Does telepathy automatically cross language barriers? This was a question that popped up in a gaming session lately. I didn't consider it much then, but after a while I started to think about it.
Many modern cognitivists claim that it is our language which form our thoughts. This makes sense.. when I think, I tend to think in Swedish (me being a swede and all). So, what happens if I send my thoughts to someone else? I propably would send Swedish thoughts (or English, if I put some effort into it). This line of reasoning makes it at least plausible to me that telepathy may very well be language dependent.
Imagine what would happen if I knew telepathy, and tried to telepathically communicate with an italian? His mind, his thoughts are all italian. All of a sudden he would have swedish thougths in his head. He would here them but he wouldn't know what these thoughts mean.
However, and this is a big however. Telepathy is a made up concept anyway. There is no "right" and "wrong", but rather a telepathic concept as it fits into any given setting. In these short paragraphs I have at least presented a line of reasoning for why telepathy mustn't need to be language independent.
4 comments:
Pictures and emotions are not based on language, at least not much.
That is true. I was thinking about the scenario where you send pictures instead of words. If we assume that you can send your own thoughts as they are in your own mind, we can use that as a basis for how it would be to send images.
It is actually quite hard to keep a sharp image in your head, and not everyone has the talent to do it. I for one, is very bad at drawing, and much of that comes down to me not having a particulary image-memory. I tend to think in symbols and charts, not detailed pictures.
There is also a reason for why many artists uses reference pictures. They just don't have the clear picture in their heads.
So, in an RPG, if someone wanted to send a detailed picture of something by telepathy, I think I would require some kind of artist-skill-check. The exception is if you want to send symbols or maps. These, however, are not always universal.
Emotions, on the other hand, would be much easier to send. Not as specific, but much more language-independent.
In some games there has been a character or two that communicate with animals via, say, telepathy.
Say, you want to ask a wolf if ten horsemen passed through their lands.
You could communicate the smell of a horse or the sound of hooves beating the ground or the sound the riders make when spurring the horses on. And the wolf could answer by you running through a game trail, sniffing the ground, and running more and smelling the open plains and fires the plainsmen use to cook their food.
Or some similar. Mental images and feelings and the like, more then exact pictures.
The more alien the creature is, the harder it will be to communicate with it.
How could this be extended to communication through language barriers?
Good question (and example).
It seems to me that what is transferred is experiences/ memory/ expectations.
Maybe you can transfer/ read a part of your state of mind. For instance, let's say you are in a foreign land, chasing an evil warlord. Problem is, it's his country, and his subjects consider him to be good and their saviour.
When you enter a village where you believed he passed, you first try to read peoples minds as to whether your image of him has passed.. but you can't find anyone with a recent memory of an evil bastard pass through, no anger, no fear. But, as you widen your mind, you realise that many of the inhabitants are in awe, as if they have almost been through a religous experience. You can't pick up any visuals, but you feel their joy and you share their feeling of gratitude when they kneeled as their saviour passed buy.
You realise now that his was a big day for many of them. Tracking his passing through the village is no problem, but you also realise that you are about to hunt down the one they hold so high. In the future, when you search their minds for an evil murder, it will be the image of you that's there.
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