A Letter about Dilley's Theory of Telepathy
Geplaatst door
Titus Rivas (publicatiedatum: 11 September, 2011)
Samenvatting
Letter to the Editor, published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 56, 1990, pp. 312-313.
Letter to the Editor,
In the most recent article (April
1990) in his series on mind-body dualism, Frank Dilley defends the
position that telepathy can be understood as (and thus reduced to)
clairvoyance and psychokinesis. However, I can think of at least three
cases wherein the brain cannot provide us with information on the
mental state or (episodic or semantic) memory of another person:
(1) Communication between two discarnate minds, neither of which possesses
(in the common sense of the word at least) a brain. The theory of 'astral brains' seems at present still farfetched to me.
(2) Telepathy with a reincarnated mind regarding experiences of its
previous life, of which there obviously cannot be any cerebral 'memory
traces' (unless one takes seriously the possibility of reading a
deceased, decaying brain, which is excluded anyway in cases with
cremation or other destruction of that brain), but only traces in
psychical memory proper. Naturally, I mean telepathy as active reading,
not the psychokinetic variant proposed by Dilley. The only alternative
for mental telepathy in this case would be retrocognitive clairvoyance,
which I understand falls outside Dilley's theory until now.
(3) Telepathy of unique properties of the mental memory as opposed to
cerebral traces. I myself defend the position that it is a priori
unthinkable that there are cerebral counterparts of at least the
following mental experiences:
(a) clairvoyant experiences, because they are not arrived at via the nervous system and don't leave sensorial traces.
(b) thinking about or with meta-phenomenological concepts, such as
concepts of consciousness, qualia, etc., since they concern entities
which do not exist physically, and which cannot be conceived as
existing that way, i.e. cannot be represented exhaustively in a
physical medium as e.g. the brain. If I'm right, telepathy as conceived
by Frank Dilley would not be able to deal with these special cases. Of
course, it is very hard to test his seemingly parsimonious theory
empirically, so let us ponder much on his arguments before accepting
it.
Titus Rivas
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 56, 1990, 312-313.
Contact: Titus Rivas