telepathy
Enable an agent to recognise, distinguish and evaluate telepathy claims while keeping reported experiences, proposed mechanisms and demonstrated information transfer separate.
Research draft, second pass
A second pass drafted this model: the structure a model of this thing needs, and what is known about it in the world. The line under this one says how the second half was obtained - researched against sources, or recalled without web access, in which case nothing here was read anywhere and every claim is a lead to verify. Unreviewed either way.
recalled by Codex without web access - no source was read
Researched by: Codex
Purpose and description
Enable an agent to recognise, distinguish and evaluate telepathy claims while keeping reported experiences, proposed mechanisms and demonstrated information transfer separate.
Telepathy is the hypothesized transfer of information between minds without known sensory communication or physical signaling, studied in parapsychology but not established as a reliable human ability by scientific consensus.
It can be Classify a telepathy account by its definition, context and claimed information route.; Separate the receiver's original experience from later interpretations and target matching.; Identify ordinary information routes and propose controls for a voluntary test.; Compare recorded responses with targets using a declared scoring rule and chance model.; Assess whether a result supports a narrow experimental finding or a broader transfer claim.; Explain evidential limits without affirming unverified access to another person's private thoughts..
Distinguishing features
The claim identifies mental content associated with a source mind and allegedly accessed by another mind; resemblance between two experiences alone does not establish transfer.
The claimed route excludes ordinary sensory communication and established technical transmission; discovering such a route changes the explanation of the event.
The proposed information source is another mind, distinguishing telepathy from claimed access directly to hidden objects or future events.
An inference based on expressions, shared history or situational knowledge counts as ordinary social cognition unless the claim specifies information unavailable through those routes.
A fictional ability, personal interpretation and experimentally supported effect require different evidence standards and must remain distinguishable.
Scope
+ Definitions of telepathy and the people or traditions adopting them
+ Claims of receiving another person's thoughts, feelings or mental imagery
+ Sender-receiver relationships, intended content and claimed transmission conditions
+ Operational tests distinguishing telepathy from ordinary information access
+ Evidence assessments, unresolved explanations and limits on permissible conclusions
+ Explicitly fictional telepathy when identified as a separate interpretive context
- Ordinary speech, gesture, sensory perception and unconscious cue reading
- Empathy and inference about another person's mental state without a claim of anomalous transfer
- Brain-computer interfaces and technologically mediated brain-to-brain communication
- Clairvoyance or precognition claims without a contemporaneous source mind
- Clinical diagnosis or treatment of people reporting unusual experiences
- General psychic abilities beyond their boundary with telepathy
Characteristics
- Interpretive context
- personal report | experimental hypothesis | doctrinal account | fictional convention Determines what an instance means and which standards can evaluate it.
- Claimed mental content
- verbal thought | image | emotion | bodily sensation | intention | mixed | unspecified Constrains how correspondence between source and receiver can be defined.
- Source-receiver relationship
- identified participants, prior familiarity, directionality and whether roles were assigned prospectively Exposes shared knowledge and determines whether a source mind was identified before the apparent match.
- Claimed intentionality
- intentional sending | intentional receiving | spontaneous | reciprocal | unspecified Separates deliberate communication claims from retrospective interpretations of coincident experiences.
- Information-channel control
- unexamined | ordinary access possible | specified channels controlled | control failure detected Records which alternative routes were investigated without asserting that every route was excluded.
- Target correspondence
- hits per eligible trial, target rank or a prospectively defined similarity score, with scoring rule and uncertainty Makes an apparent match assessable against a defined comparison rather than intuitive resemblance.
- Temporal relationship
- timestamped source and receiver records; difference in seconds, minutes or a declared interval Tests whether the source content existed at the claimed time and whether records preceded feedback.
- Evidence assessment
- unassessed | insufficiently documented | compatible with specified alternatives | unresolved under stated controls | independently corroborated result under stated controls Keeps the assessment scoped to the observed result and prevents automatic promotion to a telepathic explanation.
Also called
Where this came from
wikidata · CC0 1.0
Also registered as vr.tr.telepathy
Drafted structure
Bundle to layer to finding to question, as the second pass will find it: 6 bundles · 11 layers · 16 findings · 26 questions.
Telepathy definitions and boundaries Establishes which sense of telepathy an account invokes and what would qualify under that sense.
Accounts may concern deliberate messages, spontaneous impressions or fictional powers, with different criteria for an instance.
Adopted definition
Records the definition and its attribution without treating one interpretation as universal.
Definition holder and qualifying instance
An assessable account specifies who uses the definition and whether it requires intention, accurate content or merely a reported experience.
- Who adopts this definition, and where is their formulation recorded? provenance
- Does this definition require intentional sending, accurate reception or only an experience interpreted as contact? definition
Neighbouring explanations
Separates mind-to-mind transfer claims from other accounts of apparent knowledge.
Source mind and channel boundary
The model asks whether another mind supplies the alleged information and which communication routes the claim excludes.
- Is the alleged source another person's mental content, a hidden external target or an event that has not yet occurred? boundary
- Would the account still be called telepathy if sensory cues, prior knowledge or a technical interface explained the correspondence? definition
Reported contact and content Captures what participants experienced and when they connected it to another mind.
A vivid impression and an accurate record of another person's contemporaneous thought are different objects of assessment.
Receiver experience
Preserves the initial experience separately from subsequent explanation.
Original impression
The receiver's words, imagery or feelings should be identifiable before later target information is incorporated.
- What exactly did the receiver initially report, and was it a thought, image, emotion, sensation or perceived message? definition
- Was that report recorded before the receiver learned what the proposed sender was thinking? provenance
Sender content and timing
Establishes the alleged source content and its relationship to the receiving episode.
Contemporaneous source record
A source record distinguishes a prospectively identified sender and thought from a person or event selected after an apparent match.
- What evidence records the proposed sender's mental content at the claimed time? provenance
- Were the sender, transmission direction and matching time window identified before the correspondence was noticed? measurement
Telepathy test design Defines what a controlled attempt to detect the claimed transfer would observe and exclude.
A telepathy test needs both a measurable correspondence and a defensible account of how ordinary access was constrained.
Target and response protocol
Defines target selection, sender exposure and receiver response capture.
Prospective trial sequence
The protocol specifies when targets become known, who knows them and when receiver responses become fixed.
- How is each target selected and presented to the sender, and how is sender exposure verified? measurement
- How is the receiver's response fixed before feedback, judging or disclosure of candidate targets? action
Ordinary channel exclusion
Examines sensory, interpersonal and technical routes that could convey target information.
Leakage and blinding
Controls must specify whose knowledge is restricted and which physical or procedural channels remain possible.
- Could speech, reflections, device traffic, experimenter behaviour or shared target knowledge reveal the answer? boundary
- Which participants and judges are blinded, and what observations would reveal a failure of that blinding? measurement
Correspondence and evidence Evaluates target matches and the conclusions they warrant.
An unusual score, a reproducible effect and a demonstrated mind-to-mind mechanism are separate claims.
Scoring and comparison
Makes success criteria and comparison assumptions explicit.
Match rule and chance model
An assessment requires a declared match rule, an appropriate baseline and a record of eligible attempts.
- What prospectively specified rule scores exact choices or free-response similarity, and are judges blind to the true target? measurement
- What comparison model accounts for target probabilities, repeated attempts, response biases and any dependence between trials? measurement
Replication and explanation
Tracks reproducibility and separates observations from causal interpretation.
Result-to-transfer inference
Evidence summaries retain missing data, protocol deviations and alternative explanations alongside any positive result.
- Are complete trial records, exclusions, stopping rules and independent replication attempts available for inspection? provenance
- What evidence distinguishes dependence on the sender's mental content from target access, procedural artefacts or other proposed explanations? boundary
Interpretation and agent response Determines how an agent may discuss, investigate or use a telepathy account.
Reported contact does not itself authorise conclusions about another person's thoughts, intentions or consent.
Claim calibration
Aligns language with the account's context and evidential support.
Experience versus external fact
The agent can acknowledge a reported experience while keeping its interpretation and alleged external content unverified.
- Which statements describe the person's experience, and which assert independently checkable facts about another mind? boundary
- How should the agent communicate the assessment without presenting an unverified message as another person's actual thought? action
Consent and consequences
Constrains tests and decisions involving alleged senders or receivers.
Voluntary testing and independent confirmation
Investigation requires willing participation, and consequential interpretations require ordinary independent confirmation.
- Have the proposed sender and receiver agreed to the test and to how their reports will be recorded or shared? action
- What ordinary confirmation is needed before an alleged telepathic message influences a decision about another person? action
Evidence and external alignment What the world already says about this thing, gathered so the model can be checked against it.
A model that cannot be lined up against existing standards, identifiers and practice cannot be adopted by anyone who already uses them.
Reported evidence
Findings from the breadth pass, kept separate from the structural claims.
Check these first
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- This covers the proposed paranormal phenomenon, not technologically mediated communication or fictional abilities.
- Parapsychologists disagree with mainstream assessments of experimental evidence; reported statistical anomalies do not by themselves establish telepathy.
- The listed kinds describe reporting and testing contexts rather than validated mechanisms; this account is from recall, without source verification.
- Which of these check these first hold for the sense of telepathy this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Kinds and varieties
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Spontaneous telepathy: reports arising outside planned tests
- Experimental telepathy: purported communication tested under controlled conditions
- Dream telepathy: purported receipt of another person's mental content during sleep
- Which of these kinds and varieties hold for the sense of telepathy this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Real-world use
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Subject of parapsychological experiments using sender-receiver tasks
- Concept used to interpret reported experiences of apparent mind-to-mind communication
- Narrative device in fiction and speculative storytelling
- Which of these real-world use hold for the sense of telepathy this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Typical measurements
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Target identification accuracy in forced-choice experiments - Chance expectation is 1/N for N equally likely targets; no established telepathic performance range - proportion of trials
- Which of these typical measurements hold for the sense of telepathy this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Failure modes and hazards
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Sensory leakage or inadvertent cues can make ordinary communication appear telepathic.
- Selective reporting, multiple testing and publication bias can exaggerate evidence.
- Coincidence, retrospective matching and selective memory can make spontaneous experiences seem evidential.
- Fraud or inadequately controlled demonstrations can produce misleading apparent successes.
- Treating purported messages as verified information can lead to harmful decisions or exploitation.
- Which of these failure modes and hazards hold for the sense of telepathy this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart
Recalled without web access and unsourced; every item is a lead to verify.
- Extrasensory perception - A broader category of hypothesized information acquisition that includes telepathy alongside clairvoyance and precognition.
- Clairvoyance - Purported information concerns an object or event without requiring another mind as its source.
- Precognition - Purported information concerns a future event; telepathy is distinguished by its proposed mind-to-mind source.
- Empathy - Understanding or sharing another person's feelings does not require information transfer outside known sensory and cognitive processes.
- Brain-to-brain interface - Transfers information through instruments and physical communication channels rather than the hypothesized unaided process.
- Which of these neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart hold for the sense of telepathy this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
What the second pass must settle
- Which reference works and research traditions provide materially different definitions of telepathy, especially concerning intention and emotional content?
- What do primary studies and independent replications establish after accounting for information leakage, selective reporting and analytical flexibility?
- Which free-response scoring methods best distinguish specific target correspondence from flexible retrospective interpretation?
- What experimental intervention could distinguish dependence on a sender's mental state from access to the external target itself?
- Should fictional telepathy remain a contextual branch of this registry entry or be linked to an existing model of fictional abilities?