expected. And we are working on getting better at it right now, too. The thing that will forever remain outside the limits of science is the thing we cannot tell apart from fiction.

TheDude wrote: Telepathy is outside of the realm of science.

I agree. But many an alleged telepath wouldn't. They think or at least pretend to believe that their skills are real and useful. What do you say to them?

I don't mean to say that it's greater or lesser than science, only that it is fundamentally impossible to demonstrate telepathy in a scientific setting.

Well, it appears that it hasn't happened yet. I wouldn't dare say it is impossible. Ordinarily this would be my challenge to you to prove that it is, but considering the reasons you give in the next line, I'll have instead to question what sort of claim you think actually is demonstrable...

Any mind reading, precognition, etc. could easily be written away as fraudulent claims or lucky guesses. There would be no way to verify that thoughts have been exchanged.

I find that it doesn't matter what we call it. If someone is over dozens or hundreds of trials reliably "lucky", that is still some demonstration of something going on, whether we have a model to explain it or not. Unfortunately, in every case where anyone has had such luck it was always down to faulty controls and security.

Moreover, there is no way in or outside of science (other than telepathy, supposedly) to access the thoughts of another person.

False, but also not necessary. I propose following experiment:
Let there be one alleged telepath, and separate from him, in ways that isolate against all traditional information flow, say, 20 different subjects. The telepath doesn't know them personally, but he has met them before the experiment so that during it he could concentrate on them. Now all of them are played back some sort of message or given the same riddle or shown the same colour. Now, maybe one of them could think of something else, but we can be reasonably certain that if we repeated the experiment some 30 times, we would expect a genuine telepath to identify a number of thoughts that cannot be written off as chance alone. Repeat the whole thing with other subjects and other experiments and if the result is confirmed, some sort of mind communication is likely to go on - you know, something.
We can also be even more secure. Instead of presenting the subjects with messages, we could induce certain feelings in their brains through chemical interference. If we are dealing with a telepath we would expect him or her to be able to identify what a majority of the subjects feel in ways that don't seem like chance.
See, if the telepathy hypothesis didn't make testable predictions, then it would be beyond testing in a very literal sense. But the problem is, most of them actually do, and when ever we test them with any rigor they fail gloriously.

The thought may be recognized in some machine as electrical activity in the brain, but how it got there and what happens to it when the thought is over are two things that we couldn't analyze.

I would contest the unit "1 thought" because I don't actually know enough about either psychology or neuroscience to say that we can draw a line between one thought and the next. But as with all things physical, brain activity is continuous through space and over time. There is never a jump. One neuron transfers a signal to the next, one thought morphs into another and as we measure activity in one region we can predict activity in another with a finite margin of error. To say that this is something science will never be able to capture with its methods is to say that it literally doesn't happen.

Unless someone could invent a machine which presents the thoughts of an individual in sentences on a screen, I don't think telepathy can be studied in a scientific way.

Well, again, this presupposes the thought as a unit of something and that thoughts are expressed in a language we adopt much later than our nervous system boots up. However, first advances in reproducing images from brain scans have been made already: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211009377/pdfft?md5=a3ccaeb09832f05fc4fdf3530da1ca64&pid=1-s2.0-S0960982211009377-main.pdf
Also, earlier you said that telepathy was beyond study "in or outside of science", so I'm not sure what the standard here is exactly anymore...

Just because somebody somewhere doesn't know something it does not follow that nobody else does nor that it is unknowable. Conversely, just because someone feels they have it all figured out it doesn't follow that they know something about anything.

I don't think that not being backed by science means that something isn't real or useful. For example, ethics are not scientifically based at all. The only possible thing that I think you could test is the most commonly preferred moral actions, an objective scientific moral standard is beyond the scientific method. I'll not say science isn't useful, only that it is not the only method by which someone can find useful things and/or true things.
Your proposed experiment still wouldn't be accepted by a good chunk of the scientific community, at least based on the members of the scientific community I've met. Parapsychology is completely taboo and those who practice social science wouldn't likely even look at it. The physicists I know would likely throw it out altogether and claim that it isn't science, just like they claim psychology isn't a science. And it would not demonstrate, regardless of the number of tests run, that the telepathy both exists and is being used.
And this is fundamentally why I think it's outside of science. I've studied psychology formally and none of the brain scan images I've found could demonstrate such a thing. A correlation can be established, but due to the current limits of technology and the limits to epistemological access to the thoughts of others, I don't think that there is currently any available option which would be both accepted by the scientific community (peer review being necessary for any scientific paper worth it's weight in paper and ink) and which would accurately and objectively demonstrate the truth of telepathy. So for the time being, I think it's outside of the realm of science and technology. Someday, supposing that our thoughts are physical activity within the brain as opposed to noncorporeal things which have correlational brain activity, brain scan technology may advance to the point where two individuals can comfortably and effectively take part in a telepathy test, but as it is the cognitive sciences are not advanced enough to produce an objective (or close to objective) telepathic outcome.
My standards are simple. Produce for me a machine which can display thoughts on a screen. Test it until it verifiably works. Then compare it's results to what a telepath (ideally a large number over a long time) says. If the results are the same reliably, then it's telepathy and we can start teaching telepathy in schools as a legitimate skill. If the results are similar, then further testing is needed (perhaps telepathy can only accurately read general ideas and not word for word sentences). If it's only sometimes similar, then it's likely not telepathy. And if it's almost always incorrect, it's also not telepathy. I think that test with that technology would be sufficient to demonstrate objectively whether or not telepathy is real.
But for the time being that option isn't available.