The good thing about B5 was that it brought up a different perspective on telepaths. It went into how telepaths had to restrict their telepathy to avoid absorbing the thoughts of others.
Is There In Truth No Beauty said:
MIRANDA: On Vulcan, I learned to do things impossible to learn anywhere else.
KIRK: To read minds?
MIRANDA: How not to read them, Captain.
KIRK: I don't understand.
SPOCK: Doctor Jones was born a telepath, Captain.
KIRK: Oh.
MIRANDA: Vulcan was necessary to my sanity.
SPOCK: What most humans generally find impossible to understand is the need to shut out the bedlam of other people's thoughts and emotions.
One might suggest that most Federation citizens lack of fear of telepaths was due to more experience with them. A more tolerant view, if you will.
Most of the telepaths we've seen on Star Trek consider it rude to read someone else's thoughts without permission, and most people seemed to feel that was guarantee enough. That's very much how Voyager handled it: more "primitive" cultures feared telepaths, but the crew just takes Tuvok's word that he won't try to read their minds without permission.
I should note that:
Yes, Lwaxana Troi often suggested that she was reading the thoughts of others. She was totally okay with seeming rude, knowing that she was only kidding. She would suggest that Picard was thinking some lascivious thing about her, and both she and Picard knew that wasn't true, so she wasn't
actually violating a taboo, it merely looked that way to outsiders. And she got a bit of a kick out of that.
My own mother does similar things regularly (although without telepathy).
I remember a SF novel I read where the central character dated a telepath. When they became intimate, she explained that, like B5 and trek, telepathy training wasn't so much about learning how to read thoughts as how not to, how to shut them out. And, she explained, that was harder when the other person was thinking about
you. And also harder when you were in physical contact.
The result was that, when they were having sex, she would keep up a running babble of everything she was thinking, because she was aware of everything
he was thinking, and wanted to keep things fair.
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I've always thought that such is a very weird way of conceptualizing telepaths, myself. Especially a telepath from a
species of telepaths.
Being overwhelmed by the internal monologues of others would be like being overwhelmed by seeing people on the street or having a conversation with more than one other person or eating dinner with a group--no cognitively normal human would ever be bothered by these ordinary, everyday stimuli, so why should a cognitively normal telepath in a telepathic culture be imposed upon by nothing more than the run-of-the-mill thoughts of everyone in broadcast range?
There's also the practical and ethical questions of how and why a telepath would shut down their receptive faculties--to shut down my vision, I have to close my eyes. Then I run into walls. I would never choose to be blinded (unless she asked nicely and there was a safe word), so why would a telepath resign one of their primary modes of sensing the world for the vague convenience of others.
Now, a lot of these reflections don't find purchase with, say, Babylon 5's telepath model, because they're basically mutants who have not been exposed to selection pressures over thousands of generations, and hence some maladaptivity may be expected. And where Diane Muldaur got her esperness from is a question left open by "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", probably because it's a profoundly stupid idea for humans to have natural parapsychological abilities and the less it's explored, the better.
That said, I'd love to have someone explain to me how a telepath could ever subject me to anything other than a very cursory privacy violation involving whatever I happen to be thinking of at the moment, when whatever magnetic or electromagnetic effects which would affect my brain function would wipe hard drives, or just plain boil my skin off--and which would be even stronger at their epicenter, where stands the offending telepath. Probably involves quantums.
For that matter, I'd like to have explained how a human like Riker can pick up thoughts broadcast at him. It's barely plausible enough that Betazoids can sense and parse human thoughts, in English, Japanese, or Punjabi, as the case may be,* because I can suspend my disbelief and pretend they have ridiculous sensitivity to IR and microwave emissions** or have intensely well-crafted biological SQUID-like organs, but where's Riker's antenna? Boo.
*It's ironic because this is the same show that in most other respects uses plausibility for toilet paper, but Heroes S1's Matt Parkman is actually one of the more interestingly limited and "realistic" fictional telepaths. He could only experience what was actually being thought by his target, thus leaving behind the unlikely notion that a telepath could activate the brain changes associated with memory recall remotely and without the target's awareness; and, additionally, he had no magical grasp of the language of his target's internal monologue, being easily baffled by HRG's ability to think in Japanese.
**The worst part about being an electromagnetically-based telepath might be the enormous background noise caused by technology, especially alien technology designed for use by low-frequency insensitives, e.g. the blackbody from a replicator or perhaps even radio communications.
Edit: Regarding specifically Troi, however, what the hell was up with the counselor having as one of her duties
personnel evaluations? I don't know about you guys, but I doubt I'd speak very frankly to a therapist who is also responsible for deciding whether I get promoted or not. Maybe with the ubiquity of mind-rape lite that must be inherent with social interactions with telepaths, however, the two positions are no longer considered inimical, since everybody knows you have dreams about killing your mother anyway. : /
