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From: greg@endor.harvard.edu (Greg)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: Mind Reading
Message-ID: <403@husc6.HARVARD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 15-Oct-86 13:07:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: husc6.403
Posted: Wed Oct 15 13:07:11 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 15-Oct-86 20:42:46 EDT
References: <217@sri-arpa.ARPA> <3598@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1858@mmintl.UUCP> <364@husc6.HARVARD.EDU>
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Reply-To: greg@endor.UUCP (Greg)
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In article <364@husc6.HARVARD.EDU> hadeishi@husc4.UUCP (mitsuharu hadeishi) writes:
[Lots of ambiguous, untestable theorizing deleted from original posting]
>	However, it may be that very subtle forms of telepathy (below
>the threshold of consciousness) can be going on all the time without
>our being aware of it.  If this phenomenon is subtle enough, we
>may not be able to distinguish it from the noise (due to the selective
>nature of our consciousness which acts as a kind of squelch.)

Alternatively, we may invent it by selectively looking at the noise.
Whatever you mean by noise.  And telepathy.

>	Now for the punch line:  I've had more than a few unambiguous
>experiences of communication with my girlfriend (my love) which could
>be described as "telepathic."

Your research is unscientific.  You might protest that scientific reasoning
is only a Western bias, so I'll explain myself.  By unscientific I mean
inconclusive, imprecise, uncontrolled, and unconvincing.

>For example, a few weeks ago I called
>her, but she wasn't home, so I left a message.  A couple hours later
>I suddenly had a burst of ecstasy...I thought to myself,
>"maybe she's just got home and got my message."...
>
>	That not good enough for you?  How about the time we had
>the same dream, but she was in San Diego and I was in LA?

It's very easy to take all of the experiences in your life, select the
coincidences, and then declare that they are more than coincidences.  It's also
easy to edit your own memory to have it fit your preconceived notions of the
world.  Recollections of dreams and feeling are especially easy to change.

Or to put it more bluntly, I had my own experiment recently:  I ran a random
number generator for a long time.  Here is a sample of the results:

11011100111010...
^^ ^^^  ^^^ ^

I discovered an *amazing* coincidence, nay it was more than coincidence.  ALL
of the digits above the arrows are 1's!  Given that there are ten ones, the
odds of that are 1024 to 1!

>	Yes, I am a senior in physics (a pretty good physics student,
>too, in my opinion :-), and I realize that there is no plausible
>mechanism that could have transmitted this kind of information.

Boy, you must be pretty smart.

If you feel that there is no plausible mechanism, or in other words, no
plausible explanation (for a mechanism is no more than that), then your
theories are inherently implausible.

What you really mean is that there is no *known* mechanism for what you
describe.  In that case, the phenomenon you have discovered would be the
biggest enigma in all of physics.  It should be presented as the great
counterexample in all physics courses.  Other paradoxes in physics are
presented in this fashion, so why not yours?  Maybe there is something wrong
with your experiments...

>Excuse the psychobabble.

I'm sorry, but I can't.  Psychobabble, just like any other sort of babble, is
ultimately inexcusable.  It doesn't belong in net.physics, and it doesn't
belong in the mouth (or at the fingers) of a "pretty good physics student".
gregregreg