Is it theoretically possable for telepaths to exist?

[Red Siegfried]

In David Gerrold's War Against The Chtorr series of books, there are some people who have artifical radio transmitters implanted, allowing them telepathy and even allowing them to switch all their sensory perception over to another "telepath," essentially allowing the two to trade bodies. I think other people who didn't have the implants could experience a limited form of telepathy by wearing a headset of some sort.

 

[Mojo]

The methods used for communication in animal species (sound, visual signals, pheromones) are all detected by the sense organs used to detect the world around the organism. For these senses to evolve, it was necessary for the things being detected (i.e. sounds, light and chemical scents) to exist in the environment. Unless there was an evolutionary advantage to the aliens in being able to detect radio waves, they would not have evolved this ability.

If they did have this ability, of course, they would just regard it as one of their normal senses, rather than as "telepathy".

Of course, there are actually creatures we know about that can sense things that we can't. The platypus, for example, can detect electric fields with sense organs in its bill. But, of course, as far as the platypus is concerned this is just one of its normal senses.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Any supernatural effect, once understood, becomes "normal". That's always part of the problem with psychical research.
Star nosed moles, platypus, electric eels , dolphins, bats,various fish, all use sensory mechanisms outwith the normal human range. We don't think of them as supernatural or paranormal though.

A radio sense as effective as a walkie talkie would be a great advantage to any social animal, even if it transmitted no modulated information, merely an awareness of position.

I'm now doomed to think of aliens with antennae as having spark gap transmitters in their heads. No wonder they have to eat people- the energy demand must be pretty huge.

 

[patnray]

Even assuming a mechanism for transmission, telepathy would require the ability to make sense out of other peoples' thoughts at the preverbal level. One could hook an EEG to an audio amp and have the subject think of a sentence, but the result would just be noise, not any thing intelligible. Even if you fed the output to electrodes implanted in a second person, they wouldn't be able understand what the first person was thinking.

So, for telepathy to work the transmitter and receiver mechanisms must be distinct organs that can process information in a coding scheme that is shared by others (much as vocal chords and ears are output and input devices with corresponding decoding circuits). And consider that human babies must learn to use the "codes" (language) before the vocal chords and ears are sophisticated communication tools...

 

[Dogdoctor]

Since every thought is merely a biochemical reaction in the brain, I suppose that if it is possible that aliens could detect what every single molecule of your body is doing then they would be able to read your mind. I imagine that it would be possible to create a device which does that (using highly advanced technology resembling MRI perhaps ) but not sure that a being could posses the powers to do that.