I'm inclined to think that certain psychic phenomena are indeed electromagnetic in nature. If (other) animals can read electromagnetic fields, what's stopping human beings from learning how to do so over the course of many generations?
What's stopping them is that evolution is not Lamarckian. You can't "learn" to develop an entirely new sense. One might evolve eventually if there were a survival incentive, but only if the potential for it already existed in the genome. Evolution is not an intelligent process that responds specifically to new needs; it's just a selection of randomly occurring traits that happen to improve survival odds. So any new ability is usually a refinement of something that was already there. For instance, feathers probably evolved for insulation or display before they started to be adapted for flight. So first humans would have to develop an electromagnetic sense in general, and then it might become specialized for some other purpose.
Of course, since we're talking about humans, there's another option besides natural evolution, which is genetic engineering or cyborg modification. But if we can just implant radios in our brains and communicate that way, it kind of eliminates the need to develop telepathy.
Is it possible that seeing or otherwise sensing auras in other humans is the first step toward acquiring this sense as a species?
No, because "auras" are a myth. There's no scientific evidence for any such thing, and perceptions of them are probably the result of vision problems, synesthesia, or hallucinations. The Kirlian photography technique that's alleged to detect auras is nothing of the sort; the light patterns it generates are created by the high-voltage electricity that the technique imparts to its photographic subjects.
The question has been raised as to how humans would be able to distinguish between EM impulses generated in the brain versus those associated with nonsentient sources such as electrical wiring. I'd argue that humans would learn to self-select for those impulses that are peculiar to human brain chemistry--up to and including the actions of pheromones--just as the human brain self-selects what images can safely be ignored by the eyes.
It's not a question of selection, it's one of detection. The EM output given off by the brain is far too faint to read from a distance without an enormous antenna, something far bigger than a human body. And it would be drowned out by all the other EM noise. Sure, your eyes can select images up to a point, but you can't select to see the light of a distant firefly against the face of the Sun. It's just too completely drowned out by the surrounding input.
At what point are multiple instances of intuiting another person's emotions correctly without prior verbal communication considered to be expressions of empathic ability? In short, when does reading people constitute a psychic phenomenon rather than a quotidian hit-or-miss determination?
When such a phenomenon can be demonstrated by a repeatable experimental process, and when alternative explanations for it can be conclusively ruled out.
Which is hardly the case in your example. Empathy is real, but there's nothing psychic about it. It's simply a matter of observing others' nonverbal communication (expressions, tone of voice, body language) and identifying it with one's own emotions. We have things called mirror neurons that give us the ability to experience the perceived actions and reactions of other people as if they were our own. That's empathy -- simply the ability to relate to others' feelings and share in them. The term has been co-opted by science fiction as a term for the telepathic detection of emotion, but that's not its real meaning. The ability to intuit others' emotional states is already a natural function of most human minds (aside from those on the autistic spectrum).
And, as I've probably mentioned, animals can sense emotions in other, perfectly natural ways, including a keen sense of smell letting them detect people's hormonal shifts, or perhaps an ability to see changes in body heat in infrared.
The assertion has repeatedly been made that for psychic powers to be considered believable in science fiction, they need to have limits--and that these limits are not made apparent in Trek. I disagree with the latter statement. In TOS at least, the limits are there. They're physical, and they're specific to each person or other being. Spock having to meditate before performing his first meld, Spock reeling into Kirk's arms after being overwhelmed by the Horta's pain, Spock having to be roused by Kirk after melding too deeply with Nomad--all of these examples demonstrate that psychic abilities are limited by the physical stamina of the person or being that possesses them, quite aside from his or her baseline sensory processing capacity.
That's not the point. The point is that too many SF writers use psi powers as an excuse to ignore laws of physics and common sense, to cheat and enable characters to do the impossible without explanation. They have psychics do things that are physically absurd, like draw mass and energy out of nothingness or transform a cruise ship into a bunny rabbit, and the only explanation given for how that's possible is "It's psionics." Which isn't an explanation at all, it's a copout.
The distrust of psychic powers by the scientific community--and by extension, quite a few sci-fi readers--seems to stem from the fact that these powers aren't reproducible in controlled conditions as per the scientific method. However, if we allow the assumption that psychic powers are limited by an individual's stamina and processing ability, we also have to assume that psychic powers won't manifest themselves uniformly across an entire race or species. There would indeed be a bell curve, and at present it only serves to confound the scientists performing their examinations--and frustration has a way of producing hostility, which in turn sets up a bias that can compromise the integrity of an experiment.
Nonsense. Good experimental design would certainly take individual variation into account, and would test a large enough sample of subjects to cancel out any such accidental bias. Come on, that's one of the most basic principles of statistical sampling. Anyone who knows anything about the experimental method would know how to select a statistically representative sample of the entire populace. The scientific method is specifically designed to identify and weed out sources of bias,
including the personal prejudices of a given experimenter. That's why it demands repeatable experiments conducted by multiple independent experimenters.
What you're forgetting is that many scientists in the past actually thought they
were finding meaningful evidence of psychic powers, rather than being frustrated by failing to find them. But then it turned out that either their experimental design was bad or they had been the victims of deliberate fraud. This is what's so great about science: it's self-policing. Scientists constantly try to prove themselves and each other
wrong. That way, errors and biases and flawed experiments can be weeded out and we can come closer to understanding reality. If something real were there at all, science would eventually draw closer to it as it weeded out the bad results. Instead, science has moved away from its previous findings that seemed to suggest the possible existence of psi powers, because
those were the bad results, usually as a consequence of deliberate fraud or wishful thinking.
But I have heard that ley lines are part of or affect electromagnetic fields.
Ley lines are another myth. The term was coined merely to describe ancient tracks in the British landscape, and then was co-opted in 1969 by pseudoscience. It's one of those bits of "ancient lore" that are less than 50 years old. If there were actually any real phenomenon there connected to the Earth's magnetic field and detectable by humans, you'd think people would've noticed it sooner.
What I do know know is that many police do have a heightened sense of awareness of their surroundings and of people, and they call them hunches. Perhaps this is how their hunches work.
Hunches are the result of pattern recognition and cognitive processing going on below the conscious level. What we perceive of our own thoughts is just one layer of what's actually going on in our brains -- indeed, there's a theory that the conscious mind is a brain's simulation of itself, a model that it uses to direct its attention and activity. The processing that generates that model goes on outside of our conscious awareness, therefore. And our brains can perceive and analyze things outside our conscious awareness and then insert those realizations into the model, making us aware of them without necessarily knowing where they come from.
Seven emotions have universal signals: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise and happiness. You can learn to spot them.
Yeah, they look
like this.
Although if you want more information on what psychics actually do, i suggest you look into cold reading.
Yup. Basically the same thing Sherlock Holmes did, except he was honest about it.
The distrust comes more from scams and dishonest people. there are a lot of those.
But it's important to note that distrust is not a bad thing in science. The scientific method is about distrusting everything, especially your own beliefs and desires and perceptions. That's why everything has to be tested and double-checked and put through a gauntlet of attempts to disprove it. You don't take anything on faith, because faith can be wrong.
I've long been interested in psychic powers myself, but I am extremely skeptical of them. I am not entirely closed to the possibility, but i do know a fair amount of scams and dishonest tricks they use in real life.
I used to be willing to believe in anything, and I'm always open to learning new things. But my problem with the idea of psychic abilities is that nobody's ever been able to satisfactorily define what they
are. Sure, we know what they're alleged to
do, but nobody's ever offered a model of what they are physically, how they do what they do. It's just a bunch of descriptive labels and assertions. Description isn't enough. There needs to be an explanation.
Like with dark matter. "Dark matter" isn't a meaningful term, just a placeholder for "some sort of stuff we can't see." But it didn't stay there. Physicists came up with a variety of models for what dark matter might actually be -- axions, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), massive compact halo objects (MACHOS), even a deficiency in our understanding of gravity that made us think there was dark matter when there actually wasn't. Various specific explanations that had measurable, testable properties and thus could potentially be ruled out or verified. But nobody's ever come up with an explanation for psychic powers beyond "psychic powers." There are no testable models for what the nature and mechanism of those powers might be. And, of course, there's no plausible evidence that they exist at all.
And then there's the evolutionary argument. If these powers did exist, they'd give any organism that had them an enormous survival advantage. Therefore, they wouldn't be hidden away in some tiny segment of the population. They'd be strongly selected for by evolution, and by now probably everyone would have them. Not to mention that they'd probably exist in other species as well. Sure, there's the counterproposition that maybe this is something entirely new that humans are just beginning to evolve, but the odds that we'd just happen to be alive at the time when such a novelty was coming into existence are vanishingly low. (Plus there are the other objections already cited: How would it work? And what pre-existing biology would it be a modification of? New traits don't just come out of thin air.)
Whereas the odds that humans might believe in something that doesn't really exist are enormously higher. We've always believed in magic and mystical powers. Every supernatural belief that people hold today has an analog in ancient lore about sorcerors and demons. There's no reason to think there's anything more to it than old superstitions with new labels stuck on them to make them sound more scientific.
