For many years Duke University had the only program dedicated to proving or disproving ESP, extra-sensory perception. Actually the term extra-sensory perception is misleading, because if we have a sixth sense, it is not extrasensory.

Identical twins have an interrelationship for which we have only anecdotal accounts. There is evidence that, to a certain extent, identical twins share the same “self.” We have not the slightest idea why we have this “I” inside us, whereas as far as we know a computer has no more realization of its own existence than a rock does.

It may or may not be googable, but it would interesting to find out whether Duke ever tested this identical twin identity.

I wrote around this subject of “self” below, when I said that, since we can’t even recognize the 2% of our population, which means you know a number of them, which consists of pure sociopaths, people with no guilt feelings at al, how can we say that people of other RACES have the same feelings inside that we do.

We know NOTHING about the self. All of our sciences tell us flatly that the “selfhood” possessed by every man, woman, do and cat and bird on this plant CANNOT EXIST. I am talking about this whole experience you and I live with every day, the one through which we feel pain and joy and boredom and the only thing that really MATTERS in the universe.

But science tells us that this is no more real than ghosts.

Than GHOSTS!

I am not getting mystical on you here. It is very hard to discuss this and keep people from sliding off the deep end about me hinting at something. I don’t hint. I believe that science works just fine. I believe that the self is simply something that is preternatural; something that we simply know exists, since we are US, but cannot be demonstrated by present-day science.

But when you say that all people are the same beneath their skin, you are presuming knowledge nobody has any inkling of. That was the point I mad, and it was an important one.

But when I make a point, somebody goes toddling off on something they are used to thinking about. One reader, whom I jumped one, went right into how everybody was the same under the skin and assimilation and so forth. As far as the point I actually made, he simply didn’t hear it.

Ted Bundies lawyer friends thought he was just like everybody else. They SAID so. They TESTIFIED to it. But inside Ted was as alien as any Martian. But the reader didn’t see that point at all. He just went into the usual flitter about how his colored friends bathe and speak good English so they must be just like him.

It makes me tired all over when someone acts like he is commenting when he is just repeating his tape recording.

Anyway, back to this ESP business. Our speed of communication in space is limited by the speed of light. But if two identical brains were developed, identical twins, would communication between THEM be limited the same way? If identical twins have any shared selfhood, it is completely outside of science as we know it. So if twin A is on Alpha Centauri 4.6 light-years away, his connection with the other twin may still be instantaneous. After all, this is not two people communicating, this is the same person.

If we ever found that was true, then we could simplify it until all communications in space were handled this way.

Already this speed of communication is problem is noticeable. You watch a reporter in Iraq being asked a question, and then the noticeable delay before he starts to answer. Each side of the talk must go up 14,000 miles to the satellite, then back down to him. That is a fraction of second, but normal conversation occurs at about 240 words per minute, so this break is noticeable, since it goes on BOTH ways.

I remember when Nixon talked to the first astronauts to land on the moon in 1969. We didn’t use satellites then, and we were used to radio and telephone. So it seemed like a HUGE delay when he and the astronauts had to wait three second for the telephone comment to get to the moon and back at light speed. And the moon is next door astronomically. When the satellite passed Jupiter we had to wait something like an hour for the pictures to get back here.

Alpha Centrauri is our next door star, and a question and answer would take ten years to travel there and back. So how fast does Pi, this shared self, move, if it exists at all?

It used to be ridiculous for people to worry about things like the speed of light. But every day the theoretical becomes practical, and what used to be practical becomes as outdated as using a whole computer to add and subtract.

I am sure someone will tell me that Psi moves just as fast for people regardless of the color of the skin, but that is not what I am writing about.

I did a whole piece about the specific problem I had with monomaniacal anti-Semites who interrupted a point I was making to blame it all on Jews. I received an agonized reply about how I was calling anyone a zithead who talked about Jews.

This is the old “So you are saying my mother is ugly” bit I keep talking about. I go to a lot of trouble to make a SPECIFIC point and then the person I am talking to, who seems to have been in a coma while I talked, looks angry and says, “So what you’re saying is that my mother is ugly!” When I made my living at this I had to put up with crap like that and try to calm the person down and try to understand HOW my comment on the economics of Pakistan somehow could be construed in his mind to refer to his mother.

But I don’t HAVE to do crap like that any more.

AND by now my commenters should be able to do it FOR me, though their silence in the latter case disgusted me.

No, I am not interested in your Mommy or your colored friends. It is hard enough to get my point if you pay attention. The time you spend defending Mommy or Sambo would be better spent looking back over what I actually said and trying to USE Mantra Thinking.

I did not start this blog so we could go on endlessly getting tangled into what I meant and standard ideas you were thinking about before you read what I said. The world is crammed with publications and online stuff for you to do that with.

I want commenters who read, read again, think, and then come up with something productive. There are very, precious few people who can do that. Others are welcome. But that few are the ones I am LOOKING for.