(comment cont)

> "yet there are many such cases which fit a pattern that a small percentage of humanity can run around among our minds like hackers on the internet."

As I said about X-Men films and Magneto compared to wiggling a playing card, look at X-Men films depictions of Professor Xavier and his mind control abilities. Now look at the speeches of Martin Luther, or populist politicians, or the stage presence of popular singers and entertainers, look at the crowds of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands fired up by their words, convinced by their rhetoric. Look at the effects on civilisation of preachers and religions, the Cathedrals the lifelong devotion, at the effects of silver tongued cult leaders. The visible effect on people's behaviour is enormous, visible and unmistakable. Now compare to the ide that "a small percentage of humanity can run around among our minds like hackers" and the evidence is no different to background noise; suspiciously, almost by design, no different to a story that is unprovable or undisprovable. Did the playing card wiggle, are you a true believer or have they got to you? What does it have in common with the rules of thumb I considered earlier - are hackers awesomecool and using modern buzzwords? Check. Would it be secret insider knowledge that feels superior to know? Check. What are they doing with their power, are they Jeff Bezos amassing wealth or Elon Musk trying to reach Mars or Putin trying to amass power? No, they're ... making scientists think quantum entanglement cannot communicate information and telepathy isn't real. Hmm.

Of course I can't /prove/ these things didn't happen or don't mean anything. But then the stories which can easily be disproven ("the moon is gone!") have no reason to stick around.

I still fear ghosts even though I no longer believe in ghosts. I am God-fearing even though I no longer believe in the Judeao-Christian old man in the sky I was told about from birth. Scary stories have a sticking power in the mind, and it makes sense that avoiding harm is more useful to a living creature than gaining pleasure, and false positives have small cost.

> "Thought control now regulates our minds, even our ability to think (or not think) of a topic may be influenced by these controls without our awareness."

Like the idea that there is no free will; it would mean I have no ability to change my belief in free will, so it's irrelevant if true.
If thought control is regulating my mind without my awareness, none of this matters - none of what you write or what I write makes any difference to anything or anyone. I see a kind of thought control - women in abusive relationships, people in cults, people talked into believing things or not believing things - without needing telepathy involved. Why should I think that telepathy is more real than story?

> "The entanglement conjecture is not really “telepathy” by modern language it is “teleportation” and “wormholes”. Yes, I speculate to you the wormholes are in our heads, only it is information not matter which passes through."

I speculate to you that the entire Sun is not powerful enough to pull the Earth into it, and the amount of energy required to twist spacetime so two distant places are touching in a wormhole would be literally mind-blowing. But why, and how, might I have a wormhole connection to you, of any kind of entanglement or spacetime warping, when we were born so far apart and don't know each other? Why am I more likely to have a connection to your neurons than to the neurons of a nearby cat or a c-elegans parasitic worm inside a cat or to the neurons in your digestive system? You want to "burst my top-of-the-food-chain centrism" but you are prioritising humans as special and different when we are vastly outnumbered by other creatures with similar biology.

To paraphrase Tim Minchin, there are a lot of mysteries in the world. Every mystery humans have untangled or explained has turned out to be: not magic. Paranormal things retreat into the ever-smaller gaps where the unexplained still exists, like the God of the Gaps. Radioactivity stayed where it is, when we found it, we found it. The paranormal was once crashing accross the sky in Thunderclaps, then it was faeries appearing in the garden and distant reports of sightings, ... nowadays the paranormal is hiding down at 0.000000000001cm excitations in subatomic fields? Where's the telekenesis that can move mountains, where's the clairvoyance that can predict lottery numbers, where's the mind control that can read thoughts in words without torture? Nah mate, see that neuron wiggle a little? Do you believe that could happen by chance? That's the real paranormal, that is. It's a secret only those of us in the know, know, y'know? If you don't know, sorry but you're a controlled fool and hooray because that means I'm better than you in an exclusive club you can't join. Y'know like we're back being 5 again and I'm showing you the trick where you stare into a mirror until the persistance of vision effect makes you look weird and telling you that's an image of you in old age, and you're gullible if you believe and a fool if you don't.

> "I enjoy these stories about voices diagnosing illness. Some favorites"

I also enjoy those stories. Take this guy[3] where the title is "brain injury turns man into math genius" but the text of the article is "He started sketching circles made of overlapping triangles, which helped him understand the concept of pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter." which is middle school math for tens of millions of children around the world every year, and not genius anything. The topic says he sees complex geometric shape, but the descriptions says he sees straight lines over things. The topic says he's an aqcuired savant but the decsription says he gained an interest in math and went to college to study it. Something unusual happened but it has been hyped into a much more enticing, engaging, meme-worthy story.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-34583642

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3904192/

[3] https://www.livescience.com/45349-brain-injury-turns-man-int...