The evolution of telepathy

Fyxe wrote: I would say that mr Obiwon is quietly showing this very temple the lesson of its failure in inclusion.

I'm curious at to why you think we have failed?

Edan wrote:

Fyxe wrote: I would say that mr Obiwon is quietly showing this very temple the lesson of its failure in inclusion.

I'm curious at to why you think we have failed?

Hello!

I have not been around much the last few months. sort of doing my own thing now because of the exact reason I said. I left cuz of bullying. After that a growing group of outcasts from this place got ahold of me. they have a few refuge camps on the internet. some were forced out and some left becasue of bullying because of different ideas they had about the force and stuff like that.

This is a very interesting topic.

Even if most of The people here don't believe telepathy or any type of force powers even exist That it's all made up or some type of fantasy delusional mindset......
it's nice to see at least some people are starting to open up at least about dialog on the ramifications of it .
That's a great start. And for most of you that's a huge huge huge step in the right direction

Agreed force! Yet I will remain skeptically cautious. I know many friends that got banned or just left for their different ideas.

However that is really a different subject. I for one have spent the last few months studying energy working and have become a reike master. During that time my abilities have grown in leaps and bounds. Now you may ask if I can move stuff with my mind like forceuser? Well no not yet but I have grown from where I was and now have anability to help people by healing them. Right now such people are the outcasts. Maybe it will flip one day? I dont know but if it does I will not be one to call the stupid and craze and delusional or that they wasted money and didnt study just to get a certificate!

Blessed be That sounds awesome foxy.

Blessed be That sounds awesome foxy.
I have only Been able to push things or do other things sporadic for me I try to stay away from it because it's like you have to go into deep thought like in a real dark room

I too have seen many accounts deleted so I too am careful what I say......
I to have gone to the outcast
I've had a few witches ask for help.
One I Snapped their disk back in place that had been out for 2 or 3 weeks.

Another one had lower abdominal prostate severe pain for 2 or 3 weeks unable to sleep.
After meditation they were able to get up that morning with no pain and go play tennis and sleep the whole night through.
I know it's out of place here but I was able to help push evil entities out of a few houses to help other outcast which is that were being picked upon and terrified.

So now my gears are only to help those who are victimized and weak to bring life and healing health to the world.
And you are more powerful then you know
You are a lite to the world.
I'm only saying this not to brag only to incourag every one they can do anything.......
We can heal the earth

Gisteron wrote: 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...

This was a great post to read. Thank you for the time and effort that you put into writing this.

America has a serious problem with racism and race relations and I think your explanation of “othering” was very much appropriate to my country’s dilemma. When distinctions and divisions happen on the basis of behavior or achievement, you cant call it “othering”. It is unfortunate when people are left behind but it isn't always unjust. That being said! When one group of people is born with a condition that automatically places them into an upper echelon of society based on conditions which have nothing to do with their own merit as individuals and they tend to use their status to trample on the “others” - well that is obviously oppression. We are having a very hard time figuring this out over here. The best thing I can say is that at least we are finally talking about it. I have hope for the future but I see some serious obstacles, both domestic and foreign.

I really want to reply to your point about neurology. My limited experiences of “telepathy” are consistent with what you said. There is too much going on within every person’s being for anyone to ever be able to fully grasp the internal world of another. There is just too much there. Also, the idea of overriding someone’s mind seems completely impossible to me for the same reason - it is too complicated and there is too much there.
Ok.
We have the brain pretty well mapped out and explained based on the best of our current technology and understanding. Now, I am not asking you to accept or believe that telepathy exists. What I will ask is if you believe that we have learned everything that there is to know about the brain (or MUCH more precisely, the nervous system- primarily the CNS but also the PNS) and if it is possible that there are still MAJOR breakthroughs awaiting us?

Gist: i am not a woo-woo crystal power kind of person. Im not a scientist at the same level as you are but I am scientifically minded and scientifically literate and I am college educated. I am reasonably intelligent and I have lived a difficult life within which it has been very important for me to be able to recognize bullshit. Im saying to you sir that I have experienced “telepathy”. More realistic terms in my opinion would be “thought sensitivity” and/or “thought sharing” but whatever terminology is used, my experiences have proven to me, personally, that this is a real thing which happens amongst human beings.

Im not sure how to approach this scientifically. Here is a thought eperiment: If we really can perceive each other’s thoughts or intuit each other from a distance (intuition that someone is thinking of you and then they call) then there must be some mechanism at work. What could that mechanism be? What are the particles? What are the receptors? This is a sincere question. If you were to engage in a thought-experiment based on the presupposition that we (human beings) can occasionally “hear” or sense each other’s thoughts, how might that work? Where should we even begin?

Fyxe wrote: I know many friends that got banned... for their different ideas.

Name two.

I for one have spent the last few months studying energy working and have become a reike master.

And yet somehow none of that time was spent learning that Reiki is spelt with an 'i' at the end, not an 'e'?

... I have grown from where I was and now have anability to help people by healing them.

I'm tempted to ask healing them of what, but it would be entirely off topic. Regardless, I feel a moral obligation to take this opportunity to remind people, especially in days like these, to always seek advice from trained and qualified medical professionals with any ailment or suspicion of a medical condition they might have. Every controlled experimental study of Reiki has failed to demonstrate it's efficacy over and above the expected efficacy of a placebo effect. There is no controlled experimental demonstration that it works, no proposed mechanism by which it could work without violating well-established physical principles, no consistent method by which it is alleged to work, no regulations controlling its use, or restrictions on who gets to assert mastery of it, nor a widely accepted or used training programme for it. If you have money to burn, by all means, waste it on Reiki sessions if you must, but never let it replace genuine medical attention.

Right now such people are the outcasts. Maybe it will flip one day? I dont know but if it does I will not be one to call the stupid and craze and delusional or that they wasted money and didnt study just to get a certificate!

Well, that's good for you. All I'm pointing out is since there is no regulation or central authority controlling what skills or knowledge it takes to become a Reiki master, ownership of that title is meaningless. Here is a site that sells a package with some materials, instructions for a ritual, and a ready-made Reiki master certificate for the cheap price of 97 USD and promises that completing the programme can take something like one or two days. On Udemy all three Reiki degrees together with a video, a bunch of articles and a few other resources are available at... well, currently it says 16.99 USD, claiming to be an 88% discount promised to last for just under the next six hours. So I'll be generous and leave it here with the regular price of 139.99 USD. An 88% discount on that should be 16.80 USD, but no need to be pedantic over some 19ct, I suppose. You can also buy certificates off Etsy for under 10 USD, but you can buy photoshop templates for academic degrees there, too, so I guess that doesn't really mean much one way or the other.
So yes, if you paid money and wasted time "studying" for your Reiki degree, well... your loss, twice over, seeing as there is no demonstrable skill or knowledge you acquired through that training, but only solidified your commitment to a belief you already had by investing yet more resources into it. But so far nobody has called you "craze", or stupid, or delusional for it here. You may be a victim of fraud/trickery, and that's sad enough, but bullying is not something you ever had to endure or worry about here, not on account of your beliefs, anyway.

And now after you hijacked yet another thread for your personal crusade against reason - a debate I must apologize to OB1 for indulging, if ever so briefly, after reading a plea and expressing some intent not to - I invite our readers and you, Fyxe, back to the actual topic at hand, namely the social implications of a hypothetical world where telepathy is real or ubiquitous in particular, or the morality of differential treatment of people based on their natural gifts or a lack thereof more generally. For, despite what forceuser implied, there is no conflict between disbelieving the unbelievable and entertaining it. It is in my opinion not the goal nor the purpose of science-fiction to depict worlds, people, or plots that are plausible given what we understand about the universe, but rather to explore political and philosophical topics divorced from the confines of events or properties of the real world and the biases we may have grown living in it. We can absolutely discuss the social or moral problems a telepathic human society might face, and we may in so doing learn about our own social and moral sensibilities, and at no point in this discussion is it necessary to believe that a world like that will or even could come about any time soon or ever at all, nor do we need to make or defend a stance on that question one way or the other.

Edit: OB, your latest post was released as I was still composing this one. I shall leave and get rest now, and engage with it at a later time. I'm leaving this message in an effort to not come off as yet more disrespectful than I was already being, by leaving a lengthy post that looks like it entirely bypasses yours whilst engaging in an unproductive distraction only to be my last before a break of several hours.

Gist: tangental discussion forgiven lmao. Stay savage, homie, no worries over here.

Edan wrote:

Fyxe wrote: I would say that mr Obiwon is quietly showing this very temple the lesson of its failure in inclusion.

I'm curious at to why you think we have failed?

Completely off topic but I am glad that you are back. The community is better with you than without you. Peace and love.