How Come Telepaths Can Read Your Mind

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Philosophy & the Paranormal

Why You Tin't Read My Mind

Nosotros had no idea that Paul MacDonald intended to write this article.

Much attention is given in the populist media to explaining the unexplained; every month new books, magazines, and websites devoted to the paranormal make their appearance. In an attempt to counter-residual the prevalent climate of credulity,The Skeptical Inquirer has offered cogent and sober analyses of claims fabricated most alien abductions, after-expiry communication, Biblical Creationism, and other peculiar pseudo-scientific theories. However, information technology is rather unusual for paranormal claims to be subjected to explicitly philosophical scrutiny, perhaps partly because information technology is more than mutual to remember that reported incidents are just highly unlikely, implausible or garbled. But some claims made about some types of paranormal phenomena, such as ghosts, psycho-kinesis, and telepathy are more than but improbable: they are basically confused at the conceptual level. At the same time that cognitive scientists articulate more than and more complex materialist theories of the mind, reducing the mental domain to the operations of neuro-chemical computations, paranormalists postulate an immaterial mind with significant occult powers. This article is an attempt to sort out some of the serious conceptual problems involved with claims fabricated about the paranormal phenomenon of telepathy.

What is Telepathy?

The discussion `telepathy' (from the root pathos) seems to convey the sense of remote-feeling, not remote-thinking; `telepathy' is thus closely related to `sympathy' and `empathy'. Now, on one hand, remote-feeling or feeling-at-a-altitude is non such a strange or para-normal notion that one needs special guidance to capeesh its significant. Allow us suppose that you lot are in a crowded café, chatting with friends and watching the action. Y'all happen to notice the rapid and abrupt movement the waiters make through the swing door into the kitchen. You think that it'due south remarkable that there aren't more than collisions near this unpredictable portal. 1 of the diners bends over to pick up something in front of the swing door at the very moment information technology bursts open, striking the diner on the head with an aural thump. You wince, as do the other diners who witness this incident, and turn to your friends and say that you lot felt that. This is a perfectly intelligible statement and requires no paranormal explanation about feeling-at-a-altitude, but paranormalists affirm something more than mysterious almost the overcoming of psychic distance in some not-so-normal experiences.

It may help to draw some distinctions betwixt various sorts of feeling (or affective) experiences with respect to i'due south physical or mental proximity. In a sym-pathetic experience (`feeling-with'), your intimate knowledge of another person'southward situation allows y'all to feel how you imagine you lot would feel if you had the other'due south problems or blessings. In an em-pathetic (`feeling-inside') experience, your intimate knowledge of another person's feeling-reactions allows y'all to imagine that you lot are in the other person's situation, having the same issues or blessings. In the tele-pathic state of affairs, you are able to experience hurting or pleasure on behalf of another person, just as if you lot were in the other's situation. Of course, there are profound differences betwixt the feeling a person whose head has been banged might have, and the remote feelings y'all accept in witnessing this head banging; he might need a pain-killer, but you practice not. The pain occurs in his caput as a outcome of the door banging his caput, whereas it is as if the pain occurred in your head as a result of seeing his head banged.

So perhaps the really salient feature of alleged incidents of telepathy is something which might better be called tele-noesis, i.e. remote thinking. From numerous science-fiction films we are all familiar with the idea that tele-noesis might be something like an inner, individual voice (which the audience hears), but which the `telepath' only thinks and doesn't speak out loud. In Star Trek: The Next Generation no one else hears this inner vocalization except another telepath. But right abroad there'south a serious trouble with this analogy of so-chosen telepathy - the just mode that we in the audience have whatever understanding of what'due south going on in the scene is that we actually hear the telepath'southward `inner vocalisation'. And so it seems equally if the telepath'due south thoughts must exist just like our own `inner voice', but not ane we could ever hear - and what does that sound like? Some other related question concerns whether or not the telepath has non-projective thoughts, i.east. thoughts that another telepath could not hear. If so, what cognitive mechanisms could exist employed to emit ane kind of thought and not the other? Would these `hush-hush' thoughts exist like whispers instead of shouts? We could pursue several hypotheses in this context, but all the analogies one could utilise are fatigued from normal speech and implicate standard, this-worldly causal mechanisms. The endeavor to postulate a projective `inner voice' and an extroceptive `inner ear' completely misconstrues the actual connections between the brain and the powers of voice communication and hearing.

There is another intelligible and ordinary use of the concept of remote-feeling, as opposed to remote-thinking. When two people have been together for a long time their thoughts tin can sometimes intersect, that is, they can each have the aforementioned (though non identical) idea at the same fourth dimension. This is most likely to occur when the respective thoughts are triggered by an incident or outcome that is a regular feature of their everyday life together. And so much of everyday life is lived out according to addiction that it is little wonder that a couple'southward thoughts may sometimes run along parallel tracks. For example, after the evening meal, just earlier doing the dishes and just subsequently the nightly news report, one person says, "Information technology would be really nice if we had some chocolate", and the other says that's just what he was thinking - "you've read my mind." Several comments are called for. First, this sort of cognitive `echo' doesn't strike us as anything out of the ordinary or paranormal. Second, this occurrence seems more than likely the amend the ii people know each other, and less probable where personal rapport is weak or limited. But one tends to assume, without skillful reason, that the less likely such an outcome the more than mysterious its sources must be. Third, while information technology may be highly tempting just misleading to metaphrase the pregnant of `mind-reading' above equally a metaphorical extension of `reading', what sort of reading is this cognitive echo being compared to? Just as mind-hearing fails to find a coherent notion of an outward `inner voice', so also does mind-reading fail to observe an inner text somehow displayed to anyone but its ain writer. For the paranormalist to respond that reading and hearing are metaphorical intentional verbs does not advance his case, since it isn't clear what reading or hearing would correspond. In contrast, i does not demand a metaphor to convey the sense of having an object of thought.

The straight-forward sense of listen-reading in our example is that, at that moment, each person is thinking most the aforementioned affair; there are two cognitive acts whose `object' is chocolate, perhaps even the same bodily slice of chocolate. In what way would a `genuine' telepath be doing something other than thinking about the same `object' as some other person, telepathic or not? In the Next Star Trek case, perhaps we in the audition are willing to entertain the notion that real idea transfer has taken place because we don't know about a shared background of habitual practices between the two subjects. More than that, we might fifty-fifty know for a fact (about the fictional earth) that the ii subjects practise not accept such a shared background. But it is a logical fallacy to infer from ignorance of the subjects' rapport to the truth of the hypothesis that some sort of thought-transfer must be at piece of work here. Allow'southward imagine a very finely tuned Magnetic Resonance Imagery apparatus attached to a person's head. The trial subject has trained himself to recall very clearly and distinctly about several dozen simple 'objects'; these are the terms in his mental vocabulary or prototype repertoire. Another person, the observer, has been trained to recognize the MRI display of certain specific patterns and correlate them with their 'objects'. So, the question here is whether the observer is 'reading' the subject's thoughts when he correctly reports the sequence of images. Merely the reply is surely "No"; the observer recognizes a pattern as being nigh some thing in much the same way that anyone else comes to larn virtually and recognize ordinary patterns as signs; for example, certain highway signs stand for rockslides, narrow shoulders, speed limits then forth. The insertion of an MRI brandish into our thought experiment serves to evidence that some sort of causal transmission takes identify betwixt the subject's thought well-nigh an `object' and the apparatus display. Then a perceptual process takes identify when the observer perceives a sure pattern and identifies it as standing for an item in the bailiwick'south mental vocabulary. There isn't anything like such an apparatus in the imaginary Next Star Trek scenario, where we are meant to believe that a telepath directly perceives an item in a person'due south mental vocabulary, or direct grasps an `object' of thought. But there are even more serious issues at the epistemic core of the telepathy hypothesis. Some philosophers have held that thought is silent, inner voice communication and that speech is vocalized, outer thought. This itself is a controversial hypothesis but let's grant some cogency to the idea of an "inner class of the word", equally Jean Piaget phrased information technology. It seems to exist widely, though not universally, accustomed that every human being has a basic, central language. Thus we understand what someone ways when they say that they take finally mastered German when they recollect or dream in the German language. But what language does the telepath think in? His or her own natural language or a special language? Could a High german-speaking (or thinking) telepath understand a French telepath? Could an Earth-born telepath understand a telepath from an extraterrestrial civilization? If sender and receiver demand to share the aforementioned natural language then this imposes a normal, not para-normal, constraint on an alleged sixth-sense that paranormalists merits has escaped the narrow parameters of our ordinary senses. One might reply to this objection by arguing (as does the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, amid others) that all humans have a universal language of thought; but this likewise is a highly contentious theory which has serious problems of its own. Even on a generous construal of the linguistic communication-of-idea hypothesis, its proponents do not merits that it has all the backdrop of natural human languages. In detail, information technology does not accept whatever phonic shapes or contours. And this brings us back to the original question in the kickoff section: what exactly is it that the telepath is meant to be reading or hearing when he claims to `have' another person's thoughts?

In this context let me reprise an argument from an earlier article of mine, in Cogito (Apr 1997). In a quite straight-frontward style, the encephalon does not directly produce outward spoken communication. The brain instructs the vocal organs to produce sounds, or the hands to produce graphic signs. So just what is the brain supposed to be doing when telepathy occurs? The brain does generate electro-magnetic pulses which tin exist detected past external apparatus and some paranormalists have argued that at that place is nothing in principle to dominion out the brain also performance every bit a receiver. But my question so would be, simply what is the brain declared to receive? Possibly we are more familiar with this kind of point in arguments against the reduction of thoughts to neuro-chemical events. It is by no means a foregone determination that the thoughts I have are identical with their neuro-chemical back up in my brain. So if someone says that a specific neural issue which occurs when I have the thought there's a red ball tin can be transmitted and received by his brain, he nevertheless hasn't shown me that he has that thought. In fact, it'due south non even clear whether, if he did indeed have the thought there's a red ball, it would be a token of my idea or his idea. It doesn't seem to make any sense that information technology would be a token of his thought since this doesn't show that any transfer took identify; nor that information technology's a token of my thought that he's having since then these two tokens would be numerically identical.

Some other manner to illustrate this signal is to imagine a piece of carte black on one side, white on the other. You lot're looking at the black side, someone else is looking at the white side, and this person claims that he is going to transfer his thought of seeing white so that y'all have this thought. What exactly would exist the idea that you lot have if this experiment were successful? While you are seeing blackness would y'all likewise exist seeing white from his point-of-view? In which example, what has happened to your betoken-of-view; where has the cognitive content of seeing black gone? On the other manus, if while seeing black you would be seeing white from your point-of-view, then there'south a contradiction in a claim well-nigh your thought. The counter-sense is that you lot are both seeing blackness and not seeing black as the content of 1 and the same thought.

A Brief History of Telepathy and Culture

Unlike the belief in ghosts, reports almost telepathy and telekinesis begin to appear only 100 to 150 years ago - this makes remote-thinking and remote-moving relatively contempo paranormal phenomena. But that is hardly surprising when one considers the historical advent of the telegraph, the telephone, television and so forth. Table-rapping came into vogue in Victorian-era spiritualist seances in a culture familiar with telegraphic messages; `voices' from the other side became the preferred mediumistic device in a culture more familiar with telephone calls. These inventions introduced to the full general public the ideas that cause and effect, point and receiver, can exist separated by keen distances. The continuous conduit that carries a message is ruptured where it disappears clandestine, into high tension wires, or fifty-fifty the very air itself. The technical skill shown in these inventions is in the transformation of one type of signal, say, tapping on a metal key, into some other type of signal, electrical pulses in a copper wire; merely the conceptual skill is in the art of making things seem closer than they are. The mechanism of teleportation in the original Star Expedition and other sci-fi films represents an exponential increase in the imaginative construction of such devices. The concept of teleportation seems to be no more than than the limit of a continuous serial of instantaneous transfer devices. At the same time that it shows but how far nosotros think that our imagination can reach, it does not show that we now have any good reason to think that our imagination is more powerful than the facts allow.

At nigh the aforementioned time every bit the introduction of distance-collapsing devices such as the telephone, naturalistic theories of the heed and the Freudian theory of the unconscious helped to create a picture of the conscious, thinking being equally an inner vessel or chamber with hidden compartments. It seems plausible to the paranormalists that there is a kind of psychic separation between the latent source of some thoughts and their manifestation in conscious awareness. Furthermore, telepathic encounters are supposed to involve the bridging of this inner psychic gap. Several advocates of telepathic cocky-aid employ a crude film of the brain'south left and right hemispheres, between which some sort of inner bulletin transfer takes place. Others make much of the `mental modularity' or `society-of-minds' model, and in both cases treat the component parts of the heed almost as conscious agents in their own right. Thus in their hands such complex heed-brain models are reduced to a thinly-curtained homuncular account; there is an inner, `secret' agent who perceives perceptions, examines mental contents, and `spies' on other people's thoughts and feelings.

To brand matters worse for the paranormalist, the attempt to extend the concept of remote-sensing to telepathy or tele-cognition through an illustration with television or telephony doesn't get off the footing in the start identify. In the case of tele-vision, where the origin or source of the pictures is remote from the viewer, the distance is bridged past means of broadcast or optical/wire transmission, but the viewer perceives the images in his immediate environs. Thus there are external representations of the remote original presentation, whose product is beyond the range of direct perception. The same account can be given for telephony and telegraphy in terms of external, merely nearby, representations of the remote original sounds or marks. Merely how would this account cover the case of tele-knowledge? Another person's thoughts exercise indeed have an origin remote from the start subject; no matter how physically shut the two persons are, the remoteness of one's thoughts to another person's thoughts does not decrease. The other person'southward thoughts are beyond the range of one'south straight sensory perception. But what is the declared means of transmission which could bridge this `distance' betwixt bespeak and receiver? And more than than that, surely the distance across which remote-thinking is supposed to accept identify is nothing similar being physically far away? In the Side by side Star Expedition scenario, we are led to believe that the telepath has to be `within range' in order to receive remote thoughts; just what could that hateful? 1 seems forced to draw the inference that thoughts spread out like the light from a buoy, becoming diffuse and vague equally the radius increases. The illustration with tv set or telephony falls at a further hurdle: if another person's thoughts are remote, in some unknown sense, there isn't annihilation that would count as the external representations perceived by the telepath prior to his attributing them to a remote source.

Is It All in the Mind?

There is a plausible though unwelcome explanation for what's going on when some people merits to exist 18-carat telepaths. In the psychiatric classification of the various forms of schizophrenia i unusual symptom is called `idea insertion'; this refers to a mental state in which the psychotic patient has thoughts which he or she attributes to someone else. The psychiatrists' standard reference work, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (4th Edition) advisedly distinguishes this psychotic disorder from auditory hallucinations. In the erstwhile, the patient knows or is enlightened that `alien' thoughts occur in her heed, merely denies that she is the author of those thoughts; in the latter, `voices' are heard as emanating from outside the person'south body just the source has disappeared or is using a remote device. Where the old is a disturbance of attribution of agency, the latter is (at least in part) the result of deterioration in the boundary of self and world. The telepath may experience an `inner vocalism' other than its `normal' phonation and, though she does consider the utterance as occurring in her own heed, she attributes the author of the utterance to someone else as agent. Several telepathy advocates admit that as many equally i in five of those who claim telepathic experiences suffer from some form of mental illness. But these advocates fail to mention how mentally `normal' people can manifest such disturbed thought processes without an underlying pathological condition.

There are numerous well-remarked issues in contemporary philosophy of perception and knowledge about the nature and properties of thoughts, their causal relations to neural states, the intentional directedness of thoughts, the ideal or real status of `objects' of thought, indirect versus directly relations to the world, and so forth. Depending on their allegiance to various mind-brain models, metaphysical commitments, and other factors, philosophers adopt dissimilar attitudes on each of these issues. In that location is no generic, neutral attitude towards the questions raised by these problems; but it is precisely through the avoidance of these questions that the paranormalist can propound the notion that telepathy is an actual ability of (some) human beings and that genuine insight tin can be gained about the nature of the human mind by the examination of reported instances. At to the lowest degree part of what seems to be missing from intelligent philosophical give-and-take of paranormalists' claims nearly telepathy or tele-noesis is the absence of any paranormal theory of heed; merely perhaps that absenteeism is itself symptomatic of an underlying disturbance. In recent years at that place has been much promising enquiry in the philosophy of mental illness1 by manner of the hypothesis that mental patients apply a misplaced or incomplete `theory' of mind (fifty-fifty if such a `theory' is non consciously held just simply tacit). An adequate model of such a disturbed theory of mind might lead researchers to better empathise, not just the cognitive footing of mental disease itself, but also the sort of cognitive dysfunction which could pb to the thought, held by some paranormal advocates, that the mind has telepathic powers.

© Paul MacDonald 2003

Paul MacDonald is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch Academy in Perth, Western Australia.

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Source: https://philosophynow.org/issues/42/Why_You_Cant_Read_My_Mind

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