Extrasensory Perception: Telepathy

SPECIFIC TOPIC EXPLORATION

Extrasensory Perception: Telepathy

1. The Phenomenon of Telepathy

Telepathy is one of the three main types of extrasensory perceptions that are strenuously researched in both the scientific community and in private. The Parapsychological Association was granted affiliate status with the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969 because parapsychologists, unlike creationists, use the scientific method to test their hypotheses. Parapsychology is the study of extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis. Extrasensory perception is perception that is not mediated by an organism's recognized sensory organs. Telepathy is the specific perception of another's thoughts without the use of the senses. This phenomenon is often labeled as psi phenomena. To read another person's thoughts without any observed communication is groundbreaking and thought of as a superpower to many. Some people think that the world would be a much more interesting place if psi were a reality. On a personal level telepathy could improve our communication skills, prepare for the future and help us achieve our goals. On the national and international level, the consequences could be drastically remarkable. National defenses could be able to read into their enemies' minds, gain knowledge about their secret documents without breaking into their headquarters, and convince them to disarm their weapons by thought alone. J.B. Rhine, one of the first to study psi in the laboratory, had an interesting theory about the prospect of harnessing psi energy.

"The consequences for world affairs would be literally colossal. War plans and crafty designs of any kind, anywhere in the world, could be watched and revealed. With such revelation it seems unlikely that war could ever occur again. There would be no advantage of surprise. Every secret weapon and scheming strategy would be subject to exposure. The nations could relax their suspicious fear of each other's secret machinations.

Crime on any scale could hardly exist with its cloak of invisibility thus removed. Graft, exploitation, and suppression could not continue if the dark plots of wicked men were to be laid bare."

But people also feared such a power; a fully developed psi capability could devastate lives. People could read your thoughts, see what you're doing every minute of the day, and control your body with their minds. That would make possible a form of social control more horrific that that portrayed in George Orwell's 1984 where free will and self expression is committing a "thoughtcrime". Martin Gardner sees psi powers as "tools with far wider scope for repression and terror than the mere tapping of a phone, opening of a letter, or electronic eavesdropping." The military potential of psi is a hotspot for the watchful eye of the Pentagon. The Pentagon's top secret "psychic task force" had spent over $6 million in 1980 alone trying to develop psi weapons reported columnist Jack Anderson in 1981. United States' military leaders knew that the Soviets had been conducting serious psychic research since the 1930's and that Stalin had hoped to develop psychic weapons to counter America's nuclear threat. But Rhine was interested in psi phenomena because of its philosophical implications. He believed that a widespread acceptance of materialism would have disastrous social consequences.

"The most far-reaching and revolting consequences lies in what would happen to volitional or mental freedom. Under a mechanistic determinism the cherished voluntarism of the individual would be nothing but idle fancy. Without the exercise of some freedom from physical law, the concepts of character responsibility, moral judgment, and democracy would not survive critical analysis. The concept of a spiritual order, either in the individual or beyond him, would have no logical place whatever. In fact, little of the entire value system under which human society has developed would survive the establishment of a thoroughgoing philosophy of physicalism." J. B. Rhine.

If psi were real, he thought, the materialist worldview would have to be abandoned and one more in tune with traditional values could take its place.

Supposedly a telepath can read another's mind through their practice and mastery of psychic powers which they claim that everyone has. This phenomenon has quite a lot of history to it and research upon this phenomenon is still ongoing and is perplexing as ever. The reason why telepathy is an enigmatic controversy is that its existence seems to call into question many of our most basic beliefs about the nature of knowledge and reality. It seems to undermine the theory of knowledge underlying modern science, namely, that sense experience is the only source of knowledge of the external world. Telepathy specifically tends to undermine the theory of reality underlying modern science, namely, that all that exists is matter in motion or mass/energy. Many of us have had experiences that seem to feel like extrasensory perception but as we've seen, we can't always take our experiences at face value. What seems inexplicable often turns out to have a rather mundane explanation. Before we accept the reality of psi phenomena, then, we should be sure that the phenomena in question can' be explained in terms of well-understood processes.

2. Explanation from mainstream science; Occam's Razor

The Million-Dollar Paranormal challenge was offered by magician, educator, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient James Randi to anyone able to demonstrate paranormal abilities under controlled conditions. That reward is now up to a million dollars giving anyone more than just an incentive to prove their extraordinary powers. Under proper observing conditions, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests to date (Schick, Vaughn; p.203).

Unless the experiment can be repeated by others, we can't be sure that an effect is real. But in the field of parapsychology, there are no repeatable experiments. Even the same researchers, using the same subjects, can't achieve similar results every time. Consequently, there is good reason to doubt that psi is real (Schick, Vaughn; p.204).

Many seem to regard telepathy phenomena as quite ordinary and as fully in accord with the more familiar manifestations of Nature's forces. We frequently hear Telepathy compared to the manifestations of electricity, particularly in the phase of wireless telegraphy. But it isn't as simple as it sounds, it cannot be lightly dismissed or placed in any ordinary category. It is, scientifically, sui generis--in a class