the telepathy thread

[Chroma Starlight]

2 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

(We) still lack a way of distinguishing ESP from simple coincidence, so what difference does it make which it is?   

coincidence /kəʊˈɪnsɪd(ə)ns/, noun
1. a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.

synchronicity /ˌsɪŋkrəˈnɪsɪti/, noun
1. the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

If you're experiencing coincidence, then you're noticing a pattern or some sign that stands out. The mail delivery worker was out there every day at 10:45am just as you stepped out for a morning stroll. What a coincidence! Next week, some unknown person parked their car in your spot three nights running while you were out at the store. That's a coincidence. It feels unscripted, or the scripting is not meaningful, like "reality tv." There's no sense of higher organization or content. Events happen but no meaning resolves. It seems mundane and it would be a stretch to change that. Nobody wants to hear this story at parties.

Synchronicity feels as-if scripted just for your story. It's very on-point, and the kind of thing where the more you examine it the more its uncanny meaning appears to unfold into perfect alignment with you; lively. Synchronicity is a higher thoughtform; you can't reduce it to any one of its elements; the meaning emerges from the whole.  It's delivered in a certain playful manner from everywhere and nowhere but it's playing in front of you, out there, which is to say within you. You feel as if you've been noticed and you've noticed it, and you get in sync with these flows. Or not, maybe because it's just too much. But that's no fun! What could be more fun than serendipitous synchronicity? It's far more likely to occur if you expect the possibility, if you follow intuition if only just to discover where it leads you. Curiosity, wonder, fearlessness, and playfulness all coexist well with synchronicity. It's like you put yourself out there and maybe you'll see it; go for a walk in its park expecting you may see or even be approached by some of its birds. You just never know. This feels like a story that you could maybe tell to someone close and trusted, or could shift the details into a source of inspiration for some co-creative work.

Both of these have a quality of being random encounters in your life. I think there's other kinds than random, but I think here there's a real unsolicited quality to it; it comes as a surprise. But then you can answer the call once it appears and give it some time and positive energy to see where it leads. An ignored synchronicity may or may not be a coincidence; they don't seem to necessarily involve repetition; each moment in life is unique.

Of course, telepathy would be next-level synchronicity. It would be like noticing you can induce a kind of receptiveness to synchronicity where you are in sync with something outside yourself in some deep way. This happens constantly in life and yet in spite of that, or maybe because of it, I think that people are accustomed to dismissing it as insignificant. 

Edited July 29, 2021 by Chroma Starlight

[Luna Bliss]

 

[Rolig Loon]

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

For the religious or spiritual person, it is in part the validation of their belief.

I can understand that. As I commented very early in this thread, faith is about believing when there is no rational explanation for what we experience.  Whether we believe in God, or ESP, or faeries, the validation we expect is personal.  It fills an individual need and almost by definition cannot be shared or validated independently.  I may have expressed myself in a clumsy way the last time we reached this point in the discussion, but this is why you will never be able to convince me that telepathy exists unless you show me a way to validate it that I can accept personally.  For me, as a scientist, that's going to mean a demonstration that stands up to the scientific rules of replicability and rigorous tests to rule out bias.  I can accept the fact that you and many others believe that telepathy exists, and in one part of my mind I can suspend disbelief and enjoy the wonder of imagining that you are right.  That's where literature and my own faith in things I cannot explain take me.  Not far enough to let me accept telepathy as real, but far enough to understand why you do.

[Madelaine McMasters]

2 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

From a psychological point of view, it's difference between living in a universe that we can control (if only in a haphazard way) and one in which we are the hapless victims of fate.  ESP is an attractive explanation because it allows us to think that we can tip the scales in our own way sometimes.  It can be demoralizing to feel that many of the events around us are random.  So, true or not, ESP appeals to our hope that we are in control of something.

It also offers a window into a world of mystique and magic, in much the same way that Madeleine l'Engel and J.K. Rowling let us escape into worlds in which ordinary people can do things that twist the laws of physics.  We recapture a bit of the wonder that we once felt as very small children, when nothing seemed impossible. If some mysterious events are not simple coincidence, maybe the world is more wonderful than we have been led to believe. Maybe we are too.

I must admit that although I see no scientific proof for ESP -- in fact, doubt that it's even possible to verify that it exists -- I have always been fascinated by science fantasy.  I know that it's fiction, but while I am in the story I can believe that telepathy, telekenisis, and all the rest are real, and that I might be able to  do them myself.  And then I log in to SL and all I can do is fly, teleport, and make objects appear out of thin air.  It's a bit of a letdown, really.  

Though I understand that psychological point of view, it should be pretty clear to everyone I don't share it. I'm content to be a hapless victim of fate. That's easy for me, fate dealt me an excellent hand. The realization that many of the events around me are random is interesting, not demoralizing. I still feel all the magic of my childhood. Though my two favorite magicians are gone, I continue their craft.

The mystique and magic you find in Engel and Rowling I find in the natural world as well, in greater quantity and quality. I imagine you might, too. Even so, flights of fancy are enjoyable and never more than a daydream away. As a lifelong storyteller, I've witnessed the power of fully natural "telepathy", where people put ideas into each other's heads, sometimes quite cleverly, sometimes with nefarious intent. SL is a nifty platform for doing exactly this, though it's still a step down from the playground between my ears, and those of the people I have the great pleasure of trading stories with.

 

[Luna Bliss]

21 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

As for feedback from Arielle, she already knows you don't need it, why don't you?

 

I asked for feedback from Arielle because I wanted to know what she means by "transferring a type of information" when discussing synchronization. You chastised her for breaking the "no-communication theorem or no-signaling principle" and thereby engaging in "quantum woo", and I need to know what she means by "transferring" and when she conceives this "transferring" taking place before I can evaluate if her conception would indeed be violating the laws of physics. We need clearer definitions of "communication", "transferring", "instant communication" and "information" overall in this discussion -- what do we mean or what does any theoretical physicist mean when they use these words? Clearly, we have to know what we mean before we can determine whether information could indeed "transfer" or "be known" in a manner which defies our known senses.

My request for feedback on this topic, in this thread, was sincere and has nothing to do with my frustration and subsequent comments on the Vaccination thread related to the misinformation sources she backs up her vaccination fears with.
I'm not sure why you are chastising me over remarks to Arielle, as you have been just as condescending to her. I guess you didn't like me defending her against your quantum woo accusations levied against her?

[Brilla Took]

pffft

 

Edited July 29, 2021 by Brilla Took

[Luna Bliss]

21 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I've highlighted an apparent contradiction in your post, in purple that arises from mixing Bohm's theories with classical QP. First, you say there is no need to violate the No-Communication Theorem", then quote that instant communications exists between all particles in a plasma, not just two, violating the No-Communication Theorem. Bohm actually allows for violation of QP via "higher order fields" that act on QP. As I recall, those fields are superluminal and fully deterministic, but layer atop each other, ad infinitum. Turtles, all the way up?

If telepathy is merely becoming aware of information that is always already there, then the thought or feeling a telepath "senses" from afar is present within the telepath prior to the remote individual experiencing it. That gives the telepath ample time to become conscious of it before it happens, doesn't it? Telepathy represents becoming aware of a infinitesimally narrow sliver of that infinite information space... the right now. Doesn't it seem much more likely that you'd become aware of things that already happened in the wider expanse of past information (which you'll mostly ignore because you experienced them classically and knowing the past isn't novel) or things in the potentially even larger space of the future, which is premonition? The further into the future one sees, the less likely one might be to recognize anything about it, but the odds still seem to vastly favor premonition over telepathy in the reality you propose.

At quantum levels the classical laws of physics frequently don't apply, and if ESP occurs it would need to involve the quantum level where only quantum physics could define it (as opposed to using classical physics). And so when theorizing about how non-sensory events could occur we should not use classical physics exclusively.

I do like Bohm's conception of the information always being there (information in the Universe is not necessarily being transferred in a linear fashion). I assume that's what the "instant communication" means you take issue with in saying I contradicted something. In any case, that paragraph was a paraphrasing of him by another author, and we'd need to study him further to see what he really means.
http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/DavidBohm-WholenessAndTheImplicateOrder.pdf

He does propose a unified (or unifying?) level underneath the two levels we understand a bit better with our classical physics laws and quantum physics conceptions. I hate to use the term 'level' because this is linear thinking when his conception is that these levels are in constant flux and unfolding (implicate, explicate order).
~~~~~~~~~~
It might be a better description to say it is information that is always accessible rather than "always there". It is not fixed but is always in flux. Whether an individual can or cannot access it is a different matter -- there is the possibility but this does not mean we can. And just because any individual can access information of one type (for example, telepathy) does not mean they can automatically access information of another type (for example, pre-cognition).
It might help to imagine our brains acting as a kind of filter 'designed' or evolved to access what is optimum for human functioning at a physical level. If we were suddenly to access all the information in the Universe our heads would explode.

So what exactly is the information that is always "there" or "accessible"...what is its structure?  I'm just now trying to wrap my head around Bohm's holographic universe concepts, and wondering if his conception will be the same as the A-field (Akashic field) proposed by Vedic Science and theoretical physicists.
A hologram, when cut into pieces, always contains the whole.

Edited July 29, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Luna Bliss]

21 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

The idea that everything is always already there also seems to disallow free will

As far as I can see, his concepts or the notion of ESP wouldn't need to  invalidate free will at a human level. The information that is "out there' and accessible is always in flux -- nothing fixed about it. However my free will would certainly be thwarted if I attempted to alter the current iteration of the Universe coming into being with the big bang and then disappearing into "nothingness", and then emerging again with physical properties. At this macro level the Universe is indeed deterministic and controlled by something beyond human endeavor or will.
I don't have a problem with conceiving of the Universe as both random and deterministic.

[Ceka Cianci]

In this day and age,I don't think we have to worry too much about people tapping into their telepathy sense..

Humans are evolving to become more dependent on other things doing a lot of things for them.

 

Look everyone, a buncha telepaths walking on the side walk communicating with each other, telepathically... hehehehe

[Luna Bliss]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Though I understand that psychological point of view, it should be pretty clear to everyone I don't share it. I'm content to be a hapless victim of fate. That's easy for me, fate dealt me an excellent hand. The realization that many of the events around me are random is interesting, not demoralizing. I still feel all the magic of my childhood. Though my two favorite magicians are gone, I continue their craft.

Yes, we know you don't believe in God or even a spiritual aspect to reality. However, some people believe in a spiritual aspect as part of reality because they discovered truth, and their contemplation of reality and experience brought them to this realization -- not because it provides any kind of security or magic that makes them feel better. This is where you repeatedly insult people -- by imagining their reality is a delusion designed to buffer them against reality, assuming they can't face the truth.

In fact, for me the reality where previous conceptions once reigned, was the secure one.  The new perception is so excruciatingly different in many instances, so vast and undefined, that it's downright scary at times.

Edited July 29, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Rolig Loon]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Though I understand that psychological point of view, it should be pretty clear to everyone I don't share it. I'm content to be a hapless victim of fate.

Oh, don't share it either.  I hope that has been apparent in my comments so far.  I do understand it, though.  Those are real, recognizable factors that influence the way people behave.

[Lindal Kidd]

On 7/11/2021 at 9:51 PM, Madelaine McMasters said:

as I welcome them to the world of "flicker fusion threshold" supervillains.

Are you referring to the way that LED lights seem to strobe as you move your eyes back and forth? I have this to a very annoying degree.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, Ceka Cianci said:

In this day and age,I don't think we have to worry too much about people tapping into their telepathy sense..

Humans are evolving to become more dependent on other things doing a lot of things for them.

 

Look everyone, a buncha telepaths walking on the side walk communicating with each other, telepathically... hehehehe

 

That's not evolution. That is devolution. 😉

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

That's not evolution. That is devolution. 😉

We are DEVO!

 

[Rat Luv]

I was talking to my nan today and she reminded me of something...my grandad was welding one day and he kept seeing a shadow figure moving around in the yard. He put his mask up, because he was supposed to be working alone in that section, and wondered if another worker had turned up, or if someone had broken in. Then he saw the figure running into a warehouse shed, so he followed it inside but couldn't see anyone...then heard a massive crash and came out again, and a scaffold had collapsed exactly where he'd been standing  

He always said "Oh, I probably just imagined it, a load of rubbish really!" but she thinks that, deep down, he wondered if someone or something dragged him away in time...things like that can't be proved in a lab but I still think there are weird forces out there...

@Love Zhaoying It says 'video unavailable' here  But was it this? 😍

 

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

We are DEVO!

 

 

My cat doesn't like it. lol

[Madelaine McMasters]

22 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Are you referring to the way that LED lights seem to strobe as you move your eyes back and forth? I have this to a very annoying degree.

I also see LED lights strobe with eye movement, but that's a different exploitation of the persistence of vision effect and I'm not sure just what other cognitive factors go into people recognizing it. Everybody should be able to see the effect under the right conditions, not all seem to. I know two people with high flicker fusion thresholds. I taught one of them to see strobing tail lights, one already knew, as you do. I've also taught people who don't see flicker (my eye doctor) to see strobe trails, and had no success with others. These capabilities are related but seem somewhat independent.

Knowing you perceive this strobe trail effect, I'll recommend some other "tricks". If you have a string of animated LED blinky lights with a soft "breathing" animation, swing a section of the string over your head in a dark place and watch the lights. As they grow brighter and dimmer, you'll see the ratio of "dot" to "gap" length change. When full bright, you'll see only the usual fading trail behind the passing lights. As they dim, you'll see the trail break into dots that grow shorter until they vanish when the string goes dark.

This is most noticeable at night, when your eye sweeps across a dark scene and encounters flashing LEDs. If you've seen strobing tail lights, you might have noticed they don't strobe when braking. While braking, the LEDs are 100% of the time. During normal driving, they're flashing at about 50% duty cycle. Viewing modulated LEDs though a spinning object, like a window fan, or through your waving fingers, can also produce interesting stroboscopic effects. DLP color wheel projectors exhibit a "rainbow effect" to people sensitive to strobe trails.

If you have a car with a rough running motor that shakes one or more of your rear view mirrors, you can use that shake to replace your rapid eye movement. This is most interesting when viewing animated LED advertising signs and billboards that are behind you. Those things also flicker. The shaking of the mirror will "demodulate" the sign, causing surreal distortions. My old station wagon's motor was so rough that I could play with the accelerator pedal at stop lights to explore resonances all around my car. I could shake any of the rear view mirrors, my glove box door, the passenger window, etc, just by finding the sweet spot engine RPM. My stop light experiments often produced audible effects, such as honking or yelling from cars behind me after the light went green. Now I have solid, quiet cars and those glory days are over.

Back to flicker fusion threshold, my high threshold causes me to be annoyed by old CRT television sets (nearly unwatchable) and computer monitors with refresh rates below 100Hz. I can't watch plasma TVs because they flicker. This surprised me when I saw one sporting a tag that said "600Hz Refresh Rate" at Best Buy. I brought my portable oscilloscope into the store and pointed a photodetector at a TV showing the static Best Buy logo. Sure enough, there were 600 pulses of light per second, but there was also a clear pattern of brightness change repeating every 10 flashes, at a very flickery 60Hz. I went home and Googled, finding this explanation...

https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-sub-field-drive-1847853

A display technique engineered to improve picture quality for the vast majority of viewers makes Plasma TVs annoying for me.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters

[Chroma Starlight]

21 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Are you referring to the way that LED lights seem to strobe as you move your eyes back and forth? I have this to a very annoying degree.

These may be lights that don't have enough power supply filtering to entirely eliminate the flicker from the AC mains. Or, in some places, the grid operators can change the brightness of the lights, probably by modulating the duty cycle of a high frequency pulse. Some people are just sensitive to this sort of thing, like noticing a 60hz flicker on your monitor's display in your peripheral vision late at night. I've always tended to notice stuff like this.

I amazed my older brother once by being able to 'clairvoyantly' say whether or not an analog TV was turned on when its volume was down the whole way from another room, but I convinced him. It was weird to me that that he pretended that he couldn't hear the tone that it made. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Later on, I discover this was probably the horizontal scan deflector, which for a NTSC signal is 15.734 KHz, well within the documented range of human hearing.  On some CRTs, it was just really loud, I don't know why. I've got an LP record where you can hear they had a loud one within range of a mic. It's really annoying.

[Ceka Cianci]

22 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

That's not evolution. That is devolution. 😉

That's what I feel as well, but you won't get a lot that think it is, because they love it.. hehehehe

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

If you have a car with a rough running motor that shakes one or more of your rear view mirrors, you can use that shake to replace your rapid eye movement. This is most interesting when viewing animated LED advertising signs and billboards that are behind you. Those things also flicker. The shaking of the mirror will "demodulate" the sign, causing surreal distortions. My old station wagon's motor was so rough that I could play with the accelerator pedal at stop lights to explore resonances all around my car. I could shake any of the rear view mirrors, my glove box door, the passenger window, etc, just by finding the sweet spot engine RPM. My stop light experiments often produced audible effects, such as honking or yelling from cars behind me after the light went green. Now I have solid, quiet cars and those glory days are over.

If you thought that was exciting, "resonating" with other people is a blast!

[Madelaine McMasters]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

If you thought that was exciting, "resonating" with other people is a blast!

It is!

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/bohp/15/

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

It is!

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/bohp/15/

Not surprised one bit (being Dave Brubeck)..

I am embarking on a personal, musical adventure (compose songs for my own YouTube videos).  If I play all the instruments, do I still benefit from the "group" telepathy? Or, only if I am "legion"?

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not surprised one bit (being Dave Brubeck)..

I am embarking on a personal, musical adventure (compose songs for my own YouTube videos).  If I play all the instruments, do I still benefit from the "group" telepathy? Or, only if I am "legion"?

That's an interesting question. I think the answer is yes.

You've probably heard book authors or playwrights mention how some story got hijacked by the characters. During the writing of "Those Extraordinary Twins", this happened to Mark Twain. Supporting characters drifted into the limelight, forcing Twain to write the novel "Puddinhead Wilson" to contain them. "Those Extraordinary Twins" was released later, as a short story.

I'd not be surprised if you find that the whole of your musical creation ends up different, and greater, than you imagined, simply because playing the different instruments forces you to come at the project from different angles, sparking additional creativity.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
From Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"

True legion has it's advantages, though. I love going to Milwaukee's various summer festivals to see music acts. To the dismay of my friends (which is why I usually go alone), I like to see the same band three times across the weekend. I do this so I can see what changes. In some performances, something clicks and it's magic. In some performances that doesn't happen. I've seen the dawning realization that things are clicking come over the faces of the musicians. I see surprise and delight, knowing nods, and dogged determination. I know there's a language being spoken between the musicians that I often don't understand but, now and then, I get a flash of insight that overwhelms me.

I saw Dave Brubeck playing with his son Chris at Summerfest when I was a teen. I watched the band three nights in a row. Friday was nice, Saturday was amazing, Sunday was nice. It felt like Saturday's performance was informed by Friday's. This story is approximate, I can't remember the details. During Friday's performance, it was pretty clear that Dave and Chris were close. No surprise. Chris did something that made the crowd laugh. I don't recall what it was, but it seemed extemporaneous. On Saturday, Dave purposely did the same thing early in the set, making the crowd laugh again, and giving me quite a tingle. I was in on the joke. Chris, of course, was too. His response to the stolen line brought down the house. From that point on, the energy just kept rising, lifting everyone into the sky.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters
The more I read what I write, the less I like it.

[Madelaine McMasters]

23 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Yes, we know you don't believe in God or even a spiritual aspect to reality. However, some people believe in a spiritual aspect as part of reality because they discovered truth, and their contemplation of reality and experience brought them to this realization -- not because it provides any kind of security or magic that makes them feel better. This is where you repeatedly insult people -- by imagining their reality is a delusion designed to buffer them against reality, assuming they can't face the truth.

In fact, for me the reality where previous conceptions once reigned, was the secure one.  The new perception is so excruciatingly different in many instances, so vast and undefined, that it's downright scary at times.

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.” ― Voltaire

The idea that religious/spiritual belief buffers people from the harshness of reality is hardly my invention. It's widely held, including by the religious and spiritual communities. Google "comfort spirituality" to see evidence of this. For evidence of some contention, Google "comfort religion". That there are so many religious belief systems leads me to wonder if the devil is in the details. People who've found the truth are often very sensitive to challenge. Those looking around for it seem less threatened.

Anyone can work up a theory to explain telepathy using various paths through QP. Rupert Sheldrake and Klee Irwin both cooked up stories (they don't make the testable predictions that theory wants) to allow for explanations for things from telepathy to consciousness. You seem to like Sheldrake's story, but not Irwin's, but I get no sense that you can actually analyze either of them well, other than by feeling your way around indirectly via other metrics, like third party critiques and/or your own character assessment of the individuals. That's fine, I don't know enough about their stories, nor all the particulars of Quantum Physics they're applying or misapplying either. I'm relying on third party analysis and character assessment, too. You and I are are assessing each other in the same way.

In this forum, I think only two people have suggested that I insult people by presenting alternative explanations for the things we feel. There might be more who don't express their displeasure with these ideas. I find nothing out of the ordinary about that, and feel no need to redress your grievance.

Now and then, new evidence forces me to abandon old beliefs. Nature feels no need to redress my grievances.

[Silent Mistwalker]

Did someone mention LED strobe lights?

Party! Party! Par-tay!

 

https://www.amazon.com/Roxant-Pulse-ULTRA-Bright-Strobe/dp/B01LVXCDKX/ref=asc_df_B01LVXCDKX/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312181335000&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13595253625053412611&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032898&hvtargid=pla-568390215079&psc=1