Telepathy and Aycharaych
Flandry explains to a
colleague and thus to us that a normal telepath detects mental patterns
but must learn a different internal "language" for each telepathic race
and even for each individual member of a non-telepathic race because
minds lacking contact develop individual "languages." Contradicting
this, Aycharaych instantly reads and understands at least the surface
thoughts of any member of any species, even an inhabitant of a gas giant
planet. Flandry speculates that Aycharaych detects an underlying
resonance-pattern or basic life energy but this concept is questionable.
Although
Anderson presents at least three attempted accounts of how Aycharaych’s
telepathy might work, semantics involves arbitrary associations between
symbols and meanings so how can Aycharaych detect meanings behind
symbols? Admittedly, he reads living minds, not mere written records,
but he must still interpret a "language." The character of Aycharaych
was introduced in an early story so that Flandry could learn how to lie
to a telepath – he allowed himself to be drugged and persuaded of
falsehoods - but Aycharaych was such an interesting character in other
ways that he returned and became the principle continuing villain of the
series, although Flandry’s opposite number among the Merseians does
rise through the ranks like Flandry.
-copied from here.
If Aycharaych merely detected patterned radiation from another brain, then he would not be able to interpret the patterns any more than we can understand an unfamiliar language merely by hearing it spoken. However, an intelligent being not only thinks thoughts in a particular language, e.g., English or Ymirite, but also applies the words of that language correctly thanks to an underlying body of memories and knowledge. Might the entire contents of another mind momentarily enter Aycharaych's brain? Thus, he would experience the totality of what an Ymirite experiences not only when that entity inwardly forms sentences in the Ymirite language but also when the entity understands the words in those sentences thanks to his long familiarity with them. Returning to his own mentality, Aycharaych would remember not only a sequence of symbols but also the meanings of those symbols as understood by the being that had formulated them.
See also Imagine and its combox.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The most "authoritative" explanation we have for the telepathic powers of Aycharaych is to be found in Chapter 20 of THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN. The text I quoted being Erannath's summarizing to Ivar Frederiksen of what he had been told by Aycharaych: "There is some ultimate quality of the mind which goes deeper than language. At close range, Aycharaych can read the thoughts of any being--any speech, any species, he claims--without needing to know that being's symbolism. I suspect what he does is almost instantly to analyze the pattern, identify universals of logic and conation, go on from there to reconstruct the whole mental configuration--as if his nervous system included not only sensitivity to the radiation of others, but an organic semantic computer fantastically beyond anything Technic civilization can build."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes and apparently (according to me) there are two other explanations somewhere.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I wanted to add Erannath's comments here to be a "completing" of the varied explanations for how Aycharaych's telepathic abilities work.
Ad astra! Sean
Aycharaych turns out to be the last of a very old species that had high technology for millions upon millions of years. I would presume that his abilities are the result of biological engineering by a very advanced science.
Post a Comment