ESP and the Scientific Journal

[jonesy]

What part of the brain is set up to receive and process ESP? Parts of the brain are set up to receive and process sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. So, what part of the brain is set up to receive and process ESP? Point to it. Name it.

I kind of think that that was the point I was pointing at. That even if we did find or make something that fulfilled the function that the ESP searchers say should be the function they are looking for, they would then just say that that wasn't it, and that we still need to keep looking.

 

[Umbran]

Hmm. I would argue that...

Dude, you asked what someone else was saying. What you would argue is not the point - what *they* would argue is the point.

...if the optic nerves on your eyes were capable of sending signals containing visual information, but your brain wasn't capable of either receiving or processing that information, you would not have a sense of sight. Can we call it a sense if your eyes can see it, but your mind can't inform you of that?

If you don't want to differentiate between data acquisition and data processing, that's your choice. But the biologists and doctors I know (and asked, just to be sure) speak in such terms to first approximation - the action of sensing, the data acquisition, occurs in sensory nerves. Thus, when one has a typical hallucination, the patient is not actually "sensing" - the action is taking place in the brain, not in the sensory nerves. And, conversely, if the sensory nerves are getting triggered by something other than their normal inputs, they don't call that hallucination.

ESP differentiates itself by supposedly happening without use of what we commonly think of as sensory nerves, instead using the nerves we currently understand as being incapable of picking up data from the outside world under normal conditions, or by not using nerves at all.

 

[jonesy]

Dude, you asked what someone else was saying.

No, I asked what ESP was. And it was supposed to be a rhetorical question to highlight that the concept doesn't make any sense to me. But apparently I wasn't doing a good job of it.

 

[Umbran]

No, I asked what ESP was. And it was supposed to be a rhetorical question to highlight that the concept doesn't make any sense to me. But apparently I wasn't doing a good job of it.

Well, part of the issue is that you asked rhetorical questions, assuming answers that are not, as I understand them at least, technically accurate. I was trying to correct that inaccuracy, so that maybe it would make more sense.

You said, "Huh? Pressure isn't sensed with your mind? Pain? Smell? It's all in your mind."

My response is - no, it is not all in your mind. Some of it is outside the organ we generally consider to house your thought processes, and so is outside the mind itself. If you've got a highly different definition of "mind" than I do, we are perhaps at loggerheads.

Further, my response is that this is what makes ESP different - specifically it supposedly *is* all done with the mind, when the other common senses are not.

 

[Fast Learner]

What part of the brain is set up to receive and process ESP? Parts of the brain are set up to receive and process sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. So, what part of the brain is set up to receive and process ESP? Point to it. Name it.

It is easier to believe in liars, schizophrenics and lying schizophrenics than it is to believe in ESP.

While I'm not in any way defending the experiment, this isn't an argument that makes much sense to me. Scientists performed many tens of thousands (or more) of useful experiments on sight, hearing, etc., without knowing what part of the brain was associated with the sense. It's only in the last decade with the huge increase in the availability of fMRI that we've learned much in the way of useful information about where things occur in the brain. Even with that, we still have no idea where in the brain all kinds of things happen, despite knowing that they clearly take place there.

The evidence that humans can sense light variations and understand their world based on that sense is sufficient to know that light sensing is taking place, regardless of where it happens in the brain. If evidence of, for example, precognition ever proves strong and easily repeatable, science will accept that something is being sensed without having to know exactly where in the brain the sense is located. And rightly so.

 

[Fast Learner]

Further, my response is that this is what makes ESP different - specifically it supposedly *is* all done with the mind, when the other common senses are not.

It's only said to happen entirely in the mind by people who can't prove it exists anyway. If a precognitive sense (or whatever ESPy thing) is one day proven to exist, it could as easily turn out that the sensors are in, I dunno, our forehead skin, or our pineal gland, or our earlobes, or whatever.

Before we understood the body as well as we do now (which, btw, is much, much less than most people believe) the Egyptians had the theory of body humors, further refined by the Greeks. That they were completely wrong about how the body actually works doesn't mean we couldn't later figure out how things really did.

Again, not saying there are such senses, just that any theories about where ESP takes place is about as valid as humors: those theories don't have to turn out to be true in order for ESP to exist.

 

[jonesy]

My response is - no, it is not all in your mind. Some of it is outside the organ we generally consider to house your thought processes, and so is outside the mind itself. If you've got a highly different definition of "mind" than I do, we are perhaps at loggerheads.

I don't think I do. I'm just not sure what you're talking about. I'm saying that if the signals never reach your consciousness then you do not have that sense, even if the nerve endings themselves are working correctly. What senses are you saying are processed outside your mind?

 

[Umbran]

I don't think I do. I'm just not sure what you're talking about. I'm saying that if the signals never reach your consciousness then you do not have that sense, even if the nerve endings themselves are working correctly. What senses are you saying are processed outside your mind?

We seem to be talking past each other a bit. I am going to be a tad pedantic, to make sure there are no holes. My apologies if this seems annoying.

I am not saying any are processed outside the brain (though I wouldn't be surprised if an expert told me there was some filtering and pre-processing done outside the brain). We were presented with "It is all in the mind." I am saying that is not true - the ALL part. A significant chunk of each sense - specifically data reception - takes place outside of the brain. That part isn't within, so it isn't ALL within the mind.

Example: Taste. The basic sweet, sour, salt, bitter (and possibly "umami"), have receptors in your tongue. I am pretty sure we'd agree that your tongue does not reside within your mind. Your mind alone cannot tell you if something is salty - you need the tongue too - ergo, that sense does not reside only in the mind.

Except for ESP, if it exists. Supposedly that is (or may be) done all with the mind - no receptor nerves for it outside the brain. There's no other limb or organ you'd lop off to eradicate that sense.

Also, the "mind" may not be synonymous with "brain", in which case the sense may not be something done in the normal mode of receptor nerves as we understand them.

 

[Umbran]

It's only said to happen entirely in the mind by people who can't prove it exists anyway.

Well, since nobody has proven the existence to the world at large, that goes without saying.

If a precognitive sense (or whatever ESPy thing) is one day proven to exist, it could as easily turn out that the sensors are in, I dunno, our forehead skin, or our pineal gland, or our earlobes, or whatever.

Well, the tissues of the human body have been pretty well scrutinized - I'm pretty sure there's no full-out organs or large groups of sensory nerves hanging out there that are still of no known function.

Plus, honestly, for something like precognition, what is it that you're receiving? Is there a chemical, electromagnetic, or physical interaction with your body? If not, then that information isn't being picked up by a sensory process as we currently understand them, and something more strange would have to be going on.

Again, not saying there are such senses, just that any theories about where ESP takes place is about as valid as humors: those theories don't have to turn out to be true in order for ESP to exist.

True. But then again, if we are going to consider that such senses exist, it is only because of the stories that claim they do - so we have to accept that at least some of those stories are in some way true. It would not be likely that ESP exists, but otherwise the stories got it *completely* wrong. You'd expect that the actuality of the sense would be consistent with the most common bits of lore.

And, by and large, the stories aren't generally linked to some sensory organ outside the brain. That's one of the few common points of such stories. Ergo, your left big toe is probably not the seat of ESP.

 

[TanisFrey]

A resent study showed that the brain is more self adjusting than we thought. The study found that when a person is born blind, the areas of the brain that normally process visual information get used to process auditory and/or touch information. This can happen to a lesser extent to children who go blind after birth. This is a long process and does not happen over night. It is not just loading a new program like the Matrix or Chuck would have you believe.

This could imply that a person whom under goes the correct stimulus when young could reformat parts of their brain to be sensitive to thing others are not.