Comment on What's the closest any animal species has come to evolving to have telepathy?
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 months agoBritannica 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.
tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 6 months ago
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.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 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?
tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 6 months ago
Well, no. But it does depend on your point of view. From inside that culture other cultures would be the extraordinary ones.
And when you’re talking about the biology of animals it seems quite self-centred to compare everything to us. We are just one very specific animal.
Many animals have a vastly superior sense of smell, can see light outside our visible spectrum or hear sound outside our hearing range. But it would be silly to call all these things “telepathy” just because we humans don’t have these senses.
But yeah, I don’t really like the definition that heavily rely on the subjective qualifiers of ordinary/normal. I prefere the extra-sensory one. Because that clearly puts telepathy in the realm of an yet unknown or fictional mechanism, which is where I think the term belongs.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
It would be silly to call these things telepathy because by themselves they don’t facilitate a way to communicate thoughts between two minds. Even in the case of radio waves, a sense of radio waves wouldn’t be telepathy by itself, unless there is also a mechanism of generating these radio waves, and unless these two mechanisms are used to communicate ideas between users.