Joscha Bach: belief

Transcript context

…So is it that we feel that or do we actually accomplish it? So is telepathy possible? Is it real? So for me, that’s this question that I don’t really know the answer to, and Turing’s famous 1950 paper in which he describes the Turing test, he does speculate about telepathy interestingly and asked himself if telepathy is real and he thinks that it very well might be. What would be the implication for AI systems that try to be intelligent, because he didn’t see a mechanism by which a computer program would become telepathic, and I suspect if telepathy would exist or if all the reports that you get from people when you ask the normal person on the street, I find that very often they say, “I have experiences with telepathy. The scientists might not be interested in this and might not have a theory about this, but I have difficulty explaining it away.” And so you could say maybe this is a superstition or maybe it’s a false memory or maybe it’s a little bit of psychosis. Who knows? Maybe somebody wants to make their own life more interesting or misremember something, but a lot of people report, “I noticed something terrible happened to my partner and I know this is exactly the moment it happened where my child had an accident and I knew that was happening and the child was in a different town.” So maybe it’s a false memory where this is later on mistakenly attributed, but a lot of people think that this is not the correct explanation. So if something like this was real, what would it mean? It probably would mean that either your body is an antenna that is sending information over all sorts of channels, like maybe just electromagnetic radio signals that you’re sending over long distances and you get attuned to another person that you spend enough time with to get a few bits out of the ether to figure out what this person is doing. Or maybe it’s also when you are very close to somebody and you become empathetic with them. What happens that is that you go into a resonance state with them, right? Similar to when people go into a seance and they go into a trance state and they start shifting a ouija board around on the table. I think what happens is that their minds go by their nervous systems into a resonance state in which they basically create something like a shared dream between them. Physical closeness or closeness broadly defined?…

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