Alan Turing's paper in which he first lays out the idea of the Turing Test for AI is surprisingly prescient in many particulars. But one thing that stands out is when he is considering various arguments for why computers might not be able to pass the Turing Test, he considers the objection that humans will be able to display some telepathic abilities that computers won't as one of the strongest counter-arguments. He considers it nearly a given that these abilities exist.
The article mentions Star Trek and Vulcan mind melds, which continue to be an important element of the franchise today, but misses a more obvious case: there was a lot of ESP and telekinesis motifs in the Original Series in the 60s, that were severely toned down or outright abandoned by the 90s. For example, you don't hear much about Gary Mitchel anymore, except for that one episode of Lower Decks.
Also, I think a lot of sci-fi shows had direct ESP references before mid-90s, then the trope suddenly died out.
> Also, I think a lot of sci-fi shows had direct ESP references before mid-90s, then the trope suddenly died out.
Everything parapsychology dies out very suddenly in the mid 1980s. Ghostbusters debuted June 8th, 1984, and within 18 months most universities had already gotten rid of the department. Intelligence agency experiments in remote viewing and such all just fade away nearly as quickly. Police departments using psychics for leads has a sharp downward trend from that date onward. About the only thing left was late-night 900 number commercials for Miss Cleo, that last until the mid-1990s.
Comedy is a powerful sociological weapon, able to obliterate entire memetic ecosystems.
It was always there, just that at some point in tng S2 telepathy became less of a prominent identity for characters who possessed it.
There was always this thread of exploring beyond the dimensions of space and time in star trek, beyond what our minds are capable of grasping, beyond the information channels that we can immediately perceive. Getting closer, occasionally with the help of other aliens who are on that same voyage, on the nature of reality that brought us all here.
"That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."
TNG has several species like the Q that have evolved to godlike abilities and there are episodes where a humanoid undergoes the final stage of physical evolution and then ascends to a higher plane of existence (becomes something like the Q). Star Trek Picard (relatively new show) had a lot about exploring internal conflict and I think even in TNG one of the final episodes has Q tell Picard that the final frontier is internal and doesn't involve mapping out stellar nebulae.
Other shows like Stargate also have the concept of "ascension" as a pivotal plot point of many episodes. Farscape covers this as well in several episodes. Things like mind melds and mind reading are pretty common in these shows once someone ascends.
There is a lot of "woo" in science fiction as it is kind of hard to still believe in gross limitations for us over a cosmic scale of thousands of millions of years. Assuming we don't die out, I'd believe our ultimate potential is unfathomable to us now.
There is definitely a difference between "these beings have become so advanced as to do things we would believe impossible like reading state directly out of our brains" and "for vague and in fact aggressively unspecified reasons this critter can read the 'minds' of those around them". When people pontificate about "brain uploading" they are certainly speaking of some physical process that does what is now currently impossible, but may not be impossible forever.
But perhaps the more relevant objection is that episodic television can't really be read for more than the vaguest of philosophical content across their wholes. One episode can be written by an ardent materialist and the next by a New Age guru writing a New Age story wrapped in science terminology, and as long as they do a good enough job in general writing ability and following the series bible for consistency, it might take a lot of analysis to notice. Such series aren't so much statements themselves as platforms.
Wasn't there this woman with purple uniform, who's mother had a crush on Piccard, who could read peoples emotions from a great distance and speak in their heads?
I don't think I liked her character or episodes built around her. But I don't really remember why.
She was half human and half Betazoid, her empathic abilities coming from the non-human half. She only managed full telepathy in rare circumstances, like with a lover (Riker) or her mother (a full Betazoid).
GP is talking about characters who were 100% human - there was a second one in that same TOS episode, and they mentioned a standardized test all members of Starfleet were given to determine how strong their natural ESP abilities are.
Growing up I read a lot of “golden age” science fiction, and I remember realizing how many classic “hard” sci-fi novels and short stories feature super mental powers like telepathy, precognition, teleportation, etc.
- Asimov’s Foundation series
- Herbert’s Dune series
- Larry Niven’s Known Space stories
- Heinlein’s Stranger from a Strange Land
- Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man and Tiger Tiger
- Clarke’s Childhood’s End
I’m sure there are more that I forgot to mention.
It really did seem to be a pervasive expectation that the mind was the next frontier for seemingly magical scientific advancements. But it never panned out with actual results, and mental powers faded from hard sci-fi stories.
From a working author's PoV, super mental powers were great stuff. The "hard" SF audiences really liked the idea - I'm sure it helped that many of them imagined or fantasized themselves being somewhat "super" in the mental dept. Such powers add a bunch of (conveniently arbitrary) rules, which puzzle stories could be built around. Unlike (say) FTL drives, there was no expectation that the author should devise a detailed "how it works" backstory. Nor explain how the protagonist could manage to afford or invent it. And most mental powers are an easy short-cut to the character's emotional states. (Not to assert that sophisticated and nuanced character portrayal seemed a priority of most "hard" SF authors, back in the day.)
An interesting counterpoint to this is the use of telepathy in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish cycle, which is generally considered as more "soft" sci-fi. Several of the early books in the series revolve around "mindspeech", which is a form of telepathy in which it's impossible to knowingly lie:
> Mindspeech between two intelligences could be incoherent or insane, and could of course involve error, misbelief; but it could not be misused. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie. (City of Illusions)
In her later works in the same setting, Le Guin backed off from this, although she never explicitly retconned it out of existence:
> I couldn’t use it in a story any more, because when I began to think seriously about the incalculable effects mutual telepathy would have on a society, I could no longer, as it were, believe in it. I’d have to fake it.
You can read a lot of the stories from Analog, the magazine that Campbell edited for many years, here: https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html. I was a fan back in the day, but going back now I see a lot not to like. And certainly many of the stories involved ESP.
That article links it back Joseph Rhine, and then to Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism. Ultimately maybe the blame lies with Emanuel Swedenborg for inspiring every kind of woo-woo.
Actually the mind control aspect of the Foundation series was my least favorite part. I know it was a big part of the storyline but I would’ve preferred a heavier emphasis on “psychohistory” and chaos theory. The telepathic element, especially in books 4 and 5 was left unexplained. The only thing that would make sense to me is if anyone with mind control powers was actually a robot.
Apparently Asimov linked the robots into Foundation some decades afterwards, so maybe he agreed with you. (I've not read past the original trilogy, so can't say for sure.)
If you want to portray some sort of "next step in human evolution", it's an easy thing to portray that audiences would have some understanding of from other media.
The more obvious choice of just portraying people as having extremely high intelligence, is unfortunately a bit of a trap. Authors generally fail at creating characters smarter than themselves, for perhaps obvious reasons.
This makes me wonder about AGI and super intelligences. Why would our brains be able to engineer something more intelligent than our brains?
The only room seems to be in emergence from incredible amounts of processing power and data or perhaps many brains working together can overcome the limitations of one brain.
I always just thought of telepathy in science fiction as being like faster-than-light travel: clear nonsense, but a very convenient and interesting method of avoiding physical realities that interfere with telling certain types of stories. It's an aspect of the "fiction" part of science fiction.
But, relatedly, I think that a certain kind of category error happens that can play into this as well: a lot of science fiction is actually fantasy, just in a technological setting. Star Wars, for instance, is not science fiction so much as it's fantasy.
I mean how much of telepathy is in reach of science now? Think of two individuals with some kind of neurolink style device. Could they be able to communicate with just thought?
I know it's not your main point, but I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible? Just because the technology is wrong doesn't mean the idea is not interesting.
I am a big sci-fi fan and I disagree here. I think there is a difference between soft and hard sci-fi, but that difference is more about how consistency with the rules is treated. Soft sci-fi can be thought of as fantasy with a future setting, while hard scifi sticks to it's own world rules tightly, and often explores the consequences of these rules and the characters are just a means for that. (Relatedly, I think there can be hard and soft fantasy as well)
Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi. His novels explore some very far out ideas in terms of how the world may work, but he sticks to the consistency and really explores the politics and consequences of that universe.
Clarke also does this, but to a somewhat lesser extent. In many of his stories, the world and its rules are the main character, and the actual beings are the supporting characters.
I think this is a vast oversimplification of how knowledge works. Like yes, no one knows with perfect certainty what the laws of physics or whatever else are, but that hardly means _anything_ is plausible or worth entertaining.
I amuse myself with the foundations of physics and I'm so sure that FTL is impossible that I find science fiction that uses the idea almost tragically silly, simply unwilling to grapple with the limitations imposed on us by the vastness of space.
A major part of the hard soft dichotomy is how the tech is treated and talked about in the story too though, not just the level of the tech. You could make a hard-scifi version of Star Wars, you'd just be expected to provide more justification and narrative around hyperdrives than you get in the current soft scifi version.
When I was making the list above, I actually went and looked at my bookshelf of ancient sci-fi paperbacks. C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy is a nominally “science fiction” work that I excluded and would consider soft sci-fi. It’s set in space with aliens, but is really a fantastic story (in this case an allegory) that makes basically no attempt to extrapolate or connect with hard science as we understand it today.
A funny one is the Pern series, which starts out as a sword and dragon fantasy series, but then like 10 books in we find out it is actually hard sci-fi (!) with space ships, orbits, genetic engineering, computers, etc. But there is still that telepathic connection with the dragons…
>I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible?
It isn't about whether a technology is possible. "Soft SF" is SF where the actual scientific details don't matter. It is about people, their cultures, and their emotions. And really, just a metaphor for our own society. For example a story about how a future VR technology is addictive and causes people to interact less in real life could be just a metaphor for real life smartphone/Internet addiction. The story doesn't need to (and probably doesn't) explain how the VR tech works because it doesn't matter. "Hard SF" actually is based on actual science, and that is the focus of the story. It isn't that one is better than another, but they are different.
Aren't mental super powers pretty much ubiquitous in folk tradition in the form of magic, the working of miracles, or perhaps spiritually derived "powers" such as the siddhi of Indian tradition? (The traditional description of siddhi - i.e. 'attainments' or 'accomplishments' - may be the closest thing to a purported 'science' of such super powers within existing traditions. At least, it's a lot harder to find this kind of analysis in other plausible sources, such as from the Western esoteric tradition which is also a lot more obscure.) It seems weird to link these things so closely to 20th-c. hard sci-fi, when they are far from typical to that genre.
Akshually, spice, combined with genetic engineering like Paul's, is merely a nootropic which allows an overclocking of brainpower to the point where one knows how to shine light on the holographic universe's underlying 2D plane, changing qubits so as to effect 3D spacetime curvature allowing FTL travel (navigators) as well as how to code inject brains by adding certain inflections to your words (the voice) as well as calculate the branching paths of reality and probabilities thereof (seeing the future). No magic involved.
Shields though? No fucking idea. Okay, nevermind; it's soft sci-fi.
I also noticed that Starship Troopers threw in hypnosis among its many military technologies, for some reason, which feels like a related sci-fi concept.
I don't think teleportation counts. Feels like either Star Trek-type super-science or outright mysticism.
Starship Troopers also had "special talents" -- "sensers" capable of detecting and mapping Bug tunnels underground, "memory men", "lucky men", and telepaths.
Heinlein at least nods to the possibility that the sensers' abilities were the product of very powerful hearing, but telepathy would be tougher to explain that way.
> I’m sure there are more that I forgot to mention.
It's a primary theme in the Darkover books.
Those were kind of frustrating for me because I enjoyed the fantasy setting, but the author was very clear that what interested her was the conflict that occurred as it was contacted by spacefaring magicless future Earthlings.
Such powers are of course also major themes in traditional mythology. I like to note that modern time travel stories split over whether it's possible to alter the timeline, but time travel also features really prominently in traditional mythology and the message there is always that the timeline can never be altered by any means.
I'm curious what mythology has time travel? I can't think of any in Greek and Roman mythology. Celtic mythology doesn't seem to have time travel either, unless you count going forwards at different perceived speeds.
I think cyberpunk made it a cheap trope, so we don't notice it anymore, it's just a depressing constant in stories, with grubby, real world consequences like having to live on a toxic cocktail of anti rejection drugs so your outdated Neuralink V implants don't go septic.
You don't need high concept telepathy. You just need an implant. Then you can hear your mission handler in your ear, feel the traumatizing sensorium of your attack drones as they get crippled by an ICE strike, or send your consciousness on a one last valiant cyber dive that inevitably leaves your body in a vegetable state.
Telepathy has become as cheap and lowdown as human life in this setting, so it no longer gives us wonder, but a self reproaching dread of, "are we really going to do this to our Bodies and Minds? I guess we are...."
Indeed, modern technology surpassed some of the capabilities that telepathy in science fiction was imagined to achieve. But still something is unattainable.
If we're going to talk about telepathy and all mean the same thing by it, we need a rigorous definition of the term. Does anyone have one?
If asked to guess, I'd start with "the communication of meaning among humans in the absence of signification", but I am unstudied in the field and have no idea what prior art exists.
edit: I did say "rigorous". Please cite your sources, and note that while I am admittedly guessing above, I'm borrowing the terms "meaning" and "signification" from the jargon of semiotics in order to do so; considering the subject matter, to raid a sort of philosophical "fringe science" for terminology seemed apropos.
Telepathy would convey instant understanding in both the receiver and the sender. I don't think humans in their current form could handle it. We'd be completely exposed. It's not at all like verbal communication if you read accounts of NDEers.
I think this sort of negative definition is not very useful, though. As soon as telepathy is demonstrated, it becomes an existing sense. And that's not just word chopping, it's pretty evident that this is going to bother people and that they will believe it can't be "real" telepathy.
In a non-trivial way, this means that "telepathy" is defined as something that does not and can not exist. If it exists, it won't be telepathy, because it'll have to be something real, and as such, it won't be "real" telepathy.
If you do give it a concrete definition that permits it to exist, it is often the case that it turns out that we have it in the real world already, unless you define it as some sort of ability to invasively read people's minds or something, in which here's hoping it never exists in this universe.
Is intuition a sense - or is that potentially some people excelling at reading physical cues that 99.999999% of people can't see or relate to what someone is then likely thinking?
You have to contextualize it with the historical background.
The Cold War was ongoing and there was an arms race in research occurring between the Soviet Union and the United States with regards to directed energy weapons and influence/control of the mind.
Ultimately, the mind control vision came true far beyond those cold warriors' dreams. The answer wasn't chemical or subliminal or mind-ray like they thought, but tailored, addictive, adrenaline jolts of a/b tested, emotional, persusive jolts, infinitely scrolled in a social proof setting. And the victims seek it out, you don't have to force it on them.
Funny there was no mention of why this societal obsession mostly faded away in the 1980s and 1990s: Every single experiment into tele-whatever and psychic whichever under suitably controlled conditions revealed no result or outright fraud. No exceptions.
And the person responsible for defining suitably controlled conditions was magician James Randi. As a magician he recognized the tricks that con artists like Uri Geller were using. The scientists of that era like Puthoff and Targ had no understanding of perception hacking (which is what stage magicians do) so they were easily fooled by con artists who did know perception hacking.
James Randi put a stop to all that with several investigations of his own that made public fools of such scientists, and he funded a 1 million dollar prize for anyone who could prove they had psychic abilities under controlled conditions. The prize was never claimed.
James Randi was notoriously biased, stubborn, and dismissive of any evidence contrary towards his views.
His Million Dollar Challenge has been criticized for its lack of transparency and fairness. The challenge was not conducted under the auspices of an impartial third party. Instead, only Randi himself and his organization set the conditions and judged the outcomes. This raises questions about bias, as Randi had a vested interest in maintaining his stance that psi phenomena do not exist.
Despite the fact that several participants in the Stargate Project, such as remote viewer Ingo Swann, produced results that were statistically significant under controlled conditions, Randi dismissed these findings outright. He did not engage with the data or attempt to replicate the experiments. Instead, he simply declared that because psi phenomena _cannot exist according to his understanding of the laws of physics_, any positive results must be due to fraud or error.
Furthermore, Randi's challenge required 100% success rate for claimants to win the prize. In any scientific experiment, such a requirement is unreasonable as it does not account for statistical variance. Even established scientific phenomena cannot always be demonstrated with 100% accuracy due to various factors such as measurement errors or environmental influences.
Lastly, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that no one claimed Randi's prize does not conclusively prove that psi phenomena do not exist. It could simply mean that the conditions set for the challenge were too stringent or biased. Or... the sheep-goat effect really does exist, and the attitude & beliefs of the experimenter affect the result.
The application process for that prize is always brushed under the rug, and in general it doesn't surprise me no one has won it. The criteria set you up for failure, for example demanding a far higher success rate than the psychic claims themselves. Sometimes to the point where they'd have to go through months of continuous testing, then be disqualified by a single off day.
The obsession with telepathy via fiction is probably a large part of why people buy into Neuralink, despite it not actually doing anything new (other than eschewing ethical standards).
Musk's invasive BCI is so far, slightly less technically impressive than hobby toys you can build with exterior electrodes and nowhere near as impressive as the research from BrainGate that it builds off of.
It's baffling why anyone grounded in reality would lend credence to applying his "startup culture" approach to this field especially.
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Also, I think a lot of sci-fi shows had direct ESP references before mid-90s, then the trope suddenly died out.
Everything parapsychology dies out very suddenly in the mid 1980s. Ghostbusters debuted June 8th, 1984, and within 18 months most universities had already gotten rid of the department. Intelligence agency experiments in remote viewing and such all just fade away nearly as quickly. Police departments using psychics for leads has a sharp downward trend from that date onward. About the only thing left was late-night 900 number commercials for Miss Cleo, that last until the mid-1990s.
Comedy is a powerful sociological weapon, able to obliterate entire memetic ecosystems.
There was always this thread of exploring beyond the dimensions of space and time in star trek, beyond what our minds are capable of grasping, beyond the information channels that we can immediately perceive. Getting closer, occasionally with the help of other aliens who are on that same voyage, on the nature of reality that brought us all here.
"That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."
Other shows like Stargate also have the concept of "ascension" as a pivotal plot point of many episodes. Farscape covers this as well in several episodes. Things like mind melds and mind reading are pretty common in these shows once someone ascends.
There is a lot of "woo" in science fiction as it is kind of hard to still believe in gross limitations for us over a cosmic scale of thousands of millions of years. Assuming we don't die out, I'd believe our ultimate potential is unfathomable to us now.
But perhaps the more relevant objection is that episodic television can't really be read for more than the vaguest of philosophical content across their wholes. One episode can be written by an ardent materialist and the next by a New Age guru writing a New Age story wrapped in science terminology, and as long as they do a good enough job in general writing ability and following the series bible for consistency, it might take a lot of analysis to notice. Such series aren't so much statements themselves as platforms.
I miss 90s Sci Fi.
I don't think I liked her character or episodes built around her. But I don't really remember why.
GP is talking about characters who were 100% human - there was a second one in that same TOS episode, and they mentioned a standardized test all members of Starfleet were given to determine how strong their natural ESP abilities are.
The idea of multi person “melds” abounds too: the Borg collective, the Contiuum.
- Asimov’s Foundation series
- Herbert’s Dune series
- Larry Niven’s Known Space stories
- Heinlein’s Stranger from a Strange Land
- Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man and Tiger Tiger
- Clarke’s Childhood’s End
I’m sure there are more that I forgot to mention.
It really did seem to be a pervasive expectation that the mind was the next frontier for seemingly magical scientific advancements. But it never panned out with actual results, and mental powers faded from hard sci-fi stories.
> Mindspeech between two intelligences could be incoherent or insane, and could of course involve error, misbelief; but it could not be misused. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie. (City of Illusions)
In her later works in the same setting, Le Guin backed off from this, although she never explicitly retconned it out of existence:
> I couldn’t use it in a story any more, because when I began to think seriously about the incalculable effects mutual telepathy would have on a society, I could no longer, as it were, believe in it. I’d have to fake it.
https://reactormag.com/introduction-from-ursula-k-le-guin-th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell
Mind control was such an event that psychohistory could not account for. Sometimes things just happen and spoil our plans.
The more obvious choice of just portraying people as having extremely high intelligence, is unfortunately a bit of a trap. Authors generally fail at creating characters smarter than themselves, for perhaps obvious reasons.
The only room seems to be in emergence from incredible amounts of processing power and data or perhaps many brains working together can overcome the limitations of one brain.
Hah, I've noticed that for years. Anderson's "Brain Wave", however, is a decent attempt at what more intelligent people would be like.
But, relatedly, I think that a certain kind of category error happens that can play into this as well: a lot of science fiction is actually fantasy, just in a technological setting. Star Wars, for instance, is not science fiction so much as it's fantasy.
Greg Egan is often cited as one of the current greats when it comes to hard sci-fi. His novels explore some very far out ideas in terms of how the world may work, but he sticks to the consistency and really explores the politics and consequences of that universe.
Clarke also does this, but to a somewhat lesser extent. In many of his stories, the world and its rules are the main character, and the actual beings are the supporting characters.
I think this is a vast oversimplification of how knowledge works. Like yes, no one knows with perfect certainty what the laws of physics or whatever else are, but that hardly means _anything_ is plausible or worth entertaining.
I amuse myself with the foundations of physics and I'm so sure that FTL is impossible that I find science fiction that uses the idea almost tragically silly, simply unwilling to grapple with the limitations imposed on us by the vastness of space.
Usually it also implies that it grapples with the nitty gritty details to "earn" the tech. Hohmann transfers vs. brachistochrone trajectories omg squee https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
A funny one is the Pern series, which starts out as a sword and dragon fantasy series, but then like 10 books in we find out it is actually hard sci-fi (!) with space ships, orbits, genetic engineering, computers, etc. But there is still that telepathic connection with the dragons…
It isn't about whether a technology is possible. "Soft SF" is SF where the actual scientific details don't matter. It is about people, their cultures, and their emotions. And really, just a metaphor for our own society. For example a story about how a future VR technology is addictive and causes people to interact less in real life could be just a metaphor for real life smartphone/Internet addiction. The story doesn't need to (and probably doesn't) explain how the VR tech works because it doesn't matter. "Hard SF" actually is based on actual science, and that is the focus of the story. It isn't that one is better than another, but they are different.
The whole series is filled with inexplicable "magic" and "just so" scenarios.
Shields though? No fucking idea. Okay, nevermind; it's soft sci-fi.
I don't think teleportation counts. Feels like either Star Trek-type super-science or outright mysticism.
Heinlein at least nods to the possibility that the sensers' abilities were the product of very powerful hearing, but telepathy would be tougher to explain that way.
It's a primary theme in the Darkover books.
Those were kind of frustrating for me because I enjoyed the fantasy setting, but the author was very clear that what interested her was the conflict that occurred as it was contacted by spacefaring magicless future Earthlings.
Such powers are of course also major themes in traditional mythology. I like to note that modern time travel stories split over whether it's possible to alter the timeline, but time travel also features really prominently in traditional mythology and the message there is always that the timeline can never be altered by any means.
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Just because it doesn't look like us holding our fingers to our temples, doesn't change the effect.
With neuralink it'll look even more like what you imagine.. wild to see the dismissal when its closer than ever.
You don't need high concept telepathy. You just need an implant. Then you can hear your mission handler in your ear, feel the traumatizing sensorium of your attack drones as they get crippled by an ICE strike, or send your consciousness on a one last valiant cyber dive that inevitably leaves your body in a vegetable state.
Telepathy has become as cheap and lowdown as human life in this setting, so it no longer gives us wonder, but a self reproaching dread of, "are we really going to do this to our Bodies and Minds? I guess we are...."
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Said in 75% jest and 25% all seriousness (if you have a long time horizon on it)
Even minor telepathy plot points seem miles ahead of that: didn't Spock's half-brother take over the entire spaceship by healing everyone's trauma[1]?
1: except for Kirk (of course :)
If asked to guess, I'd start with "the communication of meaning among humans in the absence of signification", but I am unstudied in the field and have no idea what prior art exists.
edit: I did say "rigorous". Please cite your sources, and note that while I am admittedly guessing above, I'm borrowing the terms "meaning" and "signification" from the jargon of semiotics in order to do so; considering the subject matter, to raid a sort of philosophical "fringe science" for terminology seemed apropos.
at its most basic, it's an email
In a non-trivial way, this means that "telepathy" is defined as something that does not and can not exist. If it exists, it won't be telepathy, because it'll have to be something real, and as such, it won't be "real" telepathy.
If you do give it a concrete definition that permits it to exist, it is often the case that it turns out that we have it in the real world already, unless you define it as some sort of ability to invasively read people's minds or something, in which here's hoping it never exists in this universe.
The Cold War was ongoing and there was an arms race in research occurring between the Soviet Union and the United States with regards to directed energy weapons and influence/control of the mind.
But I get what you mean with social media / the modern internet. Probably the most direct way you can get without actual modulation of neurons.
And the person responsible for defining suitably controlled conditions was magician James Randi. As a magician he recognized the tricks that con artists like Uri Geller were using. The scientists of that era like Puthoff and Targ had no understanding of perception hacking (which is what stage magicians do) so they were easily fooled by con artists who did know perception hacking.
James Randi put a stop to all that with several investigations of his own that made public fools of such scientists, and he funded a 1 million dollar prize for anyone who could prove they had psychic abilities under controlled conditions. The prize was never claimed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
His Million Dollar Challenge has been criticized for its lack of transparency and fairness. The challenge was not conducted under the auspices of an impartial third party. Instead, only Randi himself and his organization set the conditions and judged the outcomes. This raises questions about bias, as Randi had a vested interest in maintaining his stance that psi phenomena do not exist.
Despite the fact that several participants in the Stargate Project, such as remote viewer Ingo Swann, produced results that were statistically significant under controlled conditions, Randi dismissed these findings outright. He did not engage with the data or attempt to replicate the experiments. Instead, he simply declared that because psi phenomena _cannot exist according to his understanding of the laws of physics_, any positive results must be due to fraud or error.
Furthermore, Randi's challenge required 100% success rate for claimants to win the prize. In any scientific experiment, such a requirement is unreasonable as it does not account for statistical variance. Even established scientific phenomena cannot always be demonstrated with 100% accuracy due to various factors such as measurement errors or environmental influences.
Lastly, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The fact that no one claimed Randi's prize does not conclusively prove that psi phenomena do not exist. It could simply mean that the conditions set for the challenge were too stringent or biased. Or... the sheep-goat effect really does exist, and the attitude & beliefs of the experimenter affect the result.
Musk's invasive BCI is so far, slightly less technically impressive than hobby toys you can build with exterior electrodes and nowhere near as impressive as the research from BrainGate that it builds off of.
It's baffling why anyone grounded in reality would lend credence to applying his "startup culture" approach to this field especially.