The evolution of "Telepathy"

The reading path of "telepathy" across a century and a half traces a strange inversion. In the 1950s, Bester and Turing took telepathy seriously as a literal possibility — Turing worried it might be the one thing that distinguished humans from machines, while Bester built a murder mystery around a society where minds are transparent. By the 1990s, Sagan and Hofstadter/Dennett had pronounced the evidence dead, but something else had happened in the meantime: every technology we actually built — telegraph, telephone, television, telepresence, BCI — was etymologically and functionally a prosthetic telepathy, each one named with the Greek *tele-* as if confessing its aspiration. Aby Warburg, cited in Goldberg's *Telepistemology*, feared that the telegraph had already destroyed the *Denkraum*, the conceptual distance required for thought — which is to say, he feared we'd achieved telepathy and it had made us stupider. Clarke, characteristically, split the difference: radio-assisted telepathy would probably only transmit emotions, not ideas, producing "some interesting new vices." The arc bends from supernatural claim to debunked pseudoscience to engineering fait accompli — we stopped believing in telepathy right around the time we started building it.