Creative open-ended uses for telepathy

[gooddragon1]

Cracked.com ran an article (http://www.cracked.com/article_17185_7-awesome-super-powers-ruined-by-science.html) about how telepathy would have drawbacks (#4). I say that's only if it's poorly worded. I also don't like how in 3.5 D&D so many things have immunity to mind-affecting effects when telepathy is my favorite psionic discipline.

If you have absolutely incredible telepathy you can do a very wide assortment of things.

For example (and starters), there was a list of 27 practical superpowers made with photo manipulation that people wanted to have (also on cracked.com (http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_821_the-27-most-practical-superpowers-we-actually-want/?wa_user1=1&wa_user2=Weird+World&wa_user3=photoplasty&wa_user4=recommended)), and 25/27 of them could be filled as follows...

27: Nope

26: Cells that make up living things have very very limited intelligences. Generally they don't do anything harmful to what they are a part of. However, you could make the cells in the mosquitoes (or even just their brains) move apart. And you'd know exactly where the mosquitoes are. All bugs in fact.

25: Just make people not want to come near you while you're in the bathroom. Cruel considering that they may need to go more than you do.

24: Just control the squirrels...

23: This requires telepathy on perhaps a global scale. Search the thoughts of everyone (really powerful telepathy could allow processing and archiving like a computer and/or database that doesn't involve conscious effort on your part) for the guy who typed that message at that time. Have them punch themselves in the face and tattoo those words on their face.

22: There's no problem officer. Also, if you could control sentience/things that recieve instructions then you could even "hack" into their database and retroactively remove stuff.

21: You could mess with people's memory or senses and make them think it really smells like that.

20: Find someone who is an expert in the subject. Download it directly from them.

19: You'll know there's a traffic jam before you even leave your house and which route to take to avoid it. Or your boss will be very understanding, so understanding they might give you a raise if you feel like being evil. If you really want to get diabolical... Hey everybody! I'm an emergency vehicle with my flashers and sirens on... Why no Mr. Officer, I was not impersonating an emergency vehicle. Move along please.

18: Search your own memory for where you put it. Search everyone elses memory. Or just use the ability to convey instructions to your TV via telepathy and forget the remote. But let's say it's car keys. Some bugs might have seen them (if you didn't execute every single one within a 3 block radius). Admittedly there's cases where you just couldn't find something.

17: Download tips and tricks from people who do have a quick wit. Or speed up your ability to think and think of something. Or make them think you're witty. Whatever works.

16: Cruel. You could cause their body to expel any gas it has. Or you could make people think they did.

15: Just scan their memory for their name.

14: Your boss doesn't even mind. Call in sick. Call in CEO for the day. It's all the same. Force the time in machine's sentience to accept your desired check in time if you really want. The database will confirm it.

13: You could convince yourself you don't need to eat as much by reducing hunger pains and desires. Vice versa for the other guy. Manipulating cells is possible I guess. With a very powerful telepathic "central processing unit (computer/cpu)" you could even figure out the desired result to cure diseases (by eradicating them/manipulating them) and reverse your own aging. If your cpu has infinite memory then the effect of immortality messing with your perception of time as mentioned in the one article by cracked about superpowers that suck isn't a problem

12: If you use your telepathy to make money in honest or dishonest ways, this isn't going to be a problem.

11: Some animals and bugs have a really good idea what the weather is going to be like waaaay before you do. Why not query some of the sailors at sea? Eyewitness accounts?

10: That addiction you have displeases me. Now it displeases you too. In any number of ways that you can imagine. Like it tasting metallic for some reason. Or maybe you are no longer used to the smell. Or you now have a phobia to it.

09: Manipulate your metabolism and/or body after consulting/downloading expert opinions from every expert on the human body that exists. You can shed those pounds like nothing if you want.

08: See number 26, maybe number 25 if you don't want to kill them

07: Nope

06: Number 25, it's not actually a force field though. Don't worry about getting sick for reasons mentioned above.

05: Your Telepathic CPU can double as an unhackable connection to internet with download speeds you can't imagine.

04: They didn't see nothing (illusion). Or they don't care. Or they applaud your efforts to mine nose gold for the townspeople. Meh.

03: You've got money. This isn't a problem.

02: You can directly get sound information from whatever you wanted anyways. You could transmit it too. Electrical cords... well you could copy someone's intelligence and/or create a subconscious splinter of yourself that is completely obedient to you with vast amounts of intelligence that can solve such tangled issues with little to no conscious effort on your part and you can shut off that part when you don't need it.

01: No, what I said was amazing, don't you agree? Or fine, you don't remember I said that. I said nothing or something else.

What other interesting uses of telepathy... come to mind? (I like puns too)

[Razade]

Like all of Cracked's super power posts they're predicated on them following the rules of our universe even though they couldn't in the first place. That's always bugged me.

[gooddragon1]

Like all of Cracked's super power posts they're predicated on them following the rules of our universe even though they couldn't in the first place. That's always bugged me.

Some things like super strength and super speed maybe unless you have required secondary powers. For telepathy and super-senses I felt made some assumptions about how things would be spelled out. I just like telepathy more.

[Hopeless]

Seriously?

People stop thinking what you can do with FULL access to a superpower think what you can do with that power manifesting in a single specific talent!

Telepathy: You can understand any spoken language and even be understood when talking to someone who doesn't speak your native language.
True you're hopeless with the written form so Skype works wonders but you're effectively the Universal Translator for anything that can think, contrary to what you're thinking if a machine sentience can converse verbally even if only in binary so can you if its by speaking aloud.
I'm wondering how people react if you're seen talking to squirrels who promptly demonstrate you're really ought to close your curtains if you want a bit of privacy whilst any lifeform is hanging outside that window...
On the bad side would this mean you become a vegetarian if you realise they're actually intelligent meaning eating them makes you a cannibal!
God help you if you can talk to plants!!!:smalleek:

Super Strength: Try Gravity Control in addition to being able to levitate and even fly they can effect any object they touch like that airplane but it alters their weight and size so they can hold it aloft because they're effecting the entire plane not just where they're touching.
Heck limiting that power to just touch can be applied to their body such that bullets, explosions maybe can be repelled but would you want this power to be on all the time?
There was that friend of the Blob whose untouchable ability was boosted so far that he died unable to eat, drink I'm assuming he could breath... back then the X Men came up with some interesting ideas!

Psychic Internet: We've been around a lot longer than the internet and by virtue of the link between everyone such that they could by touch or even looking at someone's bio-electric aura could be used by them to peruse the planetary psychic internet to locate and even listen/look and other senses so they could scan a dead body to discover their last moments (and possibly scream themselves silly if they experience it themselves!) just imagine a psychic trying to locate a missing child, this could locate that child although whether you'd be limited to scanning the living only or touching something that allows you to access something closer to either your target or subject allowing you access sort of if what you're looking for can only be located or accessed from say a maximum security mainframe located at the heart of say the Pentagon or the CIA and deliberately secured to mean you have to pull a Tom Cruise just to get to the console...

And here I was imagining you would have to spend an awful amount of time just searching for the right archive lord it would probably be like the new Sherlock's mind palace except its the worlds largest Akashic Record and the library staff are stubborn a^s$ho&es!

[factotum]

If you want a good example of a fictional telepath, try reading the Telzey Amberdon books by James H. Schmitz--the title character is a teenage girl who just happens to be one of the most powerful telepaths around. There are plenty of creative ways to solve problems with telepathy without having to twist it into magic, super-strength or whatever.

[TheThan]

How is being able to read other peoples’ thoughts and project your own into their head not powerful? Especially if you can do that to multiple people and have nearly unlimited range. There is nothing stopping you from taking over the world; becoming rich (I mean billionaire level at least); forcing anyone to fall in love with and never; ever being wrong. That’s just the tip of the iceberg; I mean you can do anything and no-one can stop you because nobody will know you are the one manipulating them and doing whatever you want.

[Frozen_Feet]

Like all of Cracked's super power posts they're predicated on them following the rules of our universe even though they couldn't in the first place. That's always bugged me.

The whole point of threads like that is to examine all the rules of physics which would need to be broken to get an effect people visualize. Many stories about supernatural powers typically addresses most or all of those.

---

Anyways, I play a telepath right now and I'm amused people think it doubles as universal translator. It shouldn't, not by default - because people form thoughts in their native languages. If you don't understand the language, why'd you understand the thought?

Sure, some things like sensory data and raw emotional state might be able to be transferred regardless, but those are different types of telepathy and divorced from peering into someone's conscious mind.

It also runs into problems in interspecies communication. If you think linguistic barriers were bad, how about trying to understand data from a being with different neurology and potentially senses you do not have.

In short, telepathy isn't just one power, it's a huge collection of primary and secondary powers even in its simplest forms.

The funnier thing is that we are actually getting close to implementing many forms of it. Experiments with thought-controlled machines have already been done. Ditto for copying brain activity from one person and simulating it in another, effectively swapping dreams. Installing a miniature radio device in a person's ear or eye is technically possible and allows for two way speechless communication. Etc.

[ben-zayb]

It shouldn't, not by default - because people form thoughts in their native languages. If you don't understand the language, why'd you understand the thought?
Source? I mean, does that mean any person who's yet to learn a language has no thoughts at all to form?

[Tvtyrant]

Source? I mean, does that mean any person who's yet to learn a language has no thoughts at all to form?

Yeah, this. Language certainly shapes thinking, but it should not be conflated. Especially if you look into people who claim they don't think in words.

[Frozen_Feet]

Source? I mean, does that mean any person who's yet to learn a language has no thoughts at all to form?

Think of what sort of people don't have a language. It's basically toddlers and feral children. Conscious thought is highly limited in both and abstract thinking even more so.

So it's not that you have no thoughts before learning a language, but you are incapable of forming and comprehending certain kinds of thought before it.

It's fairly easy to demonstrate it by yourself. Think about how you think. Are you claiming your "inner voice" doesn't have a language?

Now, it's possible to think in terms of images or sounds other than speech, but these aren't universally decipherable either. They are, in a sense, their own languages.

There are primitive sorts of sentience, such as emotions, present from birth. (Or, possibly, from the start of brain activity.) But many such forms are intuitive and automatic rather than conscious thought. Telepathy within a species might be able to decipher these fairly easily - indeed, humans already have mechanisms, such as mirror cells, to do this. It's how neurotypical people know how other people feel.

[Douglas]

Source? I mean, does that mean any person who's yet to learn a language has no thoughts at all to form?
I imagine it varies from person to person, but my personal experience supports this strongly. I can think in images and such if I make a specific effort to do so or if I'm trying to imagine something, but the overwhelming majority of the time my conscious thoughts are in the form of a series of words, in my native language - English.

If I'm thinking about kicking a ball and someone reads my mind, they're much more likely to get the literal words "I'm going to kick that ball" than an image of me kicking the ball. That information would not be useful to someone who doesn't know English.

On a related note, I've heard that an unofficial definition of fluency in a foreign language is the ability to think in that language, so you don't need to translate between your thoughts and what you say or hear.

[Tvtyrant]

Have you ever had a really complicated thought you could not find the words to explain? Or know the meaning of an idea but forget the name? The words are pretty clearly place markers for you actual thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

[Spacewolf]

Have you ever had a really complicated thought you could not find the words to explain? Or know the meaning of an idea but forget the name? The words are pretty clearly place markers for you actual thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

I think saying that you think only in Language is obviously silly but saying you don't think in your own language is just as silly. To be honest I think it's silly to even try and describe thoughts in a written medium as even the simplest of thoughts would take pages of explanation.

So yea using telepathy as a true translator is not possible but it would aid in communication with someone/thing that does not speak the same language so long as the thing in question had a similar biology. Hunger, Pain, Sleepy, Scared and other simple sates like that would be reasonably easy to pass along the link. While any complex thoughts would be a crapshoot.

[McStabbington]

Have you ever had a really complicated thought you could not find the words to explain? Or know the meaning of an idea but forget the name? The words are pretty clearly place markers for you actual thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

No, words and mental concepts are not identical. Nevertheless, the relationship between the linguistic word and the referent concept is very tight, and deeply shaped by the words that are used in a society. It's a given in the philosophy of language that there is no such thing as your own private language. You have to have a society around you to build the concepts into your mind.

If you guys are interested, I'd wikipedia some foundational characters in the philosophy of language; it's actually a really fascinating subset of contemporary philosophy. Much of the most current work is built on three philosophers: Gottleb Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Tarski. Tarski especially has done a huge amount of work on translation conditions between two languages.

[Tvtyrant]

No, words and mental concepts are not identical. Nevertheless, the relationship between the linguistic word and the referent concept is very tight, and deeply shaped by the words that are used in a society. It's a given in the philosophy of language that there is no such thing as your own private language. You have to have a society around you to build the concepts into your mind.

If you guys are interested, I'd wikipedia some foundational characters in the philosophy of language; it's actually a really fascinating subset of contemporary philosophy. Much of the most current work is built on three philosophers: Gottleb Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Tarski. Tarski especially has done a huge amount of work on translation conditions between two languages.

Then where do the words come from I wonder. How do people have ideas that cannot currently be described? How can dolphins raised by humans clearly work through a problem logically? Hell, how do Octopi think their way through problems, since they are solitary and do not have a community to speak to?

Do languages and societies make thinking clearer and easier? I will certainly grant that. But thinking is a biological strategy, and it evolved independently of vocal chords.

[Rodin]

Then where do the words come from I wonder. How do people have ideas that cannot currently be described? How can dolphins raised by humans clearly work through a problem logically? Hell, how do Octopi think their way through problems, since they are solitary and do not have a community to speak to?

Do languages and societies make thinking clearer and easier? I will certainly grant that. But thinking is a biological strategy, and it evolved independently of vocal chords.

Why does logical thinking require words? :smallconfused:

If you had no words, you would have the concept of what you wanted to do, and a telepath could presumably read that. If you did have a language, you might express what you want to do in words, and a telepath would have to understand the language.

It's also possible that it would be 50/50. If I wanted to kick a ball, the telepath would be able to see that I wanted to kick a ball, and language wouldn't be required. However, if I was thinking up an elaborate lie to tell or about a conversation I was about to have, it would be in my native language and thus the telepath would need to know said language.

For conversation with the telepath, it might be less than useful if we're talking in a second language - the telepath would be getting the gibberish that is me thinking, along with whatever I intend to say in their language as I mentally try to translate it. It wouldn't get whether I was planning to say a lie, as that all happens in my language.

The telepath would know if I was planning to pull a gun on them at the moment I decided to pull a gun on them. They wouldn't know I was thinking "If this guy doesn't shut up, I'm going to pull a gun on them". That's decidedly less useful, as they would only have a few seconds to react and someone who is good a reading body language would be able to do very nearly as good.

[Frozen_Feet]

1) Then where do the words come from I wonder. 2) How do people have ideas that cannot currently be described? 3) How can dolphins raised by humans clearly work through a problem logically? 4) Hell, how do Octopi think their way through problems, since they are solitary and do not have a community to speak to?

You are asking a lot of only tangentially related things. In order:

1) Basic structure for language and speech is genetic, as speech is homologous to birdsong. Specific sounds become words through association. Human points at rock and says "rock", other human looks at rock and hears "rock", repeat untill both agree the sound "rock" matches to that physical object. For little children, this process is automatic and intuitive and even unconscious. As a human grows, brain structure changes and excess neural connections are pared down, causing the learning of new languages to slow down.

2) a good starting point for this is examination of words for colors. A healthy human has visual cells for three different types of light (red, green, blue), allowing for identification of a vast spectrum of colors. Yet, no language has words for all of them. Indeed, there are languages which don't have words for even red, green and blue.

The color words found in all languages are "black" and "white", which double as synonyms for "dark" and "light". This because day-night cycle is extremely obvious and of vital importance to humans.

If a language has three color words, the third one is "red". This because blood is red, as are many edible berries and fruits. The oldest words for "red" tend to be synonymous with "blood".

If a language has four color words, the fourth is either green or yellow, because these are common colors in plants. If five colour words, it has words for both yellow and green.

If a language has six words, the sixth is blue. Typically, oldest forms of these words are synonymous with the sky.

After this, it's a crapshoot which color is named next, but the steps taken follow the same pattern: humans give name to some concrete, easily observable thing first, then start using that word of things which are similar to it in some key aspect, and eventually isolate a word for the aspect itself. Formation of thoughts and language both go from concrete to abstract and from specific to general.

If a human encounters or experiences a thing for which they have no specific word, they will first try to generalize a word from something similar. (Analogues and metaphors, basically.) If a human doesn't have that, the thought becomes incommunicable. In case of sufficiently abstract thoughts (such as advanced math), a person will never think of them unless they have already learned a language of description which allows for them, and such thoughts are both incommunicable and incomprehensible to people without them.

3) Dolphins are capable of language and those in captivity have usually been specifically taught bits and pieces of human vocal and sign language. It is a pretty clear trend in the animal kingdom that highly social nature and capacity for communication correlate strongly with problem solving ability.

So dolphins aren't a counter-argument to anything I've said. They follow the same rules as humans.

4) Octopi are sufficiently inhuman that we don't know for sure yet. It has been proposed that since each tentacle has its own neural cluster, apparent intelligence of them is similar in nature to "swarm intelligence" of certain hive insects. That is, in some conditions a lot of weakly intelligent units will act more logically than a single strongly intelligent one.


Do languages and societies make thinking clearer and easier? I will certainly grant that. But thinking is a biological strategy, and it evolved independently of vocal chords.
Wrong. In humans, the two go hand-in-hand. Vocal chords are consciously controlled, requiring a complex combination of genetics and neural systems to work. A single malfunctioning gene (FOX2P) will render a person unable to form legible sentences. Genetic impediments in speech formation often set back intellectual development, and genetic impediments in intellectual ability always set back linguistic development.

[McStabbington]

Wrong. In humans, the two go hand-in-hand. Vocal chords are consciously controlled, requiring a complex combination of genetics and neural systems to work. A single malfunctioning gene (FOX2P) will render a person unable to form legible sentences. Genetic impediments in speech formation often set back intellectual development, and genetic impediments in intellectual ability always set back linguistic development.

To add another example of this effect in humans: to refer back to feral children, one of the most interesting things about them is that whether they are ultimately able to acclimate to human society depends greatly on when they are, for lack of a better term, reintroduced to human society. The over/under seems to be right about age seven: if they are captured and reintroduced to human society before age seven, they ultimately tend to pick up a relatively normal human capacity for language; possibly on the low side, but not markedly so. If they stay out in the wilds beyond age seven, they never develop human language to any degree beyond what you might see from a reasonably intelligent dog: they have a capacity for understanding maybe 100-250 words at maximum, and everything else is at most an understanding of certain tones of voice. But they never develop anything approaching a normal human capacity for speech, and with it, they never develop any concept of complex or abstract ideas like mathematics or symbolic logic. Even the most rudimentary form of if-then conditional logic is almost completely past their comprehension. In either case, the effect is the same: by limiting their familiarity with language to a certain point, even a normal human brain can be limited in its capacity to essentially the abilities of a higher or complex-social animal. The effect you see from genetic limitation is also seen if you limit individuals culturally.