The evolution of telepathy

OB1Shinobi wrote: Gist: tangental discussion forgiven lmao. Stay savage, homie, no worries over here.

Sure, because "Savagary" is a thing to be praised, right? My answering a simple question here and my reply to a fellow poster deserves for me to be savagely attacked. Good for you. Hey maybe next you can go out and praise the rapists. Yea that would be funny too right?

I'm not sure I believe in telepathy so much as inference.

I'll explain below. It is said that the majority of our our language is non verbal. Our body gives away our thoughts far quicker than our minds and on a more subconscious level. There are people who with study are able to "read" people. Many special operatives in the CIA, FBI etc make it their business to do that well. This is one of the reasons I found that short movie to be so scary. Science fiction often becomes science fact. Its only a matter of time before the blue tooth headphones we put on our ears are actually implanted into our brains making us capable of telepathy. How do I make one of those foil hats?
In any case, being able to interpret non-verbal and para-verbal signals would, I hope:
Increase empathy
Allow for better care of the human race and the planet in general
Perhaps help us deal with some psychiatric issues we can't "explain" with words

But there are some measurable costs:
In the movie there was a gradual lessening of verbal communication. The part at the end broke me.
We'd never hear our name, which according to the guy who wrote "how to make friends and influence people" is one of the sweetest sounds we can hear.
And how would that effect children? Is it really just another form of communication? So much of a child's development comes from verbal communication.

And, forgive me, I just don't hold with the world's capacity to use telepathy in any grand and meaningful way. Look at the way we have used most other advancements. We've privatized some, we've used some for mass homicide, we've prevented, or made it extremely difficult to get others. Look at food. We have enough to feed the world and we burn our fields and slaughter meat and waste food. We have enough money that no one should be poor and yet its in banks being horded. We don't know how to live in paradise even if we have the tools to make it.

So, should we be given telepathy? What might we use it for? Probably for the same things spoken about in the movie. We have, as a society, the propensity to "other" and I think that many people, myself included, are guilty of it . We don't need more. We need a better understanding of what we have. That's where my training lies . In self-mastery. In understanding what makes me tick and how I can be of benefit to the world. I may not be able to read people's thoughts, but I can listen to their words.

This is open discussion.

Please do understand that. People have views that seem to collide often. That’s real life. how we act- that’s kinna why I’m still here, I’m still learning as I grow. Inherent worth begins sometimes where views AND faiths NOT OURS.. begins.

Or not. Up to y’all.

Why would people stop hearing their name though? That like saying I would never hear my name just because I learned a new language and spoke it all the time. We would still have names and still converse and if all had abolity it would be just like today, only in a different language so to speak.

And think of the ability to overcome the limitations of language. Different language and people misunderstand each other all the time. How cool would it be to directly put thoughts and entire concepts and ideas complete with intent and emotion almost instantly into anothers mind! Wars might be over.

I also dont think we can feed the world now or hord money. If everyone horded it the economy would blow up. But what if we could use telepathy to better convey needs to the world. I can see that as the thing that actually creates the better world. Might not need money at all cuz everyone would know what everyone else needed. No lying or manipulation would be possible.

Fyxe wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: Gist: tangental discussion forgiven lmao. Stay savage, homie, no worries over here.

Sure, because "Savagary" is a thing to be praised, right? My answering a simple question here and my reply to a fellow poster deserves for me to be savagely attacked. Good for you. Hey maybe next you can go out and praise the rapists. Yea that would be funny too right?

Daaaaang Gisteron, you raping these kids now? Thats not nice, bro, you need to stop doing that.

Hey Fyxe, just say “no” to rape, ok?

....

On a serious note, my family was victimized by a real and actual rape. Im not giving any more details than that but i have to tell you that someone picking apart your posts on the internet is really not the same thing as being raped. Not at all. Its very much an inappropriate comparison. Im not mad at you and im not being intentionally mean. That was an incredibly insensitive mistake but I understand that it was one which was borne out of immaturity. And yes, i am saying that you are not yet fully matured. You just compared someone dissecting your posts to rape, so yes, you certainly still have some learning to do. I trust that you will not make that mistake in the future.

Please allow me to continue with this: I believe that you interpreted my respect for Gisteron’s “savagery” as a compliment to bullying. That was not how i meant it. I was not encouraging someone to mistreat you, though I can understand why you could have taken it that way. Gisteron is one of the relatively few people here who will call out those who disregard critical thinking. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man (person) sharpens another”. I dont know if iron actually sharpens iron, i was born in a different age, but the point stands. There is a world of meditation and energy work that you can explore and which can enhance your life in incredible ways. By all means, explore that world and trust in the lessons that it offers you. But understand this: when you enter the realm of typing your thoughts and expressing yourself in written english, you are going to be compared to a certain standard. People are going to read what you say and most will be able to recognize the maturity of your rationale based on how you articulate yourself. You will have fewer problems if/when you learn how to develop and express a more logical rationale.

Fyxe wrote: And think of the ability to overcome the limitations of language. Different language and people misunderstand each other all the time. How cool would it be to directly put thoughts and entire concepts and ideas complete with intent and emotion almost instantly into anothers mind! Wars might be over.

No lying or manipulation would be possible.

These are awesome ideas. How cool would it be to communicate regardless of language barriers?!? Im not convinced that lying and manipulation would become impossible but it would be great if they became more difficult. Which they would be in a telepathic society. Cool post, bro. Thank you for adding to the discussion.

Rosalyn J wrote: We don't need more. We need a better understanding of what we have. That's where my training lies . In self-mastery. In understanding what makes me tick and how I can be of benefit to the world. I may not be able to read people's thoughts, but I can listen to their words.

I dont know if you have any apprentices but if you dont and if youre hesitant about it, im sure that you would be a good teacher. I do not like the word “master” so in my language i would say that you would be an excellent mentor but regardless of language, youre ready. In my opinion, anyway.

I imagine that we wouldn’t be able to hear our names because our names are a vocalization. I’m not saying that it would happen in a generation or two, but eventually we would stop vocalizing and we would end up just reading mental signals that aren’t words. We’d forget how to vocalize the same way I forgot my highschool spanish. If you don’t use it you lose it. A tragic loss I think as I consider other things we might lose, like the inner voice (dialogue?) and music, and spoken word. I just can’t see that the benefits outweigh the costs here.

Further, our thoughts are private things. We don’t always have control over what is produced in the mind. Its why we engage in meditation, gratitude journaling, aestheticism and other things to help with our thoughts. We do have control of what we let come out of our mouths. I use: is it true, useful and kind (I don’t always get it right though!). But that filter has saved me a good deal of embarrassment. We’d lose that. I found this interesting article in a google search: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/where-do-thoughts-occur

Further, I think its a bit pollyannish to believe that no manipulation would occur with telepathy. Have a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime. If we think about how we are already manipulated by companies through advertising, hell if they could put an ad for a big mac in my head are you kidding me? I’m saying telepathy is a two way street. Sure, given the right tools we could “read” people, but those with greater control could also implant thoughts. It should be noted that individuals that believe they are less susceptible to manipulation are more likely to be manipulated according to a study referenced in Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. Its a two way street. Our thoughts could be used against us.

That said, I think it’s worth living as if people could read our minds. The Secret and The Celestine Prophecy (fiction though they may be) are good at explaining the way that we put energy out into the universe. The capacity to tame our monkey mind, to direct our thoughts to live out our Creed is something that must be practiced, I believe, over a lifetime. There is no eureka moment and you don’t get any cool prize in the end, but being able to bring love, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy first in our thoughts perhaps towards ourselves, then maybe towards our family, then maybe the next circle out has an exponential impact on the world. As it says in our doctrine:

Jedi believe “In the positive influence of spiritual growth and awareness on society.”

Teaching 6: Jedi use their skills to the best of their ability. We do not use our knowledge and skill to boast or be prideful. We are mindful of the ego and mindful of our actions, exercising wisdom and humility.

Teaching 10: Jedi serve in many ways. Each action performed, no matter the scale, influences the world. With this in mind Jedi perform each action with peace, caring, love, compassion and humility. So it is that each Jedi improves the world with each deed they perform.

Teaching 16: 16. Jedi make a commitment to their cause and to humanity. Our ideals, philosophies, and practices define the belief of Jediism and we take action on this path for self-improvement and to help others. We are both the witnesses and protectors of the Jedi way by the practice of our convictions.
Pure Motive: To act with motive and purpose.
Without a sound motive and purpose, action has no meaning, no destination and lacks a foundation. A Jedi moves with the Force, trusts in its ways. A Jedi’s actions are firmly based upon a deep motivation to be as their path dictates.

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To Ob1shinobi
Thank you. That means a lot.

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Now, how to respond to the Reiki issue. It’s a little hypocritical for me to come down on someone for their beliefs and practices of Reiki when Jediism as a religion is completely based on fiction. When we talk about a placebo effect, I don’t think it can be discounted. Have a look here: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect#:~:text=%22Placebos%20may%20make%20you%20feel,effects%20like%20fatigue%20and%20nausea.%22
Placebo has become a dirty word, but look at all the things it has helped with where other things have failed. Our minds are powerful, our bodies capable of self-healing. It would be a little different in a science based forum, but here where we value the wisdom of a green puppet and some movie magic, I think less so.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting forgoing typical medical treatment or the advice of a trained professional. I say that because “faith healing” has done some pretty harmful things to people so I have learned from my own life (I’ve lost a few relatives) and anecdotes (there are plenty of people who believe “God healed them”.

I would say, tread with caution. People will believe anything if told by someone who holds a place of esteem (master for example). That comes with responsibility and humility and I hope a pretty good warning that reiki is not a substitute for medicine and professional advice.

I can say that on more than one occasion I have considered reiki as an option for energy work. I know of some Reiki Masters , but again, this is not where my strength lies. I’m more a diplomat and consular. That said, I would try not to deride anyone’s accomplishment. Few have done so with me, even as I have gone out into the world and expressed that I am a Jedi. I’ve also chosen carefully who I reveal that to.

I come here and I learn. I even have certificates for various things I have done at the Temple. Now, if I were to show those to a place that I valued and they said “you could print that out”, or “that’s not real” Would I come back? Probably not and it would be a loss on both parts.

I used to believe a whole host of things. I was never bullied. I was taught gently, slowly to examine those things. Some individuals need to be handled gently, otherwise they will see attack where there is none.
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Now, to address the rape issue.
Compared to how “savage” it could have been, Gisteron’s tone seemed to me to be pretty chill if a bit blunt. It didn’t seem to me to be savage, but maybe that is because I have been around long enough to get some thicker skin. It certainly should not be compared to rape or conflated to rape...and I think in doing that you actually weaken your argument. There is a logical fallacy for that called “moral equivalence” I believe. Here is the definition “Moral Equivalence: This fallacy compares minor misdeeds with major atrocities, suggesting that both are equally immoral.”

One day I’d like to set up a course in logical thinking...when I have time to devote to it. I’ll likely use what is already available for free on coursera, but its something in the back of my mind that I need to learn about and hopefully other people too.

This topic is so multi dimensional it's very nice

Just my thoughts with to Telepathy it's really super multi dimensional because not only do you physically hear the words Spoken just like you do with your voice With all the tones and expressions but you can actually feel all of the emotions and intent that was meant for the meaning very easily....
We are right if we hear with our ears we need to be very very patient and pay attention to tones body language posture tones to try to pick up intent from the person And meaning.
You can with a lot of practice but it's much easier for the person to deceive you this way with telepathy it's much much harder for them to do that..

And yes you can put a wall or block on your emotions so people cannot read your thoughts very easy.....
But yes there are people with more powerful telepathy who can break through that wall and see the in securities or past events in your life or See that Some people are really pretending to be a different genderAnd that it causes much fear and insecurity.
So yes there's always going to be a higher influence That some would have to worry about..... But I think for the overall good of societee for the most part would work out
But I think for the overall good of societee for the most part would work out Because what I have been exposed to is a lot of people have deep insecurities and do not feel like they are heard or understood......
But with telepathy both people actually feel 100% understood.... And it brings a calming to the soul to be understood and even loved and it bring strength to the community as a whole


Even in healing the body I read somewhere that every molecule R cell in your body is continually being replaced with a perfect brand new in based on your DNA
For example your kidneys every single cell is always continually being replaced with a brand new perfect one based on your DNA
Every organs different but just for an example every 6 months your body right now it is producing a brand new Oregon perfectly healthy.

And it can be manipulated by thought and will to heal itself easily.
But the opposite is true to it's called the The Naseebo effect which means if you believe you have a bad kidney you will continue to have a bad Kidney.

Or if a sick person comes into the office and you think oh boy now I'm going to get sick and guess what you could possibly be the only other person the office to get sick because you believed it.

But the mind is a powerful tool but I do believe if it's combined in a loving and peaceful direction like we all yearned it to be .
We will benefit the world

OB1Shinobi wrote: 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?

For one, let me disclaim that I am not educated in this area. There are reasons for me to think as I do, but they are rooted more in intuition transferred from areas I have more familiarity with than they are in an understanding of the current state of neuroscientific research.

With that out of the way, I opine that if there be anything that can be said to be holding us back from charting a complete or fully detailed map of the brain currently are limitations in the technology available to us and - possibly - ethical boundaries we are (for better or worse) for now unwilling to cross in this pursuit. I think the quest to understand the human brain is far from over yet, though whether "major breakthroughs" are yet to come depends to no small extent on what we'd recognize as such. This may be obvious to some, but controversial enough to be worth mentioning: In my humble opinion, what ever great advances we are yet to meet will in all likelihood not be the sort that shall overthrow all progress we have made thus far. We may discover that some pathways grow at a pace or in some order or in what ever other manner that was unforeseen by previous models and we might have to adjust our theories of how neurons communicate with each other to form structures, for instance. What we will not likely discover is that - pardon the expression - over long distances neural signals are not transmitted via electric potentials due to differential ion concentration across neural cell membranes, but by some hitherto unknown substance we might dub a unicorn fart. We will not discover that some mystical soul that transcends the physical body somehow gets to pull our neural levers but somehow manages to completely avoid setting off any other instruments of arbitrary sensitivity that are all composed of the same physical stuff.

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?

We do, for one, have empathy, of course. Humans, much like many another social animal, have rather quite sophisticated communication systems and they are far from restricted to speech, writing or what ever other traditional sort of "language". Often we can pick up extremely subtle clues about someone's mood or thoughts, and knowing what else we know about the person in question we can piece together what is going on in their head with some accuracy. There is of course some variability to that. Some people are naturally more sensitive to these subtle signals than others, some are better at hiding them. Needless to say it works better with people we know than with people we don't, and it works better with people who are similar to us in various ways than who are very different, because most experience we have with reading our own thoughts and that generates an often even useful bias to assume the thinking in others to be roughly similar to our own.

To me this also happened a few times that I could guess what was on somebody's mind, and once they heard me recite a few of those thoughts I could cheekily say "And now you are questioning how I'm reading your mind!", and that, too, was just the next thought they had at the time, rendering them feeling all the more "invaded" for it. On some occasions I didn't even need to see their face for it, nor to hear their voice, but if the initial guess turned out wrong, there was no recovery from that failure, and of course my bias-prone human mind recorded those failed attempts in less detail because it finds nothing impressive in making a wrong guess.

But this might of course not be the sort of "direct" thought transfer one would have much luck calling telepathic. It's not quite entirely on the "lucky guess" side of the scale, but it is far from the most outlandish examples of a telepathic replacement for verbal communication as one might find in fiction like the short film this thread started with. And, come to think of it, it's not easy to test, either. You cannot lock two people in different rooms with no ways to communicate and expect one to recite the seven digits given to the other in the correct order. That may test a claim of the fantastic sort of telepathic communication, but it doesn't serve to draw a line between some sort of thought sharing and lucky guessing if the former is not supposed to be as ridiculously effective. If you don't give one a message to transfer to the other, then for the sheer similarity of their situation they have a good chance of thinking across at least vaguely similar lines. A proper test of thought-sharing, as OB puts it, may then perhaps lie somewhere inbetween, with a message vague enough to pass through without the need for an etherial phone line, but specific enough for there to be strong odds against outright guessing it.

Now, at last, how might communication like this work, if a test like that turned out positive with statistical significance? Well, we know, and hope needn't argue, that information processing of any sort in our brain occurs via selective transmittance of electrical signals, not much unlike the function of the logical gates we build from transistors in our computer processor chips. There are philosophical nuances in defining what a thought is, and some traditions insisting that the subjective experience of the thing is part of what makes it what it is, and so on... but on a physical level we are talking about a form of electronics, and what ever else we might want to speculate is going on subjectively on top of that foundation, it would appear that this indeed would be on top of said foundation.

So: What does this mean for brain-to-brain communication, assuming, if we dare, that human physiology be roughly as it is without major overhauls? Well, if we say that electrical potentials are the building blocks of thought and we want to transfer thoughts between host brains, we need for the receiver to pick up some kind of electrical/electromagnetic signal from the sender.

This technically covers your question. Personally, I would say that the non-verbal communication is by far the more plausible explanation of seeming thought-sharing, with confirmation bias going a long way to account for the apparent reliability or frequency of its occurrence. Because I haven't done this pondering in detail before, though, I shall now share my exploration of the plausibility argument that would lead me to judge as I just did. So read on if you want some nerdy science-talk about it.
There are two angles I would like to approach this from:

The electromagnetic interaction - all electromagnetic interaction - is faciliated by photons. While at some scales one has to remember that photons are excitations of the electromagnetic field, over distances as long as the distance between two human heads it is fair to treat them as massless particle-like objects moving at the speed of light in a direction set at their generation and carrying energy quantified, with appropriate unit scaling, by their frequency. We can make a guess as to what typical frequencies would be. Some neurons or even areas of the brain might emit slightly higher or lower frequency photons, but we can get at least a rough ball park for all emissions with this, and the variations we might want to allow for may well not make much of a difference in the final argument. So, let's get started.
According to this Wikipedia article there are neurons that pulse constantly at rates of anywhere between ten and a hundred times each second. A diagram caption next to that sentence gives a time between a neuron beginning to fire and returning to its resting state of about 4ms, which would correspond to a frequency of some 250Hz if we were to suggest that the neuron could immediately fire again as soon as it can after its last action. In any case, all of these numbers are well outside the bulk of what sort of heat radiation a human body would produce, so it is not unthinkable that one could receive information this way if one could detect a signal like that. However, the question is not only if any information could be electrically transferred between brains without technological means, but also how well. If all we have is a signal that oscillates something like a hundred times a second, how much data can we actually transfer with that signal as a carrier, seeing as the bandwidth will at best be twice that? Radio engineering has come a long way in developing techniques to transfer decent amounts of data at a decent pace and over decent distances. Though, maybe of course our brains are more sophisticated than that, but, really, by how much? It's not like the limitations we face with these technologies are a matter of technical skills. We are hitting hard physical barriers of what is even possible, and decide as a result to move to even higher radio frequencies because there is simply nothing more we can improve about the "low" ones that are already a thousand times what we are talking about here. Then again, are thoughts simple or complex? How many bits can the most simple thought be reduced to, and is that reduction something our brains would even do?

The second angle I want to touch this from is on the casually mentioned range of the transmission. In electrostatics and magnetostatics there is a very useful technique to describe the respective field outside of a given charge or current distribution by considering said distribution's "moments". Up to a point they provide a very intuitive characterization of what the field source looks like. Likewise we can deduce what an object's charge or current distribution is by observing how it behaves in an external field. If, say, in an electric field it is accelerated along the field's direction, it cannot help but have a non-zero net charge. If it experiences a torque, it must have a non-vanishing dipole moment. If it is squished a certain way it has a quadrupole moment, and so on. And if it does some combination of these, then it has some combination of the respective moments. What is not taught in introductory electrodynamics classes is that one can derive this so-called multipole expansion even for charge or current distributions that change over time, and for a harmonic time dependence an exact solution has already been derived some time ago (and it's a fun read, too, I have never seen quite so math-y a paper before - that's electrodynamics for ya ). Be that as it may, what we do know is that long before any observable mechanical reaction to external electrical or magnetic fields of increasing strength our brains suffer tissue damage. What does not happen is any simple reaction like motion or spinning one would expect from charge or current distributions where low moments dominate. Our brains therefore also don't produce these simple monopole or dipole or what ever further lowest order static fields, and seeing as the dynamic multipole moments are proportional to the static ones, the first there, too, must be (as close to) zero. So what about the higher orders? Here the contributions to the field vanish very fast indeed as the order increases, no slower than the inverse of the factorial of the factorial of said order. It is a bit more complicated than in the static case, with contributions that fall off at different rates, but nevertheless they do with distance, too, and not too slowly. The falloff isn't quite so dramatic at very large distances (i.e. a distance much larger than the wavelength which is already something like half the earth's radius for a 100Hz signal, mind you), but at that point there isn't much of the field left to even fall off anymore anyhow, nor are they the sort of distances we worry about telepathic communication at.


Thanks for the question, too, it was fun looking these things up (I completely forgot pulsing neurons were even a thing), and I learned about the generalized dynamic multipole expansion which is quite awesome.

Obi, you put words in my mouth, I never said anyone was a rapist. I said you would praise the violence of a rapist. thats different to the extreme. please read more carefully next time. It seems you are as imature as you would want to believe I am in your response. you dont listen you just wait to respond. However healing energy shall still be coming your way for your family and for yourself in the hopes that things get better for you.

As for telepathy, yes I see no reason why language would end just because we gain the ability to communicate telepathically. that is a bold assumption that there is really no evidence for. Instead of language going away it would actually become enhanced! now thing of this, today we use body gestures in our language and they oftgen get misunderstood. think if we could use language telepathically and add in emotional experience of the thoughts conveyed! wow how much better would that be. If a person is sad we would know. if the person is saying they are sad but they are really manipulating us we would know that as well. the emotion could not be disconnected from the intent! and that is powerful.

also Reiki is much more pjowerful than just a placebo. I hear that a lot these days and its just not true. Its a powerful healing tool of energic bodies that in turn heal physical bodies. this can be emotional or physical. Hense why Obi will get energy from me in the hopes he can heal emotionally from physical trama as well as in reading comprehension. not bad things but things that need help and improvement. see? I have seen reiki heal bruses and small cuts, it has taken away pain both phycical and emotional. It begins the psycological healing that flows into the physical healing. the power of the mind is both emotional and physical in this way. This is all very real and I have proven it many times as my ability has grown.