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Light On Light Through


You'll hear a little of this and lot of that on Light On Light Through - my reviews of great television series and movies, my interviews with authors and creative media people and their interviews of me, my media theory and political commentary, thoughts about my favorite cars and food and space travel, discussions of my music, and a few of my readings from my science fiction stories. In the first years, starting in 2006, I put up a new episode at least once a month.  More recently, it became more or less often than once a month, usually less often.  But in the Summer of 2020, I began getting more in the mood to podcast, and on 17 October 2023, I began publishing a new episode of the podcast every Tuesday at 12:01 pm -- a minute after Noon (New York time).  - Paul Levinson 

24 October 2021: Interview about Light On Light Through podcast

26 December 2023: Chuck Todd interviews Paul Levinson about Alternate Realities on The Chuck Toddcast  

The Call to Mental Telepathy

Aug 25, 2007

Mental telepathy is still a long way off.  After all, communicating via voice and fingers, to people near and far, in response to every impulse, is not the same as communicating mind-to-mind.

But consider this:

The first electronic medium - the telegraph - required the user to travel to an office outside the home to send a message.  The telephone greatly improved this, by allowing sending and receiving of messages from within the home, and via voice. 

That still left you incommunicado when you were walking down the street, with no pay phones in sight.

But cell phones came to the rescue on that score - the cell phone in effect obsolesces the phone booth - and enables us to communicate to anyone, anywhere, wherever we or they may be happen to be. 

And now iPhones and Blackberries and similar media are widening the cell phone's flow, bringing written words, pictures, moving images, and even images with sounds into our immediate grasp.

All of this is physical, and therefore not yet mental telepathy.  And the process is far from complete - there are many kinds of communication, like the long-predicted videophone, which are not yet integrated into the ease of the iPhone.

But the distance between what our mind imagines and wants in the realm of communication has never been shorter.

And when Bluetooth is thoroughly integrated with all iPhone features, and the features increased, the distance will be further shortened.

And then ... well, we'll be knocking on mental telepathy’s door.  We may never have it, actually.  But we’ll be close.


Paul Levinson
sixteen and a half years ago

Yeah, tvindy, that would be close indeed - in fact, if all that was required was a thought to move the nanobots into action, then it would mental telepathy completely...

tvindy
sixteen and a half years ago

Neural implants with some sort of wireless technology would be a lot like mental telepathy. We could go into Second Life in our head.

Ray Kurzweil (among others) talks about the eventual existence of nanobots in our bloodstream that can lodge themselves in our brains to send, receive, and block signals, allowing us to enter perfect virtual worlds indistinguishable from reality, where we can have encounters with anyone in the world over the internet.