Evolution towards psychic abilities

[LucidDreamer]

Why would our brains have vast repositories of capabilities that we don't use?

 

I think in a way you could make an argument for this. After all, only some people go to college. A good portion of the people that do go to college basically stop challenging themselves after college. If we wanted to I think most of us could become experts at a dozen different subjects. But most of us don't so you could say that we only use a small percentage of our brains capabilities. However, I agree that we don’t have secret psychic abilities.

[LucidDreamer]

I don't believe that humans are evolving psychic abilities. In order to evolve psychic abilities there would have to be some great pressure that killed off people who didn't develop it and kept those alive who did. There doesn’t seem to be any great need to develop some form of brain telepathy when I can just pick up my cell phone. If I want to move something large and heavy then I use a crane. We have already evolved telepathy and telekinesis.

 

Besides If we actually evolved psychic abilities don't you think we would be using them. I mean evolution went to great measures to develop the ability to speak and use logic. We use those all the time. I think if we had developed some sort of useful psychic ability we would actually be using it. Evolution doesn't go to great pains to develop something we won't use very often.

 

Have we observed any other creatures that developed psychic abilities? Just because we have big brains that allow us to play chess and count doesn't mean we also have secret magic mind abilities. If we are evolving at all it’s the ability to use and create machines capable of doing the things that we think psychic abilities will allow us to do.

[john5746]

I'd say if anything, we have evolved away from psychic or sensory abilities. As we have learned to control our environment, we depend less on our senses. Animals have are much more in tune with nature and seem to know how we are feeling, weather, etc.

 

I would say dolphins probably have more ""psychic" ability than we do.

[psi20]

Well, I agree with LucidDreamer in that there's probably got to be some pressure.

When I say psychic abilities, I mostly mean "enhanced sensory perception" like acute hearing, sight, touch, logic, etc.

Like if you have children, and you're in a mall, and all of a sudden they're gone, you find that you're listening to more sounds because you'd want to find them.

Or perhaps you're deaf and depend on your sight of all your 5 senses. You would, but I am guessing here, probably pick up more detail in a cursory glance than a person who depends more on hearing than sight.

Psychic abilities are, I think, a combination of many senses and thinking skills. You might've seen something, later on smelled something familiar to a part of the crime scene, and remember something, then use logic to figure something out.

As for telepathy, you might not tell your friend that you got a haircut, but they can tell. You don't need to tell someone something for them to figure it out.

It might be wishful thinking, but I believe that there are energies we don't even know of or have seen. This energy could be used by the mind, as in psychokinesis.

People use different parts of their brains differently. We aren't all going to have superb memories or a great hand-eye coordination. I've heard of someone who can calculate crazy things like 23462 * 3532^12 in his head because the part of his brain that usually does long-term memory did short-term memory and something else. He said he could see the digits like multiplying it out on paper in his head. I've heard of a kid who's autistic. Supposedly his IQ is in the 60's, although I don't believe that the IQ system is useful and here's why. His memory is photographic and so keen, that he draws stuff like Cezanne.

Genetics plays a role in it, well, because the proteins in your brain are coded for.

But your environment and what happens to you also influence your psychic abilities.

[Sayonara]

I think in a way you could make an argument for this. After all, only some people go to college. A good portion of the people that do go to college basically stop challenging themselves after college. If we wanted to I think most of us could become experts at a dozen different subjects. But most of us don't so you could say that we only use a small percentage of our brains capabilities. However, I agree that we don’t have secret psychic abilities.

I interpreted his use of "capabilities" as referring to a set of distinct and unknown functions, rather than to potential for the additional use of known functions.

 

If we're just talking about "normal" brian power, then yes - for social reasons much of it does go unused.

 

However Yourdad's follow-up question was "isn't it possible we can do things we don't know we can?", which clearly means what I originally thought.

[ydoaPs]

some people actually do have "psychic abilities." my friend can read minds. he isn't like a money grubbing tv "psychic", he tries to hide it most of the time. he can walk into a room and know what everyone is thinking. it is kinda wierd.

[MadScientist]

some people actually do have "psychic abilities." my friend can read minds. he isn't like a money grubbing tv "psychic", he tries to hide it most of the time. he can walk into a room and know what everyone is thinking. it is kinda wierd.

 

Why should it be limited by distance??

 

As for us evolving esoteric abilities.

I was reading a very little about quantum conscioussnes, where the brain works at the quantum level. Which makes sense to me (ATM anyway) since we used to perceive ourselves as just the human body, then a brain in the human body, then since part of the brain is for memory, part is for sight etc, we become the part/s of the brain that does the thinking. Then it goes down to the cellular level so why can't it continue down to the atomic level and onto the quantum level??

 

My theory is that at the atomic level the behaviour of the atoms influence our thoughts. QC working in the same way at the lowest level.

 

What other things like entangled particles are we going to discover in the future?? What role do neutrinos, tachyons (don't shoot me!! ) and these dark matters and negative energies I've heard talk of play in our brains??

 

And if the string theorists are right..

Could the strings do even more incredible things like talk to each other or influence each other in other ways, allowing them to pass information or making them move.

And wasn't it Einstein who said energy and matter are interchangable??

Why can't we, as a collection of strings that can talk to each other, tell our strings to all convert to energy but maintain the quantum consciossnes and ascend into energy beings??

Maybe that's getting a little too crazy though.

[Ophiolite]

....my friend can read minds. he can walk into a room and know what everyone is thinking. it is kinda wierd.

And you think that's reading minds? Not reading body language? Come one ydp, I thought better of you, unless you're just trying to wind us all up.

 

Here's one way it can work: A couple of years ago two trainees had to present me with a detailed report that ran to about fifteen pages. The creation of the report was part of their training program and they had to complete it as a two man team with no input from me.

They brought the report into my office, somewhat apprehensive, but keen to find out how I thought they had done. Without opening it I said "this is pretty good work gentlmen, but you have made a small error in the second paragraph on page three."

They were, quite reasonably startled by this, so I turned to page three, second paragraph, and sure enough there was a clumsy grammatical error. The rest of the report, by the way, was pretty well flawless.

I could have claimed I knew the error was there because of my psychic abilities and they would have been inclined to believe me, since there seemed to be no other viable explanation.

The truth was far more mundane. I reasoned that since this was the first major work that they were being evaluated for within the company that they would therfore be taking great care with it. This would include thorough proof reading. But proof reading is not everone's cup of tea and I suspected by the time they got to the third page their attention would be flagging. It revives at the start of the page, but has slipped again by the second paragraph. The error slips through. Voila! Apparent psychic ability.

[SubJunk]

If you read the first post you'll see that this isn't about the existance of psychics.

But it's nice of you to prove that it's possible to fake being a psychic, however it in no way disproves the fact that psychics may exist and that this may be a result of evolution.

 

As for the main topic, I don't see why evolution would be in favour of psychic abilities at all, especially not until* we've matured as a race.

Perhaps people with extreme kinds of psychic abilities are too advanced for other parts of their brains so go insane.

 

here's a website I've had my eye on for a while but havn't been quite game enough to get into personally. It seems convincing though, and I consider myself a skeptic (not to be confused with disbeliever) of these kinds of things

 

*I use this word optimistically

[MadScientist]

If you read the first post you'll see that this isn't about the existance of psychics.

But it's nice of you to prove that it's possible to fake being a psychic' date=' however it in no way disproves the fact that psychics [i']may[/i] exist and that this may be a result of evolution.

 

As for the main topic, I don't see why evolution would be in favour of psychic abilities at all, especially not until* we've matured as a race.

Perhaps people with extreme kinds of psychic abilities are too advanced for other parts of their brains so go insane.

 

here's a website I've had my eye on for a while but havn't been quite game enough to get into personally. It seems convincing though, and I consider myself a skeptic (not to be confused with disbeliever) of these kinds of things

 

*I use this word optimistically

 

A reason why we might be evolving into a species with telepathy is..

 

A solar system is born, planets form, life forms on it, those cells evolve into higher beings, then again and again until you get a life form that can think "Why are we here, are there others on these other planets, can we communicate with them?? No, the distances are too great."

"BUT WE WANT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THEM!!"

"And we WANT to communicate more efficiently with our own species."

The quickest way to relay some information from one brain to another over any distance would be telepathy.

 

Once life on a planet evolves telepathy it can reach out to the other life forms in the universe and communicate.

So then evolution is not a competition between different species on one planet it's on all planets..

So the way we evolved speech was only the first step in our evolutionary communication race.

 

We evolve speech, we find it's not fast enough to communicate ideas so we when we evolve enough to a certain tech level we invent the phone, then the internet but that has limitations, it always will have. So we need to evolve something new. It might be something we biologically evolve or technologically evolve but instant mind to mind communications is something that would benefit evolution.

 

 

And if you want something a bit deeper...

Take a look at the world around us, there are people in many different groups/classes who look down on other groups/classes. So they eventually some of them clash and we get horrifying acts of violence, thousands or millions getting killed in stupid futile wars over which group own which piece of land or who follows the right god.

If we were all telepathic anyone from one group would realise that one of their opponents from another group isn't actually a bad person after all, they think just like each other.

Telepathy would help the human race that way.

 

I believe that because, the groups who seem to think the western world is trying to destroy their way of life, we don't want to destroy their way of life but they want to fight us about it anyway so we have to retaliate. If they could see things from our perspective they'd understand that and just carry on with their lifestyles. Then they'd see the perspective of their neighbours...

What better way of seeing another mans perspective than actually being able to see his very thoughts??

 

If we don't evolve telepathy in some way we're (as a species) going to find it difficult to put an end to fighting and start to get along..

 

I truly believe that once we do start to get along some amazing things will start to happen to the human race.

If you were in a ship visiting an alien civilisation would you want to meet a species that behaved like ours does??

As a "higher being" looking at this primitive species you wouldn't think anything of abducting one, performing a few harmless experiments to see if they are evolving telepathy and therefore evolving into this species that got along, then putting them back on their planet to cause the least disturbance to their natural evolution.

 

Sorry for the length and going off topic.

[Sayonara]

Oh dear god.

[MadScientist]

Oh dear god.

 

LOL!!!!

 

Don't worry I'm not going mental, I know it's sci-fi, I don't think we will do all that but you've got to admit, if we could all get along that way the human race would evolve into something new.

[Sorcerer]

Oh dear god.

 

Second.

 

Faster than light telepathy, its wrong on toooooooooo many levels.

[Sayonara]

I was more astonished at the 'evolution' in the post.

 

It earned the whole thread a move to this forum.

[SubJunk]

i see why your name is madscientist now. i'm not meaning to offend you cause you seem like a nice person, but you obviously have no idea of how evolution works. you're right that it's sci-fi, very sci-fi, with emphasis on the latter word

[MadScientist]

i see why your name is madscientist now. i'm not meaning to offend you cause you seem like a nice person, but you obviously have no idea of how evolution works. you're right that it's sci-fi, very sci-fi, with emphasis on the latter word

 

I chose the name MadScientist because I didn't want people to take me all that seriously on everything, maybe it was a bad decision but...

 

 

When I look out I see all these people bickering about things like "science is right" "No it's not the Bible is right." but people seem to be so fixed on what the universe is showing them that they forget they can step out of it and look for other possibilitiies or new ways of thinking/looking at things.

Some of these new things I come up with are too far fetched to fit into the conventional models so they can't be possible, can they??

So I use those for story ideas...

 

So no offence taken at all.

 

I have to take up the issue RE evolution though, because you said I don't fully understand how evolution works, AFAIK I do. So I have to take it up so I can find out where my model is broken, so...

 

Evolution, survival of the fittest.

All life has evolved to the level where it's about to burst onto land.

Plant life has moved onto the land because their environment carried them onto the land, those with mutations that enabled them to survive in this new environment did survive, evolving into plants and trees..

 

The fish evolved legs because they'd moved into the swampy coastal areas, they didn't evolve legs to walk on land but because it was easier to get through the dense swamps to either evade predators or catch prey..

 

So either a certain mutation of a species will become more predominant than the rest of its species, by surviving better giving it more of a chance to breed meaning its mutations spread more and its offspring help further this new species..

 

Being a predator or prey governs how your species will mutate, faster to evade or faster to capture...

 

Another driving force will be things that allow the species to replicate more efficiently. Sex drive being one of them, those mutations with low sex drives will be a disadvantage to the survival of the species. It's easy to see that the next generation won't be as polluted by its mutation than it will be by those with high sex drives...

 

That's basically my model for evolution..

 

And if telepathy is real or starting to become real it fits right into that model just like sex drive and the ability to speak or write does, doesn't it??

 

That's an example of me stepping back from the models most other people look at and seeing things from a wider angle. It doesn't fit into any of your models so I can't convince the rest of the world to see it so I'd have to use that as an idea for a story that people would see and think "Hey, that could happen."

 

The guys who came up with original idea for The Matrix type story did exactly the same thing. And if you look at another thread that I started, I can't find any evidence to prove our universe isn't like that but no one or not many people will ever bother to examine the universe in that manner.

[MadScientist]

Second.

 

Faster than light telepathy' date=' its wrong on toooooooooo many levels.[/quote']

 

The world used to be flat..

 

If I went back in time and told you that two particles not physically linked in any way and seperated by any kind of distance you can imagine, that they would both reflect the state of the other.

That would have probably been wrong on too many levels too to you at some stage, that's the way I would have thought if you'd told me a few months ago

For something to communicate over any kind of distance there's GOT to be a connection either through wires or through EM waves so entangled particles wouldn't have fitted into your model.

A bit like telepathy doesn't fit into our model at the moment.

 

I'm not saying telepathy exists or ever will exist, I'm just not going to dismiss it entirely because given the tools and knowledge and I could give you telepathy.

All I need to do is make a mobile phone small enough, hook up the input and output to your brain (a little difficult I admit ) then you can communicate with others just by thinking your thoughts.

Prove to me that will never happen.

 

Prove to me that we'll never be able to understand the mechanics of entangled particles well enough to be able to put that to use in our mobile phones.

 

Can you still completely dismiss faster than light telepathy??

[Sorcerer]

Cybernetic telephony isnt telepathy, close, but not quite. Thats possible too - I want one.

 

Dismiss "Faster than light".... fairly safely yeah.

 

This whole quantum entanglement business, it wouldn't occur in a natural environment would it? I mean wouldn't particles be continually interacting and entagling? Wouldn't you need to entangle them in a vaccuum and then separate them and make sure nothing interacted with them untill it cam time to measure them? Wouldn't the actual measurement untangle them?

[MadScientist]

Cybernetic telephony isnt telepathy' date=' close, but not quite. Thats possible too - I want one.

 

Dismiss "Faster than light".... fairly safely yeah.

 

This whole quantum entanglement business, it wouldn't occur in a natural environment would it? I mean wouldn't particles be continually interacting and entagling? Wouldn't you need to entangle them in a vaccuum and then separate them and make sure nothing interacted with them untill it cam time to measure them? Wouldn't the actual measurement untangle them?[/quote']

 

Cybernetic telephony, it might work by sending thought patterns from one mind to another. Sure sounds like telepathy to me. And when we can make this technology we'll have evolved into a species of telepaths. Just charge the batteries every day.

But cybernetics wouldn't make you happy so how about we develop biological, you'd need to engineer a new gland to create enangled particles and a means of passing one to another person you wanted telepathic contact with..

But it still isn't something evolution gave us even though evolution gave us the intelligence to create these things Fair enough...

 

 

But why are you assuming we know everything about the universe and how it works??

Why can't they discover something new next year that's even more incredible than entangled particles??

Darwin did it, Einstein did it, Tesla did it, Faraday did it, Pasteur did it, Curie did it, many people in more recent history have done it but what you're saying is we've reached the end. And no one will ever discover something new like any of those things before.

What would have happened if Darwin had thought "Well we know everything in the universe." or "Man evolved from apes?? This can't be right, God created us it says so our current model of the universe, in the Bible."

 

When Tesla (IIRC) first discovered radio waves he and others didn't sit back and say "These are only good for communicating over distances with."

They looked at the mechanics the best they could and came up with other things like television and radar. Then when they developed the technology they looked at those mechanics closer and came up with things like lasers, microwave ovens, etc..

 

What if the string theorists are right and the strings do exist in several different dimensions at the same time. Those strings would be moving about in our dimension, they might move about in others or link up or there might be a telephone operator (not a person or machine) in there connecting them up.

 

None of that's been proved or disproved yet so I can't throw it out completely.

[Sayonara]

Cybernetic telephony, it might work by sending thought patterns from one mind to another. Sure sounds like telepathy to me. And when we can make this technology we'll have evolved into a species of telepaths. Just charge the batteries every day.

No.

 

You either don't know what telepathy means, don't know what telephony means, or both.

 

 

Additionally this has nothing to do with the evolution of psychic abilities, so perhaps we could get away from the fanboy speculation and back on topic.

[Sorcerer]

I think sayo was trying to point out that even if we could feed our thoughts into a digital device these would have to be fed into the receivers brain somehow, not an easy task so coversion to sound would be the best option...... best to just speak into a receiver maybe.

[Sayonara]

There's no difference between using a mobile and using this device that MadScientist is saying we could have implanted in our brains - they both rely on artificial, external, powered technology.

 

He's saying that if you can transmit thoughts in any fashion, that's telepathy, in order to force telepathy into existence to support his 'evolution' discussion. Unfortunately it doesn't actually involve any evolution, telepathy or genetics so it's got nothing to do with the thread whatsoever.

[MadScientist]

There's no difference between using a mobile and using this device that MadScientist is saying we could have implanted in our brains - they both rely on artificial' date=' external, powered technology.

 

He's saying that if you can transmit thoughts in any fashion, that's telepathy, in order to force telepathy into existence to support his 'evolution' discussion. Unfortunately it doesn't actually involve any evolution, telepathy or genetics so it's got nothing to do with the thread whatsoever.[/quote']

 

IKWYM anything mechanical (biological or conventional technology) put inside us to give us telepathy (communication of thought through a sense other than the 5 we know we have for a fact.) has to stay out of this discussion because it doesn't involve evolution or genetics.

 

When I look at evolution I must see a bigger picture. Just explaining my perspective here, which might be wrong so please feel free to help me if it is...

Learning to use a sharp edged rock to cut an animals flesh, we evolved the ability to use some technology then after using that technology for a while it forces us to evolve a little more so we use the sharp rock to scrape an animal skin clean and make clothes. Which helps us evolve even better brains. I'm not talking about brains that are significantly different, just brains where connections are reinforced quicker and the way concepts of things are stored more efficiently.

So humans evolve into speakers and learn how to make connections even better, then writing and those connection building protocols are far more efficient than a few generations ago.

Why would the human brain stop evolving into a better one just because it was making those connections and storing those things as efficiently as possible??

 

And I see genetic engineering as a sharp edged stone, just another tool that will improve our evolution. Because when/if we do start using this on a large scale we're going to evolve. Maybe even better brains that can figure out how to use genetic engineering to engineer telepathy into us.

 

Assuming that we don't know everything about these entangled particles and how to use the mechanics of them. We might find out tomorrow that they can be created really easily. You don't need a star to create EM waves you can do it with a simple radio transmitter or even an electrical spark.

And given that the human body can do things like generate electrical currents and EM waves and that some animals have body parts sensitive to the Earths EM field. Why can't we create a new body part that can use some of this as yet uknown knowledge RE entangled particles.

 

And yes I do know this biological device wouldn't be passed on through normal reproduction to the next generation. Because we know absolutely everything about engineering human DNA. We know we can never manipulate DNA at a quantum level to alter it drastically.

But isn't that a bit like saying "We've found this DNA and what it does but we don't have the technology or knowledge to use it to cure some cancers so forget that."??

 

How about it I made my brain implant a really low power device and it can run from power supplied by the human body, either by directly picking up the electrical charges or just using the motion of the body to create it. Joke.

[Ophiolite]

If you read the first post you'll see that this isn't about the existance of psychics.

But it's nice of you to prove that it's possible to fake being a psychic' date=' however it in no way disproves the fact that psychics [i']may[/i] exist and that this may be a result of evolution.

Thanks for responding. Two points:

1. I don't think we are restricted to discussing the central point of the thread. Granted we don't want to move too far away from it too often, but equally the excursions down unexpected lanes can be rewarding.

2. I was not attempting to prove that psychics don't exist. Yourdadonapogos had delivered a naive(?) claim that his friend was psychic. I wanted him to consider alternatives and a personal anecdote was quicker than trying to rememeber the name of arch-debunker James Randi.

I entirely agree that psychics may exist and that if they do it may be an ability that evolved. However, based on the current absence of evidence or any plausible mechansim I shall pretend I am from Missouri and say "Show me".

 

 

 

Nullius in Verba

[Ophiolite]

I am putting this here in genetics forum only because I wish to discuss evolutionary pressure and not psychic phenomena pro or con.

If there was a genetic connection to psychic ability you would have to imagine it would give an individual an advantage to be psychic and so the expression of this gene would probably be expressed in nearly everybody by now.

How many people would be alive if they didn't go around that corner' date=' if they ducked before the bullet hit, or if they didn't drive somewhere.

It seems psychic ability is not genetic since we still have the same odds of getting killed and that is probably where we would see the greatest influence of its expression. In survival situations.

I just feel if there was a genetic connection to psychic abilities then we would see a much stronger expression of it due to natural selection by now.

Just aman[/quote']Just a reminder of what we were discussing.

 

Aman, if you are still out there, I find it difficult to envisage an ability that did not have a genetic component. Did you have anything in mind in terms of origin when you said " it seems psychic ability is not genetic'?