Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

So would it be possible to arrange psi powers into classes based on their plausibility and work ability under current physics?

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Not usefully. The categories are something like "thoroughly implausible" and "extremely implausible."

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

The technology already exists for humans to give machines mental commands. It isn't much of a stretch to imagine that same technology being developed further to provide the equivalent of psi powers at least in terms of functionality.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Another point that may be worth mentioning is that whilst science is a powerful tool for acquiring knowledge there is still much about the universe and ourselves we don't understand.

The mind-body problem is an example: how does something nebulous like a thought translate into a physical action like picking up an object? We assume that the mind can control the body because it is part of the same physical system and everything else, that we don't seem to be able to control, is not part of that system. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if the entire universe was one interconnected system in a real physical sense? Not in a Deepak Chopra mumbo-jumbo pseudo-science kind of way. If that were true you might be able to manipulate anything just by thinking about it in the right kind of way. Hello psi powers! If that's how the universe works then I would only rule out psi powers that blatantly break well established physics. For instance teleportation unless the actual travel is limited to the speed of light. As what happens when scientists teleport elementary particles in a laboratory.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Still there *are* degrees. An obvious first cut is does it require more energy than a human metabolism (more than about 100 W)? Those are clearly more impossible than something that you could theoretically have the energy for, and eliminates much of the flashy stuff.

Probably the most plausible psi powers are the limited "ESP" kind - the ones that you could make a case are processing of information your senses could be gathering but humans just don't interpret - Empathy (smell based), or Dark Vision based on echolocation, or Clairaudience (only when you can directly see the noise source), followed by the ones that let you do things to your own body that it does normally do, but faster or better or longer - things like reacting faster (Combat Reflexes), stopping bleeding, purging poisons or diseases, surviving a hour in freezing water, not breathing for minutes at a time, or doubling your ST for a single action.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I'm curious about why we'd group them by plausibility. What's the goal in GURPS? Is this for a campaign setting? And if we're talking about the real world... none of the psionic abilities is plausible... because they don't exist and there are no known mechanisms that would support them as defined.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

If your going to allow psi powers of any kind, including IMO dange sense, you have to accept that in your setting psychic abilities are real, but not yet understood (possibly because of the taboo stigma on seriously studying them) by science. From there it really depends on how far you are willing to run wit lh that.

I woukd allow things like:
Danger sense, empathy, precognitin, psychometry, etc.

I would not allow things that affect physical objects grossly such as tk, or pretty anything ending in kenesis.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I discuss real-world belief in psi in GURPS Psionic Campaigns. From my studies, here's what "believer" paraphysicists and parapsychologists seem to think:

Definitely exists: Anti-Psi, Astral Projection, ESP, Probability Alteration ("micropsychokinesis").

Probably exists: Psychic Healing, Psychic Vampirism, weak Ergokinesis or Psychokinesis

Might exist: Teleportation, strong Ergokinesis or Psychokinesis

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

It's not difficult for a moderately trained athlete to generate 150 W, and there are videos of a computer architect giving a presentation while riding a stationary bike attached to a generator powering 150 W of computers. It looks like maximum peak output is closer to 2 kW and sustained output can reach 400-500 W for an hour or more.

So that's a more generous margin, but any TK who lifts more than a championship bodybuilder is out of the "plausible" category, even if TK is plausible in the first place.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Using the square of ST in W as sustained energy production (a ST 10 human being would produce 100 W, which would translate a 2,200 calorie diet). I would suggest that a realistic sustained psychic power could not use more energy than ten percent of the sustained energy production (10 W for a ST 10 human). In general, that would limit 'realistic' psychic powers to Animal Telepathy, Anti-Psi, Astral Projection, Dream Control, ESP, Probability Alteration, and Telepathy. I think that Biokinesis, Ergokinesis, Psychic Healing, Psychic Vampirism, Psychokinesis, Psychometabolism, and Teleportation are not 'realistic'.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

It gives an idea of how much work is needed to backlog the ability into a given setting if it is desired.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Why?

I know that there are some settings where this makes sense, but it appears to me to be in direct contradiction to the OP's question. Could you enlighten me how it isn't, please?

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

There are two measures of 'realistic'

The first is 'which violates observed physics least'

The second is 'which is in greatest conflict with observation so far'

The difference is the degree of surety you place on known physics. Seeing the future, for example, is one of those things that violates observed physics the most while violating human observation the least.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Which impossibility is more impossible than another impossibility sounds impossibly subjective.
We need some parameters to confine the question into a workable format.

For a modern setting, you all but need a global Illuminati level conspiracy hiding all evidence of a not insignificant aspect of basic reality.

I suppose one could go with internal spooky powers versus external macroscopic abilities.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

What does that even mean though? Either something violates physics or it doesn't. The only differences are in our ability to understand the how. As in creating matter out of thin air is obviously impossible even to children, while getting why teleportation is as well requires a bit more education.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I was more replying to an unproductive post about how psi is impossible. I was merely stating that a certain level of the suspension if disbelief is required for an RPG that uses psychic abilities, much the same as one that uses fireballs, Orcs, or FTL drives.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

The difference is in how highly we rate our ability to understand the how. Or rather, how sure we are of the extrapolations we call science. And yes, I freely confess that from a scientific view, the list that uses science as its primary measuring stick does a lot better.

But if you ask from the point of view where you ask what could be happening without science noticing, you get a different list. This list is most likely based on 'hardest to prove', and 'most subtle and believable' rather than 'most in harmony with predictions of science'.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

God of the gaps is no less silly for magic as it is for literal gods. It requires the supernatural to not only have physics breaking powers, but that they are insanely effective at hiding it all.

Your theme seems to still fall down to what seems kind of possible to average adults rather than children. Adding new forces seems more possible than creating matter out of thin air, but it isn't really.
Which is why I think a good parameter is education/knowledge required to define powers as impossible rather than merely unproven.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I suppose more information is do.

This is for a setting where a hyper advanced (like TL13) interstellar civilization in the far far far future broke down do to a cataclysmic event. Now for this setting I'd like to present some Psi abilities that are present in people do to radical biological engineering that's occurred in the thousands of years this civilization was in it's Golden Age. So I guess in the end I'm looking for psi powers that are just impossible for humans to do for biological reasons like lacking the "hardware" so to speak. Not powers that the action of usage regardless of who or what the subject is are impossible do to physics based reasons.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I don't think science should be the primary measuring stick. I think "what the readers will take" should be. Or perhaps "what is plausible in-setting."

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Possessing physics breaking powers somehow is incompatible with being insanely effective at hiding it all?

Be that as it may, the real question is not the philosophical question of the possibility of psionics but how to present it in a way compelling to a reader.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

No, it doesn't. All it does is eliminate a particular mechanism to underlie such effects, i.e. that they derive from the chemical energy consumed by the person controlling/directing them. Other mechanisms might not suffer from that limitation.

That may sound like nit-picking, but it's not. If we don't recognize that distinction, we risk falling into the same trap as the old assertion that the Sun could not be billions of years old because no plausible chemical reaction could power it that long. Which made perfect sense in terms of Daltonian atomic theory, but was still erroneous.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I think that comment #13 was on the right track.

Rather than measure level of implausibility via physics, measure level of published support. For example, remote viewing (as measured by Targ et al at SRI) got some papers published in "real" journals, so that would be quite plausible. You could easily rate Psionics based on how many papers were published in how main-stream a journal.

Let me add an expansion: that stuff published is science journals is most plausible, stuff published in the New York Times is next most plausible, regular newspapers less plausible, and the national enquirer least plausible. And roll from there.....

Joshua Levy

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I'd say the ability to "sense" someones presence without the usage of your know senses would rank pretty high up there.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Hoo boy...I honestly don't know if mentioning the current issues about reproducibility and the reliability of peer review in the various journals would add to the discussion or distract from it.

Suffice it to say that the idea that the NYT is more credible than any other paper is questionable, too. It depends on the subject, the reporter, and some other things too.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Obviously, sceptics like James Randi, and many of the more clued-in scientists, exude a permanent and very strong Anti-Psi aura...

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

In a hyper advanced society all psi powers are plausible but you may want to place some limitations based on current knowledge of physics.

For example: teleportation is limited to the speed of light, PK requires an external power source, precognition is only a prediction not information travelling back in time and anything spontaneously created is actually drawn from somewhere else to comply with conservation of energy and mass.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Mindlink. After all there are plenty of people close enough that you would swear that they really did have a mindlink.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

The thing is, that observation is *correct* - the sun can't run on a chemical reaction and be billions of years old. In order for a psi power to do something that requires more energy than a human can generate, it has to tap an external source of power, at which point it's not a psi power, it's some other kind of power.

Of course it's possible to debate what a psi power is. In a sense I suppose the most plausible ones are the ones people actually have. I can for example unerringly lead you to trees likely to have pecans at certain times of the year, or stand in certain places and recite the words I've never heard that were spoken there by the long dead, or look at a pallet of girl scout cookies and divine exactly how many boxes of them there are for each of an arbitrary number of people. Yes I do those with memory of where they were last year, literacy and historical plaques, and mental multiplication and division, but still amazing exercises of psychic divinatory powers right?

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

is it? I'm no expert, but does psi specify that the energy comes from the person's body?

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Well it's not like there is a clear definition of the various kinds of magic. But when somebody makes a distinction it often is psi comes from you (and generally is accessible without tools) and external sources are different kinds depending on the source and/or required equipment.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

That wasn't the claim made, though. The bad argument was that the geological evidence for prehistoric biotic time scales in the hundreds or thousands of megayears had to be wrong, because no energy source existed that could energize the Sun for so long. The people making the error made it pretty confidently, too.


Meaningless. That's like saying that if a car has a power source other than gasoline, it's not a car.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

GURPS certainly tends towards magic being the utilization of ambient mana energy, whereas things like psionics and ki comes from within.

It's also worth repeating (again) that there are two radically different undertandings of what psionics are.

One is the science fiction understanding, grounded fairly heavily in John W. Campbell's editorship of "Astounding" (who was a fan of early psionic research), where psionics are constrained to a fairly limited set of abilities, having to do with thoughts and the mental movement of objects, control of bodily function, and only in very rare cases the healing of others or teleportation.

The other is the one perpetuated by D&D, which is that psionics is just an alternative magic system to wizardly magic, and that it can potentially do anything, no constraints and thus no flavour.

Clearly the OP is using the first definition. As is GURPS in general.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I think the moment you suggest super-science, all of the psi powers become possible enough to suspend disbelief. Telekinesis needing a power supply to explain the strength (I think I saw someone mention it) is an example of way you could modify the existing psi powers to make them more believable, but power cells at TL 13+ probably can manage it in the size of a B cell that lasts all day.

Telepathy can be the result of modified brain tissue that humans now just have to some degree. Basically radio (or some exotic EM type) could interact with some biological construct in the brain, and some people can control it now.

I think you can find an plausible explanation for any of it.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Let's se if we can generate some useful discussion on a different axis of improbability.

If the human brain is a computer it is a computer that grows its' own hardware and writes its' own software and is continuously modifying both. I'm running Fredsoft2016.0308 myself but I'll be updated to .0309 by tomorrow.

there must be a "kernel" for both "hardware" and "software" in the genes but it is almost certainly very basic.

consequent tot his is tat nay psi ability involving the interaction of two brains is more implausible than an ability that involves only one brain. also, as the complexity of interaction increases the implausibility goes up.

As examples Clairvoyance is more plausible than Empathy and Empathy is more plausible than verbal Telepathy.

As a tangent this same principle would apply to much cyberpunk stuff A computer wired into your nervous system could probably eventually learn to read what was going on but one with the necessary sophistication wouldn't have much use for your brain..

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I done my background on:

ESP, Telephathy, and Psychokinesis

Really not nice stuff and should be avoided:

Teleportation, Psychic Vampirism and Psychic Healing

No no to:
Astral Projection.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

You don't need to wait for cyberpunk, the technology already exists. The Wikipedia article on brain-computer interface is a good place to start if you want to learn about this.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Where does it say psi powers draw energy from within? Game mechanically it seems the opposite, most psi powers can be used without spending fatigue implying that the energy comes from somewhere else. In saying that, spells are powered by mana and yet do often cost fatigue so the issue is not clear cut in my opinion.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Alright,

So were looking for things that could potentially be achieved by a TL13 society that would resemble psi powers.

1. Empathy (scent/sound based)- by carefully redoing the sectors of the brain that respond to pheremones and tiny warbles in voice in a way that allows the conscious part of the brain to understand what is being broadcast the person effectively gains empathy (in that they have an understanding of the subjects responses)

2. ESP (sense based)- if a powerful enough computer to run extremely accurate simulations of the immediate enviornment can be shrunk down enough to be inside a persons head it can happily calculate odds and discover things that SEEM like they must be the action of a psycic.

3. Danger sense - computer in head, checks over situation, sends warning faster then brain can actually formulate it.

4. Common Sense (reduced time + intuition)- that same computer can happily calculate presented data, figuring things like computer passwords, and who the murderer is based on presented data and probabilities

5. Modular abilities/Visualization - If the brain-computer can present an augmented reality interface that shows the user exactly how to move their hands to get a task done it would (again for all intents and purposes) allow these abilities.

6. Regeneration/healing/affliction-regeneration/regrowth/immunity to metabolic hazards/etc - Well engineered cells could present some of this, nanomachines inside the bloodstream could do other parts of this. Being able to transfer those nanomachines to others could provide healing.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I know 2 people who claim varying degrees of success in Astral Projection, although it postulates the existence of an astral plane, which is a much larger claim than of just psionics.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I'm sure if we look, we can find people that believe they have any power ever imagined. I don't see what purpose that would serve though.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Then your actual goal in this thread is for pleasant sounding technobabble for psychic powers. That's not quite how your initial posts came off, to me at least.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Uh, Flyn- I'm not the OP on this thread, that was a response to the OP for vaguely plausible 'psi powers that aren't really psi powers' developed by a TL13 society.

Minuteman provided clarification for what he was looking for in post #19 of this thread, and that was my response to the concept.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

A TL 13 society is magical technology anyway, so everything is plausible, depending on the superscience allowed.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Astral Projection assumes and probably requires a non-physical component to the human mind. I think smurf might be a hard-core materialist and find the idea anathema.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Is there some reason you want to call this 'psi'? There's no particular physical problem with genetically engineering a cell phone that lives inside the brain, at which point you have something that looks a whole lot like telepathy (only with other people with the same hardware), and possibly a whole bunch of other powers depending on just what other systems are still active and operating on the same wavelength. Likewise, there are a number of senses that can be enhanced somewhat, and adding magnetic or radio senses and low power emissions isn't out of line.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Perhaps determining what laypeople think is plausible is a better method than trying to assess what is scientifically plausible since the current scientific position is that psi powers don't exist. It is not hard to find someone who believes ESP is plausible, it is much harder to find someone who believes in teleportation

I find it interesting that people find astral projection plausible.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I don't have a good answer for the OP, but it might be worth thinking about whether 'most plausible' in your campaign is:

violates the fewest physical laws

OR

damages the underlying assumptions of my game world.


It might be that 'plausible' powers undermine a lot of your intended campaign play (say, if you find ESP plausible, but intend on running a mystery campaign), while implausible powers don't do much violence to your setting (letting the guy hit people with TK isn't much more impactful than letting him shoot them).

It might be more fruitful to figure out what types of psychic powers you (and your players) want in your game, then work to cloak them in an aura of plausibility.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

I'm not sure that it does. Astral projection as generally described by believers involves moving the locus of various senses away from the body. The astral plane is just a hypothesis put forward to explain how this is supposed to happen. Although in an RPG, it is probably a good idea to include the astral plane if such powers exist. It allows cool stuff to come from or happen there, and keeps AP from just being clairvoyance that requires you to ephemerally hoof it to whatever you want to see.

Re: Most plausible Psionic powers?
 

Oops forgot about that post way back there.
Either way, it seems like the real OP wants technobabble for the veneer of what modern believers would label psychic power.
As others suggested, I think it's best to first start at the power wanted then dress it up in suitable techno-attire.