I go to the telepathy panel, which is being run by Alison, Rachel, and Nik Whitehead. We hear all sorts of interesting perspectives, although I confess to being pretty sceptical about the whole thing. Rachel's readings are wonderful, and Alison asks whether what we think is psychic power is really intuition (my own belief).
This sounds like a great topic. (Came home in the middle of the day sick again, can you tell? Don't worry folks, at this point it's just allergies, but to a debilitating extent.) What do you mean by intuition? I have had what appear to me to be convincing psychic experiences that could not be explained by what I call intuition. Most specifically not with telepathy but precognition, but I have also had a few apparently telepathic encounters. If it wasn't telepathy, then two people who had not met shared a similiar imaginary experience at the same time, then met a few months later only to get into a discussion and calculate they had shared both had a sensation of touching a mind at the same time, allowing for a difference in time zones, three thousand miles apart. This may be explained by coincidence, or mental activity transcending time, but I cannot explain it as intuition as I know the term. Other experiments, where I have asked my telepathy partner, over the internet, to share what I am looking at or touching without me sending a written description merely asking what she thinks it is, could be intuition. However, once she decribed the smell of a candle which I had lost the label of and hadn't been able to place the scent myself until she said it. :) (I know this sort of incident isn't likely to change anyone's opinion on 'psychic' phenomina, because I could be making all this up.) I am extrememly interested in theories related to telepathy, because I am not entirely sure what I think of it in spite of my own experiences.
Helen wrote:
I go to the telepathy panel, which is being run by Alison, Rachel, and Nik Whitehead. We hear all sorts of interesting perspectives, although I confess
to
being pretty sceptical about the whole thing. Rachel's readings are
wonderful,
and Alison asks whether what we think is psychic power is really intuition
(my
own belief).
This sounds like a great topic. (Came home in the middle of the day sick again, can you tell?
:( I'm sorry to hear that.
What do you mean by intuition?
I'm mostly talking about the experience I have when I'm discussing subjects with people and they say something which I 'know' to be 'wrong', but I can't immediately explain exactly why. It's a physical sensation that something is incongruent, not right. It sometimes takes me a bit of time to pick throught the facts or, more usually, the inconsistencies in the argument, but I usually get there. In discussion with me, people sometimes get irritated when I say, 'No, that's not right,' then go silent for quarter of an hour while I process what they've said. Doesn't show up so much online, however!
It's also something I experience while I'm working and I'm reading stuff: I can 'feel' when something doesn't make sense, then I go back and pick out (intellectually) what it is that's wrong about the statement. Similarly, when I'm constructing my own arguments I have a very strong sense if something is incongruent and weakening the case I'm making. Sorry, this all sounds very banal. Basically, I'm talking about a physical sense of 'wrongness' when faced with arguments that seem, superficially, to have a lot of consistency.
Also, I do a lot of interviewing and qualitative analysis. I feel that I get my best data when I 'experience' someone else's worldview and things which have been inconsistent suddenly become consistent, if I view it from their perspective. Again, sounds very banal, sorry. But I don't think this is telepathy.
This makes the discussion of social science on Auron very interesting (cutting and pasting here):
Fiona wrote:
--- Helen Krummenacker avona@jps.net wrote: > > ObB7... oh, this is always the hard bit... we've
speculated about social science in the Federation, but what sort of social science would one get on Auron--if any?
Fiona
That must get complicated... the researcher, can of course, tell what the study participants are thinking... but as they may not have analyzed themselves, the researcher will still have all the layers of whys and wherefores to work through.
I'm not sure whether it would make for greater or lesser ethical and scientific rigour-- I could see the participants saying to the researcher: "OK, that's what I was thinking, but I didn't mean it like that :)." On the other hand, it could make for more mutuality in the study process-- since the participants would also be aware of what the researcher was thinking.
I have a totally unscientific gut feeling that social science on Auron would either be a) fantastically sophisticated, cos they'd developed it to a fine art or b) totally nonexistant, cos there'd be no need for it.
Also, we're assuming that people on Auron 'think' or construct their worldviews in much the same way; that certainly isn't the case ordinarily; I wonder if there would be people with whom one would be more telepathically compatible. If there were various styles of telepathy, one might be interested in exploring how those worked or were different from one's own.
Hmm, plenty to mull over...
Una
-
Helen Krummenacker -
Una McCormack