In the film my impression was that, while there were some training programmes for telepaths, and some advanced techniques one could use with effort, for the most part it was portrayed to be just a natural skill people were either born with or without. That is what made the discrimination and othering so emotionally impactful, is the fact that both the people who did it and those who suffered under it were at no point in any sort of control over which group they happened to be in. One can argue that in a volunteer army a soldier chooses to enlist and to train, and it is their ambition that grants them advancement through the ranks if they choose to take it. Wealth is inherited to some extent, but bar the few who were blessed with ludicrous amounts of it, most sons don't get to keep their fathers' fortune for too long unless they put some effort into maintaining it, and even the vastest capital is unlikely to pass down three or four generations unless at least some of the heirs inbetween elect to stabilize their expenses and to secure an income. A four-year-old may not have developed an independent enough thinking to meaningfully choose to share in their parents' religion nor to dissent from it, but a decade or two later it becomes increasingly patronizing and disrespectful to insist that someone else be held to account for the youngster's actions or the thoughts they sprang from.
However, from what I gathered of the film's universe, there is no mistake you or even your ancestors made to render your telepathy rating zero, and there is nothing anyone can do to "fix" that. Othering on a basis like that I'd say is morally different from othering on the basis of things the target has some measure of control over.
Although, in defense of the offending party, a distinction should be made between systemic othering and othering on an individual level. When the system sets up a public circus for the ruling kind to come and look at the "freaks", or when said kind comes along and plays with said freaks like they are less than human, that's a different moral issue than when the system refuses the freaks jobs or education. If telepathic communication is vastly superior to verbal one, that may be unfortunate, but it's not anyone's "fault" in a stricter sense.
So when it comes to career paths like the physician's, where a second saved skipping dialogue may make the difference between life and death - not to mention the cases when one is dealing with a telepathic patient who is unable for one reason or another to speak at a critical moment - it is perfectly understandable, even morally justifiable, to discriminate against people who are not up to the task, irrespective of whether anyone is to blame for that. It is the same reason we don't offer driving or piloting jobs to the blind in the real world, at least not until we can effectively remedy their blindness to an extent that'd render them as effective at said job as someone who has functional vision. It is not about seeing the blind as our lessers or about delighting in the mean-ness we get to inflict on them, but rather a recognition of the job's natural requirements and that, regrettably as it might be, someone who lacks them is simply not suited to perform the job safely and effectively.
Also, OB, I'll try and respect your wish to not argue the reality of telepathy here, because in my opinion the film is fictional, and as any good sci-fi seeks to explore social problems and moral questions, rather than propose literally possible future developments. Though, if you do ask, as you have, whether the film depicts a plausible scenario on the outset, I'd say doubtful. We know enough about the human brain to say that they are different (within reason) between individuals and that they function as a whole moreso than in parts. In order to read a mind to such a clear extent one would have to not only pick up the electrical signals which fall off with distance at a very high rate and not even a consistent one over time, but also read enough of the target's brain structure and past states to be able to reconstruct their experience. Perhaps someone better versed in neuroscience can chime in with some estimates about the sort of processing power this might roughly require to do it at any reasonable pace, but seeing how our brains are busy thinking our own thoughts most of the time, I'd intuit as a lay person that a task like this is far out of reach of a human brain one would call modern. Needless to say, even in the best case the telepath would only have access to part of a telepathic target's brain, seeing as the whole thing would include their telepathy-processing and foreign-brain-simulating sector as well, and so on, so that even mathematically cannot be how it works. Perhaps the furthest that might be a plausible basis for this, is a dedicated part of the brain, or a special organ for that purpose, that can receive signals from that organ in other bodies and store thoughts from the brain ready for transmission. A broadcasting tower, as it were. And maybe if the modern brain looks a lot like it structurally, lacking perhaps only some amplifier-like cells to receive or transmit signals on purpose, then a telepath would be able to read a modern brain and send signals to it...
All in all to that question I'd say it's not strictly impossible even whilst sticking to what we know about biology or physics (I have left out of course possible worlds where literal magic might swoop in and do what ever it pleases on a whim anyway), but I don't think it is for a lack of training that we don't have it yet, but a matter of the brain physiology we are for better or worse stuck with for now...
Better to leave questions unanswered than answers unquestioned
The topic has been locked.
Topic Author
