this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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Flowers can communicate with bees via ultraviolet light, which is not a human sense. So by your definition flowers can telepathically communicate with bees. That sounds odd to me.
Also the exchange of electromagnetic radiation is physical interaction.
But that's very much my point. Telepathy, as defined in the dictonary, does not exist and so nothing should satisfy the definition.
Britannica dictionary defines it with "without using the usual sensory channels"
Cambridge dictionary with "without using words or other physical signals"
Collins "without speech, writing, or any other normal signals"
Merriam-Webster uses "extrasensory", and they define "extrasensory" as "outside the ordinary senses"
All of it seems to match radio communication, and all require it to be between two persons or minds, so flowers and bees definitely don't qualify.
Huh? No. All of these exclude radio communication quite specifically.
If some animal could pick up radio waves, it would necessarily have to have a sensory channel for radio waves. Radio waves are physical signals. Quite normal signals, too.
And while it's certainly not an ordinary sense in the real world, in the hypothetical where some animal did evolve the ability to pick up radio waves, it would be an ordinary sense for that animal.
Hah, I'd expect "ordinary" and "normal" here to mean "ordinary / normal senses for a human", not for the hypothetical telepathy user. That wouldn't be a very useful usage of these words, so I doubt that's what was meant here. There is always a reference point for someone saying something is "normal" or "ordinary", and that reference point, for a human dictionary, would be a human with human senses.
When I say that a shark has an extraordinary set of teeth, I obviously mean from a human point of view, and not claiming that it's not normal from the shark's point of view. And when I, or a dictionary, say that telepathy doesn't use usual senses, similarly the meaning is that they would be unusual for a human, and personally I would find a species having a sense for radio waves, to be unusual.
Well, no. But it does depend on your point of view. From inside that culture other cultures would be the extraordinary ones.
And when you're talking about the biology of animals it seems quite self-centred to compare everything to us. We are just one very specific animal.
Many animals have a vastly superior sense of smell, can see light outside our visible spectrum or hear sound outside our hearing range. But it would be silly to call all these things "telepathy" just because we humans don't have these senses.
But yeah, I don't really like the definition that heavily rely on the subjective qualifiers of ordinary/normal. I prefere the extra-sensory one. Because that clearly puts telepathy in the realm of an yet unknown or fictional mechanism, which is where I think the term belongs.
It would be silly to call these things telepathy because by themselves they don't facilitate a way to communicate thoughts between two minds. Even in the case of radio waves, a sense of radio waves wouldn't be telepathy by itself, unless there is also a mechanism of generating these radio waves, and unless these two mechanisms are used to communicate ideas between users, just like the sense of hearing is just one part of spoken communication.
If a species had an organ that could generate light outside the visible spectrum to accompany their superior eyes, and they were using it to talk, then yes "telepathic" would a sensible word to describe that. But that special organ, and the mental processing, would be the important parts, not the better eyes.
Well, I didn't write the definitions. :)
A lot of animals use pheromones to communicate details about themselves in a far more complex way than we could by smelling.
I think some of the peacock spiders, despite being already visually stunning, actually have UV light reflective surfaces (as well as the abililty to see UV) and use those in their mating display. So even while not being able to generate UV light they still use it to communicate in a way that we couldn't percieve. It might be a bit of a stretch, but in general you could communicate by manipulating/reflecting natural radio background waves, just as many animals do it with visible (or invisible) light.