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Telepathy & Mind Communication


This article was written after reading:
The Mind Pool by Charles Sheffield

In the book, there is an intelligent species whose members are made up of a large number of flying-insect-like pieces. Each "insect" can act and travel independently, although not with much intellect. When a "swarm" of them gather together they can function as an intelligent individual. Towards the end of the book, something similar is done with a group of these "insects" along with members of several other species to be able to make a "mind pool".

According to the book, the author is a well established scientist. I would not want to claim that my scientific knowledge was greater than his. However, there is nothing that prevents a scientist from choosing to write fiction about hobbits or dragons, or fiction that knowingly ignores science for some literary purpose, or strays beyond the writer's field of expertise. The following is not a challenge to the author's ability to apply science when he chooses to do so in his field, but a discussion of issues that might arise in any work by any author.

I won't say "psychic powers" or "supernatural powers", because this book does not present it with that connotation. It does not get into the paranormal mumbo-jumbo.

The details of the mind communication are kept rather vague. And as far as I'm concerned that is better than having an author prattling on about some clearly un-scientific gibberish. This kind of non-supernatural presentation may be a better starting point to analyze the scientific considerations in mind-to-mind communication.

The mind communication that occurs may not exactly be telepathy, but it does involve multiple minds working with each other. "In communication with" does not fully describe what happens, but communication must be a part of it, and in that sense we can discuss this first as more-or-less telepathy.

I do not begin with the assumption that something that might be called "telepathy" is an evolutionary impossibility. However, if we are talking about science, we are talking about material beings communicating in accordance with the laws of physics. What would be necessary for mind-to-mind communication would essentially be an organ in the body which functioned as a radio transceiver or something like a wire-based telephone system where individuals had "input jacks" to be able to connect to the "phone wires". [I am not entirely clear whether in the "Mind Pool" the author conceived of the communication to use "wires". There was physical contact at least sometimes, but perhaps not all the time for all individuals in communication.]

To communicate wirelessly, there is nothing absolutely requiring it be precisely radio, but that is the most likely form. Long distance communications without physical contact has a limited number of possible modes. We are familiar with the limitations of sound waves, and communicating by sound waves is not what one means when one talks about mind-to-mind communication or "telepathy". Similarly, shining lights or beams can be used for communications, but have limitations and are not mind communication. The same with vibrations sent through the ground.

The options more consistent with "telepathy" -- no physical contact and not using our 5 senses -- involve sending and receiving energy in wave form. The forces of nature which operate at more than microscopic distances are electromagnetic and gravity. Gravity is simply too weak to communicate by without unrealistically vast amounts of energy involved. Theoretically, there could be other long-distance forces of nature that could produce waves. However, the inability of science to discover appropriate waves suggests that it is exceedingly unlikely that such a force exists and operates at energy levels consistence with its use by organic life.

We find ourselves left with electromagnetic energy. Visible light, infrared and ultraviolet can be used for communication, but with limitations. Not only must you be in line-of-sight for communications, but the receiver must be facing towards the sender. (In the general sense of detecting the direction of a source of infrared radiation (strong enough to cause a feeling of heat), the entire skin can be a receiver and in that sense one would not have to worry about in what direction the receiver was facing. However, as an organ for receiving light in the detail needed for language the whole surface of a body does not seem well suited. The skin has other functions. To skin that "heard" infrared, the sun would be shouting gibberish. There might also be a sense of "hearing loss" whenever one rested one's body on furniture or otherwise blocked the skin.) This may also be closer to "sensory communications" than "mind communication".

There are other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that require too much energy or are too weak to be practical. Essentially, the same economy of energy needed to broadcast, the waves' power to reach the receiver and ability not to be blocked by intervening objects which cause humans to use radio waves in our devices would make waves in or near the radio spectrum the most likely for an organic transceiver. I have no idea of how many calories a human would have to consume to made an organic radio broadcast how many minutes for how far a distance. It might or might not be truly feasible. I just know that if it were to occur, that is how it almost certainly has to take place. And this is one of the things that most talk of mind communication in fiction ignores: it would be an "observable phenomenon". An electronic radio receiver would be able to detect the broadcast of the radio waves used to communicate between the minds. Unless the electronic radio device was designed to handle those broadcasts, the device would only detect "radio noise", but it would detect it.

As in "The Mind Pool", stories often portray mind-to-mind communication between members of beings from different planets - that is, from unrelated evolutionary development. Regardless of whether the communication link uses physical contact (like talking via wire-based telephones) or only using waves (like talking via cell phone) the chances of two unrelated species being able to do this is microscopically small.

Such communication would require that the two species shared both compatible "hardware" and important elements of language. Let us suppose the cell phone systems in the US and Japan have evolved separately with no coordination to make them compatible. The chances that the hardware will be able to successfully interface are very small.

Now, for the moment, ignore the need for cell phone substations as intermediaries between phones. Suppose your cell phone communicates directly with other cell phones. Suppose you had a US cell phone and you were trying to call a Japanese cell phone. Most likely, your cell phone would broadcast at a different frequency than the Japanese phone received. Even if they used the same frequency, they would probably differ in how they interpreted signals. They might both use something similar to Morse Code in that they use short and long bursts as the most basic components of the signals, but how they arranged the short and long bursts to construct larger pieces of a message would probably differ.

On top of this is how the two cell phones are designed to interface with their user's language. It may be clearer if we imagine using the cell phones for text messaging, since most of us think more about the components of written language than thinking of the structure of spoken language. The US cell phone would be designed to be relatively convenient for someone using the alphabet used by the English language. The Japanese cell phone might be designed to be relatively convenient for those using Japanese kanji characters. The US cell phones "evolved" to communicate with US cell phones, and the Japanese one "evolved" to communicate with Japanese phones. Therefore, neither has had any reason to take input from the alphabet that was keyed in to any other format. As a result, the two phones don't even use the same number of characters in their list of symbols. There aren't just a few more "letters" in kanji, but the kanji characters don't even play the same role that "letters" play in English. The signals from the two cell phones simply have no common symbol structure.

The same sorts of issues would come up in how each species' communications organs evolved to suit the unique physical and mental aspects of each species. This would be true even if the signals were passed by physical contact rather than by radio waves. One might not have to worry about broadcast frequency, but the other incompatibilities would still exist.

This is not intended to say that devices could not be developed to receive the proper frequency, adjust for the different signal format and structure, translate from the sender to output a signal consistent with the receiver's language needs, etc. With a device designed in this way to allow communication between two well-known and understood communication types, this sort of communication could be carried out between members of unrelated species. However, until such a device could be made for those two specific species, some other kind of communication would seem to be necessary.

Whether the communication is verbal, written, gestures, "mind communication" or other, evolution will mold aspects of language which are likely to have considerably different forms for species with unrelated evolutionary histories. See: Inter-Species Communication.

It may be worth considering that evolutionary factors may discourage the appearance of organic radio transceivers as a means of communication. There seem to be practical reasons why evolution would favor hearing and not invest resources in having both hearing and mind-communication. See: Telepathy & Evolution.

My gut feeling is that radio communications may be easier to eavesdrop on than verbal talk. Obviously, spoken conversations are eavesdropped on all the time, so perhaps my gut feeling is wrong. However, if my feeling is right, the ability of dangerous individuals to overhear you could make radio communication less desirable.

Using radio has another distinction that might be an advantage or disadvantage. One common purpose of verbal communications is to locate someone: "Hello! Joe can you hear me!" or "Hey! Joe! Over here!" When we hear something like this, we can look around and try to locate the other person visually. However, our two ears are placed on opposite sides of our head to make it easier to triangulate the other person's location auditorially. If a person with two radio antennas instead of ears had a different ability in triangulating locations, that could be good or bad -- depending on whether it was more important to help your friends find you or making it hard for your enemies. (Triangulation using radio may not be as easy as with sound, because radio waves travel much faster than sound. Therefore, it would be necessary to be more precise in when the signal reached the two radio receivers to deduce a direction.)

Hearing is useful for other things than communication. Hearing a twig snap can warn of approaching danger, the sound of a stream flowing can lead you to needed water. Therefore, it is hard to imagine evolution providing radio for communications, but not providing hearing for other purposes. However, if nature provides hearing, will it find it worth the additional investment to provide radio for communications, rather than using sound? On Earth, hearing evolved long before human communications. However, many animals produce sounds from their mouths for relatively simple communications. On a different planet, if hearing evolved to pick up natural sounds but no comparable sound-making evolved, radio communication would be less unlikely. The issue still remains that hearing can evolve for non-communications reasons and once that occurs sound-making is a single step to communication. On a planet where radio "hearing" has not evolved for non-communications reasons, both broadcasting and receiving abilities must evolve in more than one individual for useful communication to begin.

Some of these considerations don't apply to communication that involves physical contact between two individuals. However, direct physical contact is a very limiting requirement for communications.


Telepathy & Mind-reading

We can break down our questions into a few areas: the part of the person which carries out these (supposed) actions, and the purpose of the actions.

Telepathy would be the exchange of messages between minds, mind-reading would be the ability of an individual to view another's thoughts. Mind-reading appears by such definitions to have the "reader" be the active individual and the individual whose thoughts are read to be passive. However, this is (at best) unlikely. We think of our eyes as being the "active" part of seeing. In fact, light comes into our eyes and our eyes merely pass along this information to the brain. A person's thoughts presumably must emanate in some way for a "mind-reader" to "see" them. So in both telepathy and mind-reading, it seems one person must transmit or simply "shine" with thoughts and the other person must be able to "see" and understand the thoughts that come out of the first person. This is something like having a radio transmitter and receiver. (Granted, there are inanimate astronomical objects that emit radio waves by physical processes that don't involve conscious intention. Just as those are unintentional radio transmitters, a person may not have to be meaning to transmit in order to do so.) As we need light to come to our eyes to see and we need radio waves to come to a receiver to hear the message, it is reasonable to ask what passes from one person to another in order for telepathy or mind-reading to occur.

We have now arrived at the question what part of a person acts as the transmitter and/or receiver, and what is sent between transmitters and receivers. In the above discussion, we all know what eyes and brains are, what astronomical objects are, and so forth. We have constant, consistent experience with the physical world. The transmitters and receivers are probably part of our physical bodies. Physicians have centuries of experience that particular kinds of injuries and disease affecting particular parts of the brain has particular impacts on particular mental activities. We have much reason to consider thought to be in our physical brain. Lacking good reason to attribute any part of thought or the sending of thought to anything else, we should treat it as done by our physical bodies. That being the case, the mechanism by which any thoughts would go from one person to another should be a physical process. A physical process should be available to scientific analysis, detection and even imitation by instruments.

The fact scientists cannot detect radio waves or other known means of transmission suggest either such a thing does not exist or it is done by some physical process unknown to science. While the latter cannot be entirely excluded, it is highly doubtful it applies in this case. It is likely there are aspects of the universe scientists have not yet uncovered. However, a part of the universe which individual human bodies can and do interact with, but sophisticated scientific equipment developed to interact with humans and the universe being unable to detect it is highly improbable.

It could be argued that telepathy and mind-reading is not entirely of a physical nature. Those who believe in such things will often believe in supernatural aspects to humans and the universe. Science deals with "nature." Inherently, that which is "supernatural" is beyond the reach of science. Science can neither prove nor disprove it. There are many questions that cast doubt on a spiritual side to telepathy/mind-reading. First, very few people claim to experience such psychic abilities, and those who do are not those one would consider most spiritually developed (saints and the like). Second, since we know our mental functions use our physical brain, we must at least have communications between our physical brain and any spiritual part which plays a role. (People do not tend to talk back and forth between their brain and spirit. People may believe their conscience is their spirit talking to them, but at best that is a one way monologue. Because each person's conscience tells them somewhat different things depending on their cultural, religious and familial upbringing, it is more likely it is not of supernatural origin.) Third, even if we consider communication between the physical and spiritual, we again have to ask what the nature of the communication is. It suggests an interaction between the physical and spiritual realm. For the physical brain to detect or process a message, the message should have to be sent to it in a physical format even if the source is outside the physical world. Such a physical message should be detectable by science.