Magical thinking and irrational ideas concerning health

[Graustein]

"vaccination causes autism" is older than the internet? I kind of doubt that, because autism spectrum isn't really known for all that long. The study linking autism to vaccinations was only made 1998 and only came to full swing about 4 or 5 years later.

Our modern idea of autism comes from Asperger's work in the late 30s, actually, but you're right that our understanding of it has accelerated tremendously in recent decades. I was a child when many autistic spectrum children just had the ADHD label slapped on them.

You're also right about the study, but the study was conducted to "prove" suspicions that already existed. It didn't create those suspicions, but it did snowball them into the dangerous form it is today. Incidentally, the study has been debunked numerous times now and the man responsible has had his medical license revoked.

[Grimtina]

Doesn't have to be. Widespread use of the internet is more recent than the existence of the internet. I have no evidence on the internet use of American mothers of young children in 2002 but my personal bias says it was low.

And that's where you are wrong. If you aren't an American mother who had young children then, and didn't show interest in common "mothering" topics, you might think that.

i have been part of autism support groups since 1998, and I can assure you, there were planty of mothers about, too much for our old chats at times.

[Grimtina]

You're also right about the study, but the study was conducted to "prove" suspicions that already existed. It didn't create those suspicions, but it did snowball them into the dangerous form it is today.

I see. I didn't know that. At least here in Germany, no such suspicions existed, the only worry was that a measle vacc might cause impotence.

[Serpentine]

Then its violating its own principles. That's the practitioner's problem, not the art's.

If homeopathy and conventional medicine were equally effective, then homeopathy's advantage would be how cheap it is to cure people with diluted water. Therefore any expensive homeopathic remedy is clearly an abuse.

If using homoeopathy means someone doesn't get proper treatment when they need it, homoeopathy is harming that person. Split hairs or go for technicalities all you want, this is the fact of it. The price doesn't come into it. Homoeopathy and conventional medicine are not equally effective; if the placebo effect is enough to cure someone of whatever ails them, great. But if it isn't, and that person doesn't receive treatment because they're taking homoeopathy instead, then homoeopathy is causing them harm. "Violated principles" or not.

[Graustein]

We could probably just lump this all under "irrational misconceptions about vaccines" to be honest

That plus "irrational misconceptions about autism"

The antivax movement as it is now is the place where these two meet

But yeah, the Vaccine/Autism thing is much larger in the Anglosphere; it's discussed with some regularity in Australia, and many of the actual sites and such that I've seen about it are US in origin. I can't comment on the UK but I have my suspicions.

[Asta Kask]

While it has some good points, I dislike that site because it makes believe that alternative treatments are bad when it is in fact the greedy, self important "practitioners" who abuse some of the things are. The best example is ayurvedic remedies, which I used before with good results, which are being diluted or stretched to make more money from it, or are outright fake. Doesn't help if people buy online. And because I know of the wrongness of some of the statements, I have issues trusting the rest.

Please use the diluted ayervedic medicine, if ayurvedic you must use. Ayurvedic medicine often contains large amounts of lead, mercury and arsenic.

Ok. I An alternative hypothesis - you sought help when you were fairly bad - this is when most people seek help. You took ayurvedic medicines, and this happened to coincide with you getting better on your own - most people get better on their own. And now the coincidence is not there, either because of chance or because you try it while you are still getting worse. And you blame that on bad medicine. How do you know that the medicine you bought is bad?

Any responsible, good alternative healer etc will tell you to see a doctor unless it is for stuff the patient either imagines in the first place (hypochondriacs come to mind) or something very minor. The problem comes from polluted products, greedy people and uncritical purchasdes mostly done on the net.

The malaria example came from a British study and the recommendations were made by several reputable homeopathy stores. The trouble seems to be that the responsible, good alternative healer is as common as the winged pegasus.

Look, the precepts of homeopathy go against all relevant knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of acupuncture go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of reiki go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of chiropractic medicine go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of ayurvedic medicine goes against all relevant knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.

If you do research on something with a low prior plausibiity - and I've done this myself - you have to be pedantic and super-careful about designing your studies. Alternative medicine practitioners are anything but.

[Grimtina]

Please use the diluted ayervedic medicine, if ayurvedic you must use. Ayurvedic medicine often contains large amounts of lead, mercury and arsenic.

Ok. I An alternative hypothesis - you sought help when you were fairly bad - this is when most people seek help. You took ayurvedic medicines, and this happened to coincide with you getting better on your own - most people get better on their own. And now the coincidence is not there, either because of chance or because you try it while you are still getting worse. And you blame that on bad medicine. How do you know that the medicine you bought is bad?



The malaria example came from a British study and the recommendations were made by several reputable homeopathy stores. The trouble seems to be that the responsible, good alternative healer is as common as the winged pegasus.

You only get in trouble when you DO use diluted products, as they don't help really, or too much. The issue with people is, they tend to take way too much of anything, no matter what type of remedy they are pursuing. If we go by that, abandon paracetamol because of the deaths, especially in children, it has caused.

I didn't seek help, it was offered to me. I can't get better on my own because I have conditions only getting worse with time. I was symptom free for this specific problem all the time I did ayurveda. Trouble was, it was not agreeing with the cancer therapy I got (local radiation, I was told I could get burns, much like you can get sunburn from taking natural antidepressants). And then the woman making the mixes moved and I don't trust anyone else not to sell me crap so I rather have symptoms.

I haven't had any personal bad experiences with alternatice meds except that standard homeopathy does nothing for me. At all. Natural remedies usually work, if sometimes differently. I become wide awake with velerian, for example lol

[Grimtina]

Look, the precepts of homeopathy go against all relevant knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of acupuncture go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of reiki go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of chiropractic medicine go against all relevant knowledge of physics and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.
The precepts of ayurvedic medicine goes against all relevant knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology. Prior plausibility - zero.

I go by my own experience. I do not take any form of science face value, alternative or standard. I'm a very scientific person, yet the claim of modern sciences misses out on a lot of things. I am a very spiritual person, but belief alone never did anything for me either. I'm very attuned to the so-called paranormal (which is as normal as breathing for me) but there are still a lot of claims I can't get my head around because they have never happened to me.

Everyone can only truly understand what they have experienced for themselves. And even then, it is often hard to say what the mind makes up to make sense of stuff or what is actually happening.

I know acupuncture/acupressure works for me. I can feel the changes in my body as it happens. No one has told me about how it is supposed to work, it was just done one day and it helped. However, I have side effects so I don't like it that much.
I know reiki works for me and my pets. One day, it will be explained by science. I am of the opinion one day everything will be explained by science.
I don't know enough of chiropractic stuff, but it worked for my husband.
And as I already said, ayurveda works for me. This to me is no surprise because we don't know the half of it yet how herbs, minerals and other things interact with us. I try to keep up to date with all the science publiucations, and I keep being astonished about how viewpoints in science change, sometimes rather quickly.

[Jormengand]

Grimtina, I hope you know where to go to collect Tim Minchin's piano, one of his legs and his wife.

[thorgrim29]

also, 1 million USD from the James Randi Educational Foundation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Mil...rmal_Challenge

[Jon_Dahl]

Oh playgrounders... Inspired by this thread, I've been delving into these supernatural beliefs today just out of curiousity, and it's all too depressing... My piece of advice: don't go there my friends. Don't ask.

[Grimtina]

I can't watch video on this tablet, but I have an idea that it is a type of humor totally passing me by anyway. And that "challenge" has been stupid from the beginning. You can never proof personal experience. It is even hard for people to proof to others they are really depressed, or are really suffering from chronic pain. MRI imaging is just beginning to improve this.

[Jormengand]

You can never proof personal experience.

No, but you can prove whether or not, say, homeopathy works, or people can read minds. It's what we call "The scientific method" and "Reasonable experimental conditions".

[Grimtina]

Actually, you can't. Not all things work reliably all the time, not even in science. I have PLENTY of experience with telepathy. I am sure one day the science behind it will be known.

However, claiming that something didn't happen because you can't reproduce or understand it is the epitome of ignorance. If there is no other explanation for what is going on, then the unlikely explanation is suddenly the likely one.

Again, the comparison to chronic pain works. For example, try to explain to someone a part of your body suddenly hurts real bad but there is no reason why this keeps happening. There are just some anecdotal stories in medical reports but nothing that explains it. The medical profession and likely everyone else will eventually dismiss you. You'll even be told you are imagining things. Or maybe you just want attention or get out of work. This doesn't change the fact that the pain is there. You just can't prove it. You can't trigger it either. Eventually you stop talking about it and suffer in silence (or abuse pain killers).

It is exactly the same with the so-called paranormal. If you have things happen which you can see or prove to yourself (and maybe a few others) but which defies the worldview of the scientific world, people do not believe you. Which is insulting to no end because, as with the pain problem, people accuse you, like you accuse me, of lying or being stupid or crazy. You have no idea how this hurts. You have no clue how insulting it is, in both cases, to be dismissed all the time.

Our society has a tendency to dismiss what people don't want to deal with or can't understand, from ignoring the suffering of others to down talking anyone who does not share the same worldview/experience. Which is what you are doing, badly veiled in "science."

Science means little if my very real experiences are blatantly ignored. I wouldn't wonder if this is the same for others, if they suffer from chronic pain or have "unexplainable" experiences. I also would not wonder if some of those people then fall into the hands of cheaters who only want their money, because science/society hasn't been taking them seriously. As we say here, it is a cat biting its own tail.

[Jormengand]

Actually, you can't. Not all things work reliably all the time, not even in science.

You can prove things beyond reasonable doubt. It's why evolution, and for that matter gravity (which is a laughable comparison, as it implies that we know anywhere near as much about gravity as we do about evolution) are called "Theories" even though FAIAP we know they're true.

If every single telepath ever to come to be has consistently failed to offer up the goods when there are any actual controls to prevent them making it up, it's not my problem; it's theirs.

I don't think you are, and have never accused you of being, a liar, an idiot, or a headcase. All I think you are is wrong, and there are entire fields of science devoted to why you think you're right, why you're wrong and how we can prove it.

We can show whether telepathy works by having a roulette-wheel of telepaths and normal people, having the normal people think of something, and having the telepaths try to guess what, and then repeating out experiment. If telepathy works, it will show; if it does not, it will not.

It does not show, and never has.

Pain is an internal feeling; you cannot prove that you feel pain.* However, you can prove whether or not telepathy works - if you successfully tell me what I'm thinking, then I can say that you are a telepath (whether you achieve it through greater magic mojo or the far more likely face-reading and psychological tricks to get me to show what I'm thinking).

*Though it is possible to measure a lot of the chemicals which cause emotions, and I imagine there may be some way of measuring pain, or at the very least that it is possible to create one.

[Grimtina]

You can prove things beyond reasonable doubt

.

Which doesn't automatically mean things you cannot yet prove do not exist. That is a fallacy science keeps falling for, despite the fact that, over time, quite a few unexplainable things have been perfectly explained.

If every single telepath ever to come to be has consistently failed to offer up the goods when there are any actual controls to prevent them making it up, it's not my problem; it's theirs.

There is no such thing as a telepath if it refers to consistent communication. That is just not how it works or what it is. It is even wrong to think it works all in words or images. Thus, those tests are pretty darn stupid, especially as you'd have to completely isolate the test persons from everyone else.

I don't think you are, and have never accused you of being, a liar, an idiot, or a headcase. All I think you are is wrong, and there are entire fields of science devoted to why you think you're right, why you're wrong and how we can prove it.

But I am not wrong. I know this. The "explanations" some people, including confused scientists, try to offer are as phoney as snake oil, and they seem to make up ideas on the spot just to color me wrong, no matter how far fetched their ideas were.

I find those desperate attempts to put something in the wrong just because it does not agree with your own experience sad.

We can show whether telepathy works by having a roulette-wheel of telepaths and normal people, having the normal people think of something, and having the telepaths try to guess what, and then repeating out experiment. If telepathy works, it will show; if it does not, it will not.

No you can't, because again, that is not how it works. It's not a guessing game, it's a connection, and it usually happens at random and can't be initiated, much like you can't want yourself to have to pee if you just went to the bathroom (well, unless you have a bladder issue). Imagine that, urine doesn't exist because the test people can't go right now.

I kind of blame the "show people" like Uri Geller for such misconceptions.

Pain is an internal feeling; you cannot prove that you feel pain.* However, you can prove whether or not telepathy works - if you successfully tell me what I'm thinking, then I can say that you are a telepath (whether you achieve it through greater magic mojo or the far more likely face-reading and psychological tricks to get me to show what I'm thinking).

Telepathy is even more an internal conception. You can't prove it. And that makes it as frustrating as pain. And as it is usually a short process and not lasting like pain, it will probably take a long time before neuroimaging finds it. But I'm rather sure one day it will happen.

And you know, I doubt that if I would tell you what you are thinking, you would accept it. You'd make it a lucky guess, maybe even if it happens more than once. Because that is what people do to me all the time. As I can't read facial expressions and am face blind on top of it, I would have thought it would make people more likely to believe me but nope. People just can't accept what they haven't experienced.

OTOH, if course, I have accidentally mentioned it before and people go "oh yeah, happens to me too, like when I thought of X and the phone was ringing..." and it is then pointless to try and explain coincidents to them. After all, I should know better. *facepalm*

'The result is that, like many others, I usually don't talk about it. It's like I either get ignorant, and usually arrogant, comments, or I get new agey folks who then want me to show my "party trick." Or sell me on their new, spiritual lifestyle because I would be some sort of special fit.

*

Though it is possible to measure a lot of the chemicals which cause emotions, and I imagine there may be some way of measuring pain, or at the very least that it is possible to create one.

They are working on it. Neuroimaging does wonders.

[endoperez]

Sorry Grimtina, but I disagree with you as well. Nothing in my knowledge allows for homeopathy, telepathy or other forms of magic. It's a pity, since I'd be all for them and they make awesome stories too, but I've never found it.

Sometimes there's something in there that inspired the magic, and in a few cases I've found how the stories got started and how the thing behind it is real... Like tai chi being a real martial art with exercises for what could be called "internal power" that gives an advantage in a fight. However, what I found has always perfectly aligned with science. Like the internal power being about alignment of bones and tendons to create a stable structure so the large muscles in back and in legs can do more of the work.

[Grimtina]

Oh fer christs' sake, telepathy isn't magic *sigh*

People are hopeless.

[endoperez]

Oh fer christs' sake, telepathy isn't magic *sigh*

People are hopeless.

Magic is the supernatural. Telepathy and homeopathy, assuming they do work, do not follow the same rules as the rest of the world. Supernatural power is magic.

[Jormengand]

telepathy isn't magic *sigh*

On the assumption that magic encompasses all that relies on forces that do not and cannot exist, yes it is.

Of course we cannot prove 100% that telepathy does not exist. But if we are stuck taking as fact only those things of which we are perfectly sure, we cannot evolve beyond a Descartes-esque "Je pense donc je suis," or at a push the incorrigibility of the mental. That is to say, I cannot prove beyond all doubt that this keyboard on which I type this message is any more than an illusion.

But we can prove things beyond reasonable doubt, and treat as true things which we know perfectly well may not be. I do not remember who it was who said "I suppose apples might rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms," but he (think it was a guy) was right.

In order to assist us, there are what logicians call logical razors. Consider Hitchens' razor, as follows:

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

This has been an accepted part of logical reasoning for centuries, even if it was only named a decade ago. Russel presents us with the example of the invisible, inaudible, intangible, and otherwise undetectable teapot which resides in the Kuniper Belt. We cannot disprove the teapot's existence, because the teapot is designed with the specific intention that it be impossible to disprove. However, it is illogical to conclude that the teapot, as well as the similarly undetectable unicorn flying about the room you are sitting in, exist. There are infinitely many definable, and ultimately non-disprovable entities or abilities that one might consider, and yet unless and until evidence is presented in the affirmative, we can assume their existence to be in the negative.

In any case, with telepathy, however you think it works, there exists an experiment that can disprove it. For example, find two people who are about to have a telepathic connection. Give to the one a piece of paper with 4 numbers on it, and have that one communicate those numbers to the other. Repeat the experiment for the same and other telepaths. If you say it does not work like that, I can continue to update my experiment to take into account how it does work.

One wonders also how telepathy can be wholly within one person, whereas by very definition it involves more than one people. Do you instead mean some kind of divination regarding another person, rather than direct mental communication? In any case, I'm sure there exists an experiment, again based upon whether or not you have acquired the knowledge which you state you are capable of acquiring.

[Grimtina]

Magic is the supernatural. Telepathy and homeopathy, assuming they do work, do not follow the same rules as the rest of the world. Supernatural power is magic.

Nonsense. Everything follows the rule of nature. There is no such thing as "supernatural" - it is the most silly word ever concieved, really. Just because we don't know a rule yet doesn't make it "magic."

[Jormengand]

Nonsense. Everything follows the rule of nature. There is no such thing as "supernatural" - it is the most silly word ever concieved, really. Just because we don't know a rule yet doesn't make it "magic."

And yet we do know rules which are in direct contradiction to telepathy, therefore we can rule that it does not exist.

[SiuiS]

If using homoeopathy means someone doesn't get proper treatment when they need it, homoeopathy is harming that person. Split hairs or go for technicalities all you want, this is the fact of it. The price doesn't come into it. Homoeopathy and conventional medicine are not equally effective; if the placebo effect is enough to cure someone of whatever ails them, great. But if it isn't, and that person doesn't receive treatment because they're taking homoeopathy instead, then homoeopathy is causing them harm. "Violated principles" or not.

This.

It is not feasible to separate homeopathy from the common usage of and reason for homeopathy. Does this mean an otherwise-whatever discipline is tainted by people being stupid? Yes. But oh well. The solution is to, yourself, shut down those quacks and rigorously examine and study the successful homeopathic treatments to learn how they work.

Western biomedical medicine had the same problem – antifreeze was sold as a child specific cough remedy. They learned what was dangerous, what worked, and punished those people who put others in danger. Homeopathy is the tool of people who aren't on the level enough to pass rigorous inspection. Get that inspection involved, and clear it's rep. But until that happens, you cannot support a discipline that actively puts the lives of people in danger because it tries to discredit reputed, routine and consistent medicine solely on the basis of that working medicine being "the competition".


For reference, I'm an actual practicing shaman, and even I say that the usual defense of homeopathy (an unfortunate term which includes both folk remedies and also anything anyone made up and said science didn't want you to know) is asinine.

[Grimtina]

On the assumption that magic encompasses all that relies on forces that do not and cannot exist, yes it is.

As telepathy is absolutely natural, because nothing can exist without being within nature, it is not.

Of course we cannot prove 100% that telepathy does not exist. But if we are stuck taking as fact only those things of which we are perfectly sure,

But I am perfectly sure. That you can't or don't want to experience it is not my fault. You likely also don't see the sky as purple. Well, I do. Nowadays we know this happens due to a difference in the way my eye is built, but some decades ago no one would have believed me either.

But we can prove things beyond reasonable doubt, and treat as true things which we know perfectly well may not be. I do not remember who it was who said "I suppose apples might rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms," but he (think it was a guy) was right.

Yeah and pigs fly... such sayings tend to pick the most silly of examples. What about "tomorrow a glowing cat will exist." Oh wait, that happened...

[QUOTE}
"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."[/QUOTE]

As I have evidence (of course only for myself as there is no way to record thoughts... yet), this is irrelevant.

In any case, with telepathy, however you think it works, there exists an experiment that can disprove it. For example, find two people who are about to have a telepathic connection. Give to the one a piece of paper with 4 numbers on it, and have that one communicate those numbers to the other. Repeat the experiment for the same and other telepaths. If you say it does not work like that, I can continue to update my experiment to take into account how it does work.

No one can be known to be "about to have a telepathic connection" - it just happens. Sometimes as random as the leaves fall in winter. Sometimes under stress or in great emergencies. And you don't usually communicate anything conciously either, as in "buy milk". At least that's never happened to me. Very often, a connection is just a milisec of knowing a concept (which is also true for insights into future or past events). Most of the time, you don't want it to happen at all. Ok, correction, I don't want it to happen most of the time. 99% of the time it is total pointless quantum junk, as I call it. Maybe others in the situation find it cool. There are people who like advertising, too.


I suppose in theory someone could exist somewhere who could deliberately do it reliably, but that may only happen once it is known how the process actually works, whichever energies/particles are linked to allow it to happen.

One wonders also how telepathy can be wholly within one person, whereas by very definition it involves more than one people. Do you instead mean some kind of divination regarding another person, rather than direct mental communication? In any case, I'm sure there exists an experiment, again based upon whether or not you have acquired the knowledge which you state you are capable of acquiring.

No, "divination" - I hate the word as it implies something involving gods - is a totally different sensation. It's the difference between watching TV and having an actual conversation, kind of.

What I mean is, you have 2 people who share, for a fraction of a second, some form of thought. Can be image, word, emotion, smell, appetite even. It is something only those 2 people know, no one else can know with the technology of today. And more often than not, one party isn't even aware they are sharing anything. Now even if both people know after talking to each other, and can be sure, for themselves, that this is what truly happened, there is no way to show this to anyone else.

In the few instances where it is obvious that something like this must have happened because chance or guesses can't explain it, and you'd think people would stop and think about it (not in a new agey way), what usually happens is that supposedly logical folks tries their best to explain it away in the weirdest ways possible. When nothing else works you get the "oh you were imagining things" because "imagining" is the fallback excuse of science for everything yet unexplainable. Like me seeing a purple sky. And it doesn't even matter if you can give a clear example of having had no other means to know of a situation. If you do that you get "oh you made that up after the fact. " What the heck is wrong with people? To me that is the same as denying evolution because it is not in an old book.

As a teenager, I was pretty much desperate about it, and at a loss as to why people would be so much in denial. With all the attention hogging frauds out there, not so much anymore. Everyone lives in their own world of personal experiences after all. But that doesn't mean it is not frustrating and, at times, exhasperating.

[Grimtina]

For reference, I'm an actual practicing shaman, and even I say that the usual defense of homeopathy (an unfortunate term which includes both folk remedies and also anything anyone made up and said science didn't want you to know) is asinine.

What is the usual defense? I know little about it except that there is basically nothing in the bottles anymore which could be seen as medicine.

[Grimtina]

And yet we do know rules which are in direct contradiction to telepathy, therefore we can rule that it does not exist.

Like what rules? I can't see any. In a time where quantum entanglement seems to be generally accepted, I find it utterly funny people would believe our thoughts would be anything else but quantum states. I forgot who it was who admitted that by any other standard telepathy would be counted as proven already.

[SiuiS]

The usual defense is "well, I've experienced it, so I know it's true even though every conceivable test has failed. It's not my fault that you nonbelievers don't believe enough to also have experienced it."

Here's the thing; exploding head syndrome exists. Hel, I have it. People with EHS experience the shock and sound of shattering glass. It's a very clear, very real experience. But this does not mean that there is any actual glass shattering. It means something has happened to their senses to give that impression.

In a world where we can clearly show the chemical markers of many things and where there is a provable and accepted mechanism which clearly explains why people experience things that are not happening, the heuristic experiences of the senses cannot be taken as a given. This is why for example, colors, time, distance have external, nonhuman measures. The color green is light in a certain wavelength, because Green is rather objective (though subjectively known) and still green even if you're colorblind, for example.

Telepathy makes sense. There are many mechanisms which could account for it in limited capacities. Who knows? Maybe it is a given. The problem is not telepathy. The problem is bringing up telepathy in relation to homeopathy. The one is patently false; the other is merely dismissible. But you've equated them, and people are going to respond to that. This isn't a conversation that can be won with anything but the grace to walk away and pick your battles. Sorry hon.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

What I mean is, you have 2 people who share, for a fraction of a second, some form of thought. Can be image, word, emotion, smell, appetite even. It is something only those 2 people know, no one else can know with the technology of today. And more often than not, one party isn't even aware they are sharing anything. Now even if both people know after talking to each other, and can be sure, for themselves, that this is what truly happened, there is no way to show this to anyone else.

Then perhaps you shouldn't call that "telepathy," since that experience doesn't match any definition of telepathy that I'm familiar with, whether we're talking fantasy, comics, New Age woo, or whatever else. What it does sound like is déjà vu, or dreaming things that later happen, or other similar experiences. We don't know exactly what causes déjà vu, but we do know that it is linked to various neurological or psychological phenomena (such as a much higher incidence in people with temporal-lobe epilepsy) and have strong evidence that is purely neurological and/or psychological in nature (i.e. probably associated with humanity's overactive pattern-matching skills, confirmation bias, and so forth) rather than being some sort of mystical precognition.

In the same way, if you reduce telepathy from "can actively send and receive words and/or images in a controllable and repeatable manner" to "can sometimes uncontrollably share a random impulse for a fraction of a second in such a way that it is statistically indistinguishable from coincidence," that's not telepathy, that's...statistically indistinguishable from coincidence. Heck, I once asked my D&D players what they wanted to order for dinner when they arrived for the session (all separately and at different times) and all four of them independently said Thai food without any communication between them. We didn't call it telepathy, just noted that it was a funny coincidence--and on the way out after the session, we noticed that someone had put up flyers for a Thai restaurant in the stairwell and it's entirely possible we all just latched onto that subconsciously.

Like what rules? I can't see any. In a time where quantum entanglement seems to be generally accepted, I find it utterly funny people would believe our thoughts would be anything else but quantum states.

Because people who actually understand quantum mechanics know that the effects of quantum-scale phenomena disappear rapidly as you move up in size towards the macro scale. When even two- or three-atom systems rapidly decohere after contact with their environment (and by "rapidly" I mean on the order of nanoseconds and picoseconds if you don't have really really good isolation) and the smaller neurotransmitters such as glycine consist of six or more atoms, there's practically no way that quantum phenomena could be relevant. In fact, this paper shows that quantum decoherence in neural tissue occurs at the femtosecond to attosecond scale (~10^-13 to 10^-20) while neural activity takes place at millisecond scales, so even at the closest ends of the scale the quantum decoherence takes place 10,000,000,000 times too quickly to have any noticeable effect.

[Grimtina]

But you've equated them, and people are going to respond to that. This isn't a conversation that can be won with anything but the grace to walk away and pick your battles. Sorry hon.

Huh? I've never mentioned homeopathy asides it never working for me.

[valadil]

Back to the original question....

People still believe in homeopathy

My mother in law believes in homeopathic fruit. By which I mean she takes fruit and dilutes it in sugar, butter, and chocolate until there's no discernible fruitness in the diabetic concoction and then insists that because there's fruit in it, it must be healthy.