captainjack23
Cosmic Mongoose
Well ?
Psionics: Real or reasonable ?
- Thread starter captainjack23
- Start date
In my (current) view: Neither real nor reasonable. 
However, I admit that I may well be wrong concerning empathy, telepa-
thy, remote viewing and similar abilities that would probably not require a
lot of energy.
As for abilities that would require lots of energy (telekinesis, teleporta-
tion, pyrokinesis ...), the human brain would be unable to produce that
energy, and I do not see any way how it could "tap" the necessary ener-
gy from another source and control it.
However, I admit that I may well be wrong concerning empathy, telepa-
thy, remote viewing and similar abilities that would probably not require a
lot of energy.
As for abilities that would require lots of energy (telekinesis, teleporta-
tion, pyrokinesis ...), the human brain would be unable to produce that
energy, and I do not see any way how it could "tap" the necessary ener-
gy from another source and control it.
IanBruntlett
Emperor Mongoose
I introduced Psionics to MTU as an experiment. So far its been OK but its too early these days to decide if they're a good idea or not.
captainjack23
Cosmic Mongoose
rust said:In my (current) view: Neither real nor reasonable.
However, I admit that I may well be wrong concerning empathy, telepa-
thy, remote viewing and similar abilities that would probably not require a
lot of energy.
As for abilities that would require lots of energy (telekinesis, teleporta-
tion, pyrokinesis ...), the human brain would be unable to produce that
energy, and I do not see any way how it could "tap" the necessary ener-
gy from another source and control it.
In my current TU, real and exceedingly rare -and the characters intentionally know very little of it.
Oddly enough, I don't have as much trouble with the idea that one can act as, or create a conduit for some kind of energy. What bugs me about ESP is the communication problem - it looks like brains "think" by activating very individually unique nets of neurons between relevent portions of the brain . So its hard to see how that could be interpreted by an outside source without a long, and possibly impossible effort at decrypting and analyzing - and would require cooperaation ("Oh Kay. Now....think Blue. Now, think of a red shoe. Okay got the pattern. maybe"), and would only apply to one other person.
Yes, indeed. While feelings may be "culture and language independent",captainjack23 said:
and therefore comparatively easy to "decipher" (with the basic non-psio-
nic ability probably even hardwired in our genes), thoughts would most
probably be "culture and language dependent", at least when it comes
to concepts beyond simple mathematics.
Frankly, I have serious problems to understand most of the meaning -
and can not at all "read between the lines" - of a simple Chinese or Hopi
text that has been translated into German, so to me the idea to under-
stand what the authors were thinking in their own language is less than
convincing.
And this is just a "surface problem", the "neurobiological" problems you
described would make it even much more difficult ...
captainjack23
Cosmic Mongoose
AndrewW said:
Hadn't even gotten there. Wonder what reading a Vargr mind is like...
Zhodani spy: "I sense....walkies. Walkies ? WALKIES !!!! YES !!!! " (runs around the room with his tongue out).......
Interestingly, since varger are terran animals at base, they might be the easiest of aliens to communicate with -given that their brains are biochemically familiar, at least.
rust said:
While that is an opinion I myself have shared, I do recall that actual experiments were done which showed similar brain responses for the meaning of words - regardless of language and manner conveyed (audio or visual).
When one thinks in different languages say of a tree - the internal concept is the same irregardless of the actual word (when one is not simply translating, but rather proficient in thinking in multiple languages). And there are specific areas of the brain identified with language processing separate from cognition (as evidenced by clinical cases of physical damage) .
So from the context of mind reading - language may not factor into it (even when 'thinking' in a native tongue we are actually intrinsically thinking in an internal representation independent of language).
Of course, I wholly concur that cultural differences should pose an interpretation issue.
As for psionics in Traveller - I have never gotten on board with it. For NPCs it is ok - especially if some underlying parlor trick 'could' account for the effects.
When reading Hard Sci-Fi, I prefer an author avoid psionics because I consider it to fantastic. How does this differ from say FTL travel. Well, FTL is an extension of the RW Theory which says that C is a limit, but only in so far as the theory is general and not a specific case of some more general theory. Likewise anti-gravity. We have examples of exceptions in both cases from a sensory perspective (magnetic levitation; quasars emitting >C) which are wrong in the truly scientific sense.
Psionics extends nothing. It is independent of RW experience (at least which is incontrovertible). The characteristics of Gravity and the light limit can and have been 'proven' by numerous repeatable experiments. This is not to say that they hold true in all cases (hence the believability that their currently known limits can be exceeded).
As for aliens - well just look at the earth's oceans. Originally, all known life was carbon based. Scientists and writers speculated about other bases - and in at least two cases were correct decades before non-carbon based life was discovered. (Sulfur and silicon based species have been discovered). And life at the bottom of the ocean lives in extreme pressures and temperatures. Alien lifeforms are again just an extension of what we know in the RW to exist today.
For me, this means Jump Drives (excepting the silly OTU explantaion), Gravitics, and Aliens are all Hard Sci-Fi.
Psions extends from nothing we know of in the RW (as aspects of humans or other species). Thus, for me it is not Hard Sci-Fi, but rather Fantasy (nothing wrong with that, I like both genres, but for Traveller I minimize the Fantasy).
captainjack23
Cosmic Mongoose
Loz said:
Oh, it works fine -and as you point out, if Niven et al. can pull it off, it's good and hard SF - I just think that it's way more on the fiction side of Science; but one that seems to work fine. And I'm going to buy the book, even as I go on in other threads about "inter-neural network communication protocol incompatabilities".
Lets hear an AY-MEN from the muties in the BACK ! Yeah, middenface, I'm lookin at you ! Gimmie a HELL yea-as !
Looks like this is a more toolkit/campaign resource oriented supplement, which is great as the non OTU supplemets are starting to appear.
I cannot wait for the Strontium Dog suppliment. Do it Now, Now, Now !
...and , hope of hopes, surely you can't have managed to bag a license for Luther Arkwright -could you have ?
BP said:
I guess you're referring to the subterranean bacterial ecosystem (lithotrophs - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithotroph ) that digests rocks, and to the H2S-using microbial life around hydrothermal vents? If so, they're not really silicon or sulphur-based - they just use it for energy. They're all still carbon-based though.
I guess that assessment depends on whether or not one believes that there's something to things like telepathy, remote viewing, astral projection, out of body experiences, and ghosts.
EDG said:
Arg - there I go espousing some tripe I heard (or misheard) on TV or in some popular media - Thanks!The ones I was thinking of are not microbial though (a tube like plant and a crab) - but they are carbon-based - they just used sulfur and silicon for energy (chemical vs. radiant type thing) - making them candidates for life on non-oxygen/sunlight lacking planets (moons).
EDG said:
No - that assessment is based on no incontrovertible, repeatable experiments based on scientific method that I have heard of.
Doesn't mean I don't believe in these things - they certainly have been 'observed' by people. But that is no different from me observing a magician levitating a body. Though I couldn't tell you how its done, this doesn't mean I believe in magic levitation. It wouldn't be hard to take the magician off stage and ask him to levitate a human on the street. Doesn't mean there is no such thing a humans levitating humans - but it certainly challenges my suspension of disbelief.
BP said:
IIRC The tubeworms and the crustaceans are in a symbiotic relationship with H2S- or CH4-processing microbes in their innards. The chemotrophic (if that's the right word) microbes give their hosts energy in the chemical rich environment, and the hosts protect the microbes. But the hosts themselves can't process H2S or CH4 on their own.
EDG said:
That makes sense (after I typed it I thought crabs sounded strange and I must be imagining the whole darn thing...). There are microbes on land that do similar processes (not the symbiotic thing though to my knowledge). Little less exotic now
Now don't go bursting my bubble on the radiation shielded DNA in microbes that inhabit nuclear reactors
alex_greene
Guest
I suspect that what some correspondents here fear is the thought that telepathy doesn't belong in the same category as, say, FTL travel.
And yet Dune posited the concept of the Spice Melange, and brought up prophecies and the Kvisatz Haderach (which is actually a term from Hebrew mysticism); the Humanx Commonwealth of Alan Dean Foster has a young boy with a telepathic minidrag "familiar;" and Star Trek, Doctor Who and Babylon 5 have often featured telepaths and telepathy in their stories - indeed, telepaths turned out to be crucial in the Shadow War, and The Doctor has a telepathic relationship with his TARDIS. Not to forget the Torchwood episode "Greeks Bearing Gifts," the crux of which was a McGuffin which enabled telepathic intrusion into peoples' heads.
Then of course, in the literary sphere, Larry Niven's characters frequently encountered psionics or were psionics; and Dan Simmons' "The Hollow Man" is a classic SF tale of telepathy and tragedy.
It's only the most conservative SF fan who fails to heed Sir Arthur C Clarke's Second Law, "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
What we have a responsibility to do, as Traveller Referees, is to ensure that a Psionic phenomenon is understandable and consistent: if a strange ion cloud through which the ship flies has the effect of temporarily rendering everyone aboard able to read the thoughts of people they encounter, then any other ship passing through that cloud has the same chance of that phenomenon occurring. If the Referee gives some medical "explanation" of the unknown phenomenon's previously undiscovered effect on the synapses of a specific region of the human brain, e.g. the temporal lobe, you have a rationale for a thing that modern science considers as physically impossible as developing a machine to defy gravity or to travel faster than the speed of light.
It's not something "fantastic;" it becomes something for which we have, in the real world, no explanation with the current science that we know.
Perhaps a century from now, scientists may discover gravitics, FTL travel or the principles behind telekinesis in such a way as to be reproducible in a laboratory and, some time later, accessible to the general public: but for right now, the universe of Traveller looks to be as physically possible as the worlds of "En L'An 2000" a century ago, with smartly-dressed gentlemen in period frockcoats and top hats pedalling flying autogyro / bicycle hybrids, or the world of Hugo Gernsbach with its miles-high Art Deco towers with superfluous coaxial flanges, aircars and people wearing Son of Ether jumpsuits and living off food pills; or, indeed, the world of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, where for a small price, a cyberpunk can implant a computer inside their heads that wire up their sensorium to the Internet.
And yet Dune posited the concept of the Spice Melange, and brought up prophecies and the Kvisatz Haderach (which is actually a term from Hebrew mysticism); the Humanx Commonwealth of Alan Dean Foster has a young boy with a telepathic minidrag "familiar;" and Star Trek, Doctor Who and Babylon 5 have often featured telepaths and telepathy in their stories - indeed, telepaths turned out to be crucial in the Shadow War, and The Doctor has a telepathic relationship with his TARDIS. Not to forget the Torchwood episode "Greeks Bearing Gifts," the crux of which was a McGuffin which enabled telepathic intrusion into peoples' heads.
Then of course, in the literary sphere, Larry Niven's characters frequently encountered psionics or were psionics; and Dan Simmons' "The Hollow Man" is a classic SF tale of telepathy and tragedy.
It's only the most conservative SF fan who fails to heed Sir Arthur C Clarke's Second Law, "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
What we have a responsibility to do, as Traveller Referees, is to ensure that a Psionic phenomenon is understandable and consistent: if a strange ion cloud through which the ship flies has the effect of temporarily rendering everyone aboard able to read the thoughts of people they encounter, then any other ship passing through that cloud has the same chance of that phenomenon occurring. If the Referee gives some medical "explanation" of the unknown phenomenon's previously undiscovered effect on the synapses of a specific region of the human brain, e.g. the temporal lobe, you have a rationale for a thing that modern science considers as physically impossible as developing a machine to defy gravity or to travel faster than the speed of light.
It's not something "fantastic;" it becomes something for which we have, in the real world, no explanation with the current science that we know.
Perhaps a century from now, scientists may discover gravitics, FTL travel or the principles behind telekinesis in such a way as to be reproducible in a laboratory and, some time later, accessible to the general public: but for right now, the universe of Traveller looks to be as physically possible as the worlds of "En L'An 2000" a century ago, with smartly-dressed gentlemen in period frockcoats and top hats pedalling flying autogyro / bicycle hybrids, or the world of Hugo Gernsbach with its miles-high Art Deco towers with superfluous coaxial flanges, aircars and people wearing Son of Ether jumpsuits and living off food pills; or, indeed, the world of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, where for a small price, a cyberpunk can implant a computer inside their heads that wire up their sensorium to the Internet.
alex_greene
Guest
Very true. I couldn't even begin to cover the range of hard SF authors who have included telepathy or other psionic phenomena in their books.
Where gravitics, say, or FTL can expand the scale of a setting to one of spaceship economies, trade tables, profit and loss, mass aerial or space combats, warfare and the purchase of copious miniatures and taking people out of the equation in favour of wargaming or tradegaming, psionics reduces things to a human level and brings it all back to roleplaying.
My point, I guess, being that it is harder for someone to keep an open mind about the possibility of reliable psionics than it is for them to accept the idea of FTL or gravitics - something else for which science currently has no answer, and so therefore considers impossible.
Myself, I keep an open mind about every possibility - particularly when the result is an exciting and memorable Traveller game. I like psionics in Traveller. It adds an exotic aspect to life in the TU, and reminds the players - and the characters - that the most alien character in the universe might be the human sitting right beside you.
Where gravitics, say, or FTL can expand the scale of a setting to one of spaceship economies, trade tables, profit and loss, mass aerial or space combats, warfare and the purchase of copious miniatures and taking people out of the equation in favour of wargaming or tradegaming, psionics reduces things to a human level and brings it all back to roleplaying.
My point, I guess, being that it is harder for someone to keep an open mind about the possibility of reliable psionics than it is for them to accept the idea of FTL or gravitics - something else for which science currently has no answer, and so therefore considers impossible.
Myself, I keep an open mind about every possibility - particularly when the result is an exciting and memorable Traveller game. I like psionics in Traveller. It adds an exotic aspect to life in the TU, and reminds the players - and the characters - that the most alien character in the universe might be the human sitting right beside you.
