Is ESP, in particular telepathy, not computable?

Question

In Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” he writes in 6(9) The Argument from Extrasensory Perception that

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

Based on Turing’s remarks, I suspect the task of telepathy is not a computable process, that is, a task one could expect a Turing machine to perform.

Although it seems intuitively obvious that they are not computable tasks, how would one argue that telepathy, or other ESP tasks, are not computable?

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Edit: There is a psi phenomenon I am particularly interested in. In Dean Radin's "Selected Psi Research Publications" there is one he co-authored called "Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments". Human subjects, but not computers, were able through their intentionality to affect a double slit experiment.

How would one formulate that task as an algorithm to run on an AI machine? If that can be formulated it looks like it would serve as a modified Turing test without involving human judges to determine if the simulation convinced them. If that can't be formulated, then strong AI does not explain human mental behavior.

A video of a talk by Radin, "New Experiments Show Consciousness Affects Matter", summaries the above and similar results.

Answer 1

Although it seems intuitively obvious that they are not computable tasks, how would one argue that telepathy, or other ESP tasks, are not computable?

One would have to argue that there exists no test that can measure the phenomenon of telepathy and, further, no such test could possibly exist. In other words, not only has such a measurement never been made (it just might not have been found yet), but it is logically impossible that it could ever be made. This response assumes the laws of physics as currently known. However, if ever it were ever discovered that telepathy follows a discrete set of laws, then once the process became clear, a telepathic Turing machine would become theoretically possible.

Answer 2

Communications usually happens via energy, or vibration. Somewhere along the EM spectrum. There's RF, but X-rays are also in that spectrum. Telepathy would be a form of communication.

If telepathy exists, might close proximity telepathy differ from telepathy between two minds separated by a great distance?

If we're considering the former, some EM energy put out by the brain, could explain it. If a brain's thoughts are associated with that specifically-patterned EM, then receiving that signal and interpreting it would be within the range of known physics.

Kind of like the physics of how two radios work, as a transmitter and receiver. (Also well within known laws of physics!)

Maybe it's spread-spectrum "signal?" The brain puts out a LOT of signal!

As for telepathy over distance, that's got to be a different phenomenon.

In any case, if it's the case that telepathy is linked with EM emissions, that is certainly computable, as is EM and energy science, generally.

Answer 3

An excellent reference would be Peter Hasker’s The Shadow of Consciousness. He discusses the efforts in recent decades to understand both the easy and hard problems of consciousness both algorithmically and neurologically. Not everything can be computed. And Hasker details how this issue has bedeviled even the “easy” problem.

Not the lack of computability includes physics not just consciousness. Basically anything that is underdetermined is not computable. Quantum phenomena are underdetermined. So is any macro scale object which is chaotic in behavior, which has been found to be the case for a surprisingly large range of macro objects. For underdetermined physics, any effort to model it will have to be statistical.

You also presume that physics itself is closed. It cannot be, if science is non reductive, and the majority view of scientists and philosophers of science is that science is pluralistic. IR other sciences achieve useful insights about our world that physics cannot ever explain. Also science as a whole cannot be closed unless scientism is true (that all that matters in the world is subject to science), and the vast majority of current thinkers hold that it is untrue, and necessarily so.

So, to your experiment:
No, it is likely not computable. From a purely physicalist POV this for multiple reasons. First because the physics being used in the experiment was underdetermined quantum phenomena. Second the experiment treated mind as determining the undetermined physics, which violates physicalist assumptions. Third the physicalist models of mind, either emergent, or identity theory to neural processing, presume phenomena that are themselves likely underdetermined (emergence is likely a spontaneous statistical phenomena, and our recursive neural nets look likely to be chaotic). Finally, the details of consciousness, and emergence, are not understood in physicalist terms and this lack of explicit specificity makes computation impossible.

If one takes a non material perspective then the logic problems in the experiment can go away, but the lack of clarity of terms like intentionality, consciousness and emergence would remain.

Answer 4

You assume that “a Turing machine” is a Turing machine and nothing else. But when I was a little kid, I had a toy that could do backflips, and today someone could easily integrate a powerful computer into it, making it a Turing machine that can do backflips.

I assume when you talked about “turing machine” you really meant an artificial intelligence. If we could build what would be a genuine artificial intelligence, and assuming that telepathy, if it exists, must follow the laws of physics (maybe laws we don’t know yet), there’s no reason why a telepathic AI should be impossible. And doing backflips - no problem.

Answer 5

A Turing machine (in the strict sense) only takes input from its tape and so cannot interface to the real world in any other way. Turing-complete machines, or in the real world almost-Turing-complete machines such as conventional computers, can take input from other sources. If a computer had an interface that could read thoughts at a distance then it could be telepathic certainly, but of course once we understand how that process works, the magic is gone.