This paper explores what an experiment of consciousness might necessitate. So far, the experimental part of science is considered to be best studied under laboratory conditions in which variables are isolated and controlled in order to study certain aspects of a phenomenon. This paper will argue that certain aspects of consciousness can only be revealed under real-world conditions, for reasons having to do with fundamental ways in which meaning is generated in consciousness. Meaning will be argued to necessitate genuine preconditions (...) in order to appear, thus laboratory conditions being inadequate to study certain aspects of consciousness. We will explore telepathic experiences that I had in relations with girls and highlight the real-world conditions that were needed for such experiences to take place, and then based on such considerations, an analysis of meaning will be undertaken. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article focuses on soils as more-than-human subjects who are both living entities and ‘lenses’ through which we may begin to rethink some of the conventional parameters of ecology, communication and even the grounding of some western philosophical traditions on which these boundaries have stood. Just as the very term ‘more-than-human’ potentially exceeds the relegation of both soilogic agents and animalities to subservient status, likewise this discussion embarks from a more-than-humanist (‘posthumanist’) position. As we attempt to interact with living systems (...) and ways of being in broader, more expansive terms, it becomes possible to catch conceptual glimpses of less hierarchical ontologies as they are understood by some more-than-western cultures. I have also drawn inspiration from artistic, theoretical and political movements in the west that have sought to interrupt the primacy of Eurocentric humanism in institutions and philosophical arenas. This presages dirty thinking. (shrink)

Taking as its jumping off point recent attempts in the sciences of the mind to facilitate direct brain-to-brain communication, this article considers the challenges such a development poses to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. This is examined initially through recourse to Husserl's description of the encounter with the other in the Cartesian Meditations, Levinas’ rival account in Totality and Infinity, and Derrida's contribution to this dialogue in the essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. All three turn around the problem of how the externality (...) and otherness that constitutes the other qua other can be presented to the I while being maintained in its very externality and otherness. The paper asks whether the prospect of fully realised telepathic communication would overcome intersubjective distance by offering a direct insight into the other's phenomenological interior, and how such a relation is to be conceived using the terms outlined in the above trio of texts. Finally, through appealing to Derrida's enigmatic essay ‘Telepathy’ and offering a close reading of his late concept of teleiopoesis we will overturn the phenomenological terms in which the discussion has so far been framed while arriving at a form of telepathy that is not reducible to the simple communication of a message between an active sender and a passive recipient, but which simultaneously maintains the distance between the actors involved. Teleiopoesis undermines the stable identity of the terms I and other and consequently the very concept of intersubjectivity is put into question. (shrink)

The widespread publicity and the consequent furor created by Dr. J. B. Rhine's experiments on telepathy and clairvoyance, have been interpreted in some quarters as a call for a thorough-going revision of the entire field of psychological thought. This revision, it is held, must be in the direction of philosophic idealism, and away from previously accepted materialistic doctrines. The present paper points out the non-verifiable nature of the entities postulated by the believers in "supernormal" phenomena. Furthermore, the interpretations of (...) contemporary science held by such individuals are not in themselves on a scientific plane. Specific errors in reasoning made by workers in the field of psychical research, are presented. In short, "psychical research... cannot turn the universe into a non-material, non-objective one, on either the basis of misinterpretations of current physical thought or on the basis of its own work.". (shrink)

the concept of telepathy, describe some of its outstanding features,, and indicate its connection with other parapsychological concepts. In the second part I consider data..

A long-standing concern (or at least a belief) about ESP, held by both skeptics and believers in the paranormal, is that if telepathy really occurs, then it might pose a threat to mental privacy. And it’s easy enough to see what motivates that view. Presumably we like to think that we enjoy privileged access to our own mental states. But if others could come to know telepathically what we’re thinking or feeling, then (among other disquieting prospects) that would mean (...) that our sins of the heart and most embarrassing or repulsive fleeting thoughts would potentially be available for public inspection. But how well-founded is that belief or concern? To get a grip on the issues, we should begin by considering the valuable distinction (perhaps first mentioned by C.D. Broad--Broad, 1953, 1962) between telepathic (or clairvoyant) cognition and telepathic (or clairvoyant) interaction. As you would expect, every instance of the former would be an instance of the latter, but the converse doesn’t hold—that is, ESP interaction may occur without ESP cognition. To see why this matters, we must take a closer look. If telepathic cognition occurs at all, it would presumably be a form of non-sensorial knowledge about another individual’s state of mind. More specifically, it would be a state of affairs in which so-called “percipient” A comes to know something about a telepathic interaction A has with another individual B. And what kind of things might A telepathically come to know? Well, presumably, in its most robust (and most intrusively intimidating) form, A would learn what’s going on in B’s mind—that is, that B is having certain thoughts, perceptions, or emotions. But it would still be an instance of telepathic cognition—admittedly, less intimidating or threatening to one’s mental privacy—if A learned merely that B was the telepathic cause of A’s current thought or experience—that is, that B was directly influencing or interfering with A’s stream of consciousness, whether or not A’s resulting thoughts or experiences were those of B or known by A to be those of B. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a (...) turn to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

Dean Radin, laboratory director at The Institute of Noetic Sciences , argues that telepathy is real, and suggests that quantum mechanics may ultimately provide an explanation of how it works.

Quantum information processing is at the crossroads of physics, mathematics and computer science. It is concerned with what we can and cannot do with quantum information that goes beyond the abilities of classical information processing devices. Communication complexity is an area of classical computer science that aims at quantifying the amount of communication necessary to solve distributed computational problems. Quantum communication complexity uses quantum mechanics to reduce the amount of communication that would be classically required.Pseudo-telepathy is a surprising application (...) of quantum information processing to communication complexity. Thanks to entanglement, perhaps the most nonclassical manifestation of quantum mechanics, two or more quantum players can accomplish a distributed task with no need for communication whatsoever, which would be an impossible feat for classical players. After a detailed overview of the principle and purpose of pseudo-telepathy, we present a survey of recent and not-so-recent work on the subject. In particular, we describe and analyse all the pseudo-telepathy games currently known to the authors. (shrink)

The founder of Psychical Research, though he has not yet received the honour due to him, seems to have been King Croesus of Lydia, who reigned from 560 to 546 B.C. He carried out an interesting experiment, recorded in detail by Herodotus,2 to test the clairvoyant powers of a number of oracles. He sent embassies to seven oracles, six Greek and one Egyptian. They all started on the same day. On the hundredth day each embassy was instructed to ask its (...) oracle, “What is King Croesus, the son of Alyattes, now doing?” The answer was to be written down and brought back. The oracle of Delphi replied as follows, in hexameters, as its custom was: “I know the number of the sands and the measures of the sea. I understand the dumb, and I hear him who does not speak.” Then it went on: “There comes to my mind the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise, which is being cooked along with lamb's flesh in a brazen vessel; brass is spread beneath it, and with brass it is covered.” As a matter of fact, this answer was perfectly correct. Herodotus tells us that “having considered what would be the most difficult thing to discover and to imagine,” Croesus “cut up a tortoise and a lamb, and himself boiled them together in a brazen pot.” What happened afterwards illustrates the difficulties of this sort of investigation, difficulties which still perplex us to this day. Croesus argued, reasonably enough, that if the Delphic priestess had clairvoyant powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers, she probably also had the precognitive powers which she claimed to have. But when he consulted the oracle later about his forthcoming expedition against the Persians, he received two answers, one of which was ambiguous—“When Croesus crosses the Halys he shall destroy a great empire”—and the other correct, but too obscure to be easily interpreted. (shrink)

There has been consistent interest in telepathy within psychoanalysis from its start. Relational psychoanalysis, which is a relatively new development in psychoanalytic theory and practice, seems more receptive to experiences between patient and analyst that suggest ostensibly anomalous communicative capacities. To establish this openness to telepathic phenomena with relational approaches, a selection of papers recently published in leading academic journals in relational psychoanalysis is examined. This demonstrates the extent to which telepathy-like experiences are openly presented and seriously considered (...) in the relational community. The article then discusses those characteristics of the relational approach that may facilitate greater openness to telepathic experience. The argument is that relational psychoanalysis provides a coherent framework in which otherwise anomalous phenomena of patient–analyst interaction can be understood. (shrink)

A report on carefully conducted experiments, by the authors and others, in extrasensory perception, with detailed statistical analysis of the data of these experiments. Acquaintance with the extensive controls on some of the experiments discussed, and the magnitude of the odds against chance occurrences of the apparently extra-sensory phenomena, should preclude the uncritical dismissal of such phenomena.--D. S.

The phenomenologist Gerda Walther posits the possibility of a new social act, which she terms telepathy. It is marked by an intimate in-terpersonal union in which ego and alter ego become capable of sharing in the identical lived experience, though distant from one another. Here, there is no fusion or collective identi????ication; rather, in-dividuals, though they live the experience and mind of the other, never lose or transcend their own individuation. Unlike the act of empathy, there is no analogical (...) transfer. This article defends the possibility of a restricted sense telepathy. The author argues that four conditions must be ful????illed for telepathy to occur: recognition of a social drive; a partially willed act of mind that results in the assump-tion of a certain stance, but it also comes upon us as an experience; constitution of subjects as persons marked by a “fundamental es-sence”; and I-splitting. (shrink)

Sándor Ferenczi, the great representative of the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis, had a lifelong interest in psychical phenomena. Although his ideas on the psychoanalytical understanding of spiritualistic phenomena and telepathy were not developed theories, they had a strong influence on some representatives of psychoanalysis, and thus underlay the psychoanalytic interpretation of telepathy. Ferenczi’s ideas on telepathy were interwoven with his most important technical and theoretical innovations. Thus Ferenczi’s thoughts on telepathy say a lot about his psychoanalytical (...) thinking and attitudes, and illuminate the significance of his greatest innovations in the context of psychical research. (shrink)

This paper seeks to demonstrate the structural difference in communication of schizophrenia and autism. For a normal adult, spontaneous communication is nothing but the transmission of phantasía (thought) by means of perceptual objects or language. This transmission is first observed in a make-believe play of child. Husserl named this function “perceptual phantasía,” and this function presupposes as its basis the “internalized affection of contact” (which functions empirically in eye contact, body contact, or voice calling me). Regarding autism, because of the (...) innate lack of affection of contact, intersubjective perceptual phantasía does not occur spontaneously. Consequently, autistics do not engage in make-believe play but in stereotyped and solipsistic play. Without the formation of perceptual phantasía, there is no differentiation between phantasía and perception. For this reason, people with Asperger's syndrome consider conversation not an immediate communication of thought but a logical transmission of concepts. Schizophrenia is characterized by a distortion in the internalized affection of contact, resulting in a disturbance of perceptual phantasía, and this later is covered by various symptoms—for example, delusion as a pathological kind of communication of thought. This delusion is based on the pathological internalized affection of contact represented by a terrifying Other. (shrink)

This article argues that Freud introduces the question of occultism in order to exclude the accident from the internal, psychical domain. The accident must be evacuated, for it is only by isolating a domain into which external randomness no longer penetrates that psychoanalysis gives itself a chance to be a science. And yet, as this article shows, the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing science from superstition hinges on, and is determined by, chance — and (...) a literary encounter. (shrink)