More on moths
Continuing from previous item.

The 1951 Philco publication mentioned an article by Ted Powell in Proceedings of IRE. Amazingly, the IEEE has preserved those archives, and the Powell article is here.

Powell was answering an earlier discussion by Bibbero, who was debunking telepathy by using Shannon information theory. Powell was more or less rebunking the potential of telepathy.

Bibbero's main point:

Consider, then, how much more rapidly information could be transmitted by telepathic than by aural or visual means. It is within all our experience that an almost infinitely large number of impressions can occur during a dream, which may require only a fraction of a second for completion. A bandwidth 1000 times that required for video transmission would not be an unreasonable assumption for telepathy. If, say, a 10^10 cycle bandwidth is required for a single telepathic transmission it would cover the entire range from subsonics to the experimental radar hyperfrequencies. If now we further allow each person on earth a separate band of 10^10 cycles for his thought transmission, we must push the upper end of the telepathy frequency spectrum to 10^19 cycles, even if we used all the lower explored frequencies. More logically, we should start with 10^19 cycles and continue up to 10^29.

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Powell's rebunk made the same point I tiresomely repeat. Nature isn't bound by our theories. Nature has ALWAYS found a way to do EVERYTHING in the technical realm, including an infinite number of tasks that we haven't yet begun to understand or even observe. He cited the moth infrared perception as just one example of Nature's superiority.

R. J. Bibbero's entertainingly speculative comments on the telepathy sense lead to the same bewilderment most investigators feel when they attempt to account for observed extrasensory-perception phenomena. Perhaps some clues may be found in the incredible sensitivity of the obscure senses possessed by some animals (and humans) and in the discovery in insects of infrared senses which strangely correspond with Bibbero's belief in the existence of hyperfrequency effects.

Doctor Tromp found that dowsers actually locate underground water and bodies of metal by virtue of their feeble diamagnetic and ferromagnetic fields. Some "healers" can also detect sick areas in a body by sensing the tiny differences in body electrical potentials over such areas. This was verified by the electrocardiogram and by body potential checks.

Professor Miles of Yale University had discovered that insects smell by means of infrared senses and that 7 male moths released from a moving train over a 1-mile stretch found, within hours, a female moth sealed in an hermetic container. This was confirmed by J. P. Duane and J. E. Tyler of Interchemical when they found that a female moth's temperature was some 11° higher than that of her surroundings and that she emitted infrared radiations about 8 microns in wavelength. The male moth's antenna hairs were 40 to 80 microns long, and they varied in 4 micron steps, or half the female moth's main infrared emission.

Powell also notes an idea that was instantly dismissed in 1951. Now that biologists are removing their theory goggles, they're finding the old "nonsense" is precisely correct.

Doctor Rajewsky, a German biologist, has the rather unusual theory that the human brain not only employs electrical impulses to control the body, but also radio waves, with individual cells acting as miniature oscillators.

Bibbero was missing the point by treating information as bits, and he was also missing the basic definition of information. Bibbero assumed that telepathy had to contain all the data needed for a transfer between machines. If you want to tell a simple robot how to walk, you need to send all the angles of all the joints at each microsecond.

Human communication doesn't work that way. Even by Shannon's definition, information is the unexpected or unpredictable part of the needed data. When we talk or write, we never pour out all necessary data because we know in advance what the receiver knows. We have empathy. Perception is always DELTAS FROM A MOVING BASELINE, and communication is the same. If I want you to fetch me a sandwich, I don't have to specify every angle of every finger and elbow and hip and knee to accomplish the task. I just say "How about a burger?". You know where the kitchen is, you know where each food item is stored, you know how to operate the pans and spatulas and knobs on the stove, and you know all the steps needed to cook a burger.

Telepathy, if it exists**, would be the same. A few dozen bits would suffice to call up most images in a culture with plenty of shared assumptions. In Sorosian lands where culture and skills and division of labor have disappeared, we're getting much closer to the unintelligent mechanical robot that needs to hear each angle and vector for each microsecond.

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** For clarity, I'm open but unconvinced. I've experienced (seemingly) a few dramatic examples, but natural communication methods aren't limited to a few dramatic examples. When Nature goes to the trouble of setting up a system, the system is used constantly. There's always a range of abilities for any talent. A few people do it more accurately and delicately than others, and a few can't do it at all. But most people do it well enough most of the time. If most people were using telepathy most of the time, we'd have a vastly different world.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Sorosia

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