Imagine, if you will, that I am a genuine telepath of the Charles Xavier type: I can read and cast thoughts over a limited distance, as well as probing another person’s memories. My brain’s obviously better than average, so no non-telepath can prevent me from using my power, any more than the average unarmed couch potato can stop David Hayes from skipping to the front of the line at the DMV if he feels like it. For practical purposes, I am constrained in the use of my telepathy mostly by my personal ethics.
Now let’s say I decide to prove that to a pair of skeptics, Bruce & Terry, who know and trust one another The three of us gather in a small room of their choosing, which they may check in any way they please for surveillance devices. Bruce & Terry bring three pens and three pads of paper with them, which they have acquired themselves. After searching me for any sort of communication device they position me so that I cannot see them. Once they are satisfied that I cannot peek, they each take a pad and pen and write a message to the other. I have the third pad, and using my telepathy I read their thoughts so that I can copy what they have written. We all compare our pads, and my copy matches theirs. We repeat this enough times and with enough variation and rigor (say, adding blindfolds, moving to different locations, etc) to convince them of my bona fides.
So I’m a genuine telepath. That’s verified. Does that say anything about the existence of souls, the afterlife, God, or gods? Why or why not?
I should have included in the OP proofs for other phenomena, such as precognition, post-cognition, and clairvoyance.
I can’t think of a test for post-cognition I find convincing, though. The nearest I can come to is that, if a person claimed to be both precognitive and postcognitive, and proved the former with sufficient rigor, I’d be inclined to believe the latter claim.
I also should have included proof of the existence of ghosts, but I have even more trouble thinking of a convincing proof of that, especially once one grants the existence of telepaths as described in the OP.
Czarcasm, care you to explain your position? (Not that I disagree with it; I just want to hear your thoughts.)
Agreed. In some ways it makes the existence of other supernatural phenomenon even less probable, since it effectively means you possess the capability to forge evidence that might otherwise be perceived as being evidence of those phenomenon.
Right. Telepathy I could imagine having some kind of material explanation. Pre-cognition and clairvoyance less so. Ghosts (however demonstrated) would at least force open the possibility of some kind of continued extra-physical existence, though I don’t know if you’d get all the way to God from there.
One incredible breakthrough does not make valid all other incredible claims. It would be like saying that if I were able to invent a perpetual motion device, we must now accept that faster-than-light travel is possible.
I’m not sure that’s true. Telepathy can obviously be used to fake post-cognition, but I’m sure tests for precognition and clairvoyance could be constructed with sufficient rigor to rule out telepathy. Alternatively, telepathy might be a special case of clairvoyance.
I dunno. How dependent is the theory of relativity on the validity of the laws of thermodynamics?
(Not a rhetorical question, by the way. Somebody hit the Chronos signal.)
Telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, clairvoyance - none of those prove supernatural entities exist, or even suggest that they do except in that they prove there are to-date unknown types or fields of energy that is usable to transmit/recieve these signals that interact with your mind and/or matter, and every new energy field must be inspected to see if there’s a diety or the like cowering hidden under the carpet.
A proper medium would be the way to go in proving the existence of supernatural entities. Preferably they’d be able to summon up any deceased person’s spirit at will, to appear visibly to all observers and interact clearly enough to be definitively recognized and impart unlimited verifiable private information. Then, if these spirits describe an afterlife with a God (or if the medium can summon God), then that would be fairly definitive evidence that God exists too.
Well, that’s why I specified “demonstration of the paranormal.” Though I kinda think precognition, violating causality as it does, would be more supernatural than telepathy.
I think the bolded qualification is unreasonable. Even if we stipulate that it’s possible that some consciousnesses survive physical death, that doesn’t mean that all do, or that all are subject to the medium’s will. I mean, some spirits might hear the summons and say “Screw that–I’m watching Natalie Portman shower right now.”
I’ve posted this link before, but the proof of the existence of ghosts is this video. The ghostly figure that shows up around the 30-second mark is plain as day, and there is NO WAY this is CGI or camera trickery.
Hm… I know of no particular relationship between relativity and the Second Law, but we’re talking about the First Law, here. By Noether’s Theorem, conservation of energy is equivalent to the laws of physics being invariant in time (even if different conditions apply at different times, the same laws describe those conditions). While a time variance of the laws of physics can be consistent with a lack of preferred reference frames, it’d certainly call that into doubt, and if you have a preferred reference frame, then relativity goes out the window.
Back to the OP, I’d say that once we’ve established the existence of telepathy, then the logical next step is to investigate the mechanism of it. Such investigation might or might not lead to conclusions about other paranormal or supernatural phenomena.
No, because you’ve proven you at best have a mind reading ability, but even a mind reading ability can have a natural explanation. Maybe you just have an electrical field sensing organ, like a fish. Maybe yours is just a really advanced version that can feel neurological signals.
Further let’s be really generous though. Let’s say it’s completely eithoric. Well you can control it, and it has certain repeatable affects. Therefore it obeys certain rules. Those rules can be tested through experiment, and become another field of natural science. For example in X-men Xavier built a giant computer to amplify his mental powers. If his powers didn’t follow natural laws he wouldn’t have been able to do that.
Take modern technology. We’ve built an honest to god electric oracle (the internet), we can fly, we can see sights on mars, and travel 80mph, we have machines that heat food without fire. I can talk to anyone, including strangers all over the world. I can have an orchestra in my pocket.
In short we live as wizards in a super natural world, except we don’t. All technology runs on natural laws. Discovering a new phenomenon such as telepathy would be very exciting, but even if existing known natural law was insufficient to explain it it’d merely be indicative of unexplored natural law.