Comment on What's the closest any animal species has come to evolving to have telepathy?

• tobogganablaze@lemmus.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Flowers can communicate with bees via ultraviolet light, which is not a human sense. So by your definition flowers can telepathically communicate with bees. For that would sounds like a very odd thing to say.

  Also the exchange of electromagnetic radiation IS a physical interaction.

  if you define it as not using any senses it doesn’t, but that would be a useless definition, because nothing could possibly satisfy it.

  But that’s very much my point. Telepathy, as defined in the dictonary, does not exist and so nothing should satisfy the definition.

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  • dev_null@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Britannica dictionary defines it with “without using the usual sensory channels” Cambridge dictionary with “without using words or other physical signals” Collins “without speech, writing, or any other normal signals” Merriam-Webster uses “extrasensory”, and they define “extrasensory” as “outside the ordinary senses”

    All of it seems to match radio communication, and all require it to be between two persons or minds, so flowers and bees definitely don’t qualify.

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    • tobogganablaze@lemmus.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      All of it seems to match radio communication

      Huh? No. All of these exclude radio communication quite specifically.

      If some animal could pick up radio waves, it would necessarily have to have a sensory channel for radio waves. Radio waves are physical signals. Quite normal sginals, too.

      And while it’s certainly not an ordinary sense in the real world, in the hypothetical where some animal did evolve the ability to pick up radio waves, it would be an ordinary sense for that animal.

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      • dev_null@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Hah, I’d expect “ordinary” and “normal” here to mean “ordinary / normal senses for a human”, not for the hypothetical telepathy user. That wouldn’t be a very useful usage of these words, so I doubt that’s what was meant here. Are you saying, for example, that extraordinary cultures don’t exist, since they are ordinary for their members?

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