Topics Mind

Question Is telepathy possible? I have never had a telepathic experience and nor have I met anyone who claims to have had one. I think I would be pretty sceptical if I did. But is it even possible to have a telepathic experience? How would you know you weren't the victim of some kind of psychosis? How would you be able to sort out the 'ownership' of thoughts and other mental states? When I think about telepathy I imagine it as some kind of telephony without the instruments and wires. Let's say I wanted to communicate with my friend Sandra. With a telephone I pick up the instrument, dial Sandra's number, hear some rings and clicks and then I hear Sandra saying 'Hello' (or whatever). I know it's Sandra because I recognise her voice. I know it wasn't me saying 'Hello' because I didn't open my mouth. But with telepathy all the physical actions and events seem to be eliminated. If I want to communicate with Sandra I presumably 'tune in' to her brain somehow. But then all sorts of problems start. How do I know I've really got Sandra's brain, and not somebody else's? Perhaps there is some unique quality of Sandra's mental states that immediately identify them as hers, analogous to the unique sound of her voice, but it's hard to know quite what this quality could be. When I 'hear' 'Hello' it will not have been produced by her vocal chords. If I became aware of a sudden yearning for pizza, would it me that was yearning for pizza, or Sandra? How would I be able to distinguish our yearnings? How would I know the 'voice' that I was 'hearing' was not a delusion, a case for psychiatric treatment? All these considerations lead me to think that the notion of telepathy is hopelessly problematic and can be ruled out a priori. But then supposing there is an advance in wireless telephony in the future. Instead of carrying portable handsets we will all have chips implanted in our brains. These chips will be wired up to the brain in such a way that if I want to dial, for example, Sandra's number, I just have to think of her number. Sandra's chip will then start 'ringing' in her brain (only she will hear it) and we can proceed to have our conversation merely by 'thinking' our words, rather than physically producing them as speech. This might seem far-fetched, but not beyond the realms of logical possibility. So one intuition is pulling me one way, and the other intuition is pulling me the other. Which intuition is better? Can they be resolved?

Accepted:
November 24, 2005

Comments

I doubt telepathy is possible, as I can't figure out any causal mechanism to make it work. But that's an empirical matter. I'm reluctant to rule it out in any a priori sense. Must one "know" that the content of a telepathic event is some specified other's thought or mental state? Suppose I'm reading an e-mail or engaged in Instant Messaging with someone. Clearly, I am in some sense apprehending their thoughts (or at leat their words). I do so, however, even if I don't know who the other person is, even if I'm mistaken about who it is, etc. Perhaps, someone has hacked into my friend's IM account or is impersonating my friend in an e-mail. So what? The words I apprehend remain meaningful. In the case of telepathy, one worry (as you point out), however, is that the supposed telepath might simply be apprehending her own thoughts and attributing them to others. But couldn't it go the other way, too? Couldn't one apprehend another's thought and mistakenly take it for one's own? If so, then one could experience an undetected telepathic event. There seems to be a difference, then, between the possible existence of telepathic events and knowing of their existence. (Analogously Hume distinguishes between the question of the existence of miracles and knowing one has taken place.)

I'm inclined to think that if a way to cause telepathic experiences were discovered, that some might be undetected but others remain detectable. For example, one could ask a friend to think of something and then try to apprehend it telepathically. Then through simple questioning, one could find out whether one had apprehended correctly. Correlations between outward behavior, like pain behavior, and mental feelings are also detectable. So, if I felt a pain in my hand at precisely 10:15am on November 24 and subsequently learned that my friend experience a nail piercing her hand at precisely that time, and if that sort of event could be repeated under controlled circumstances, one might suspect the existence of something like a telepathic connection. Of course, without a testable causal theory to explain the coincidence of feeling and piercing, one could not establish such a connection as a fact.