Yesterday I complained that telepathy is defined solely as a negative, which means that it essentially can't exist because if it is ever found, it will be real,

Yesterday I complained that telepathy is defined solely as a negative, which means that it essentially can't exist because if it is ever found, it will be real, and as such, will have mechanisms and limitations and real characteristics, and therefore it can't be "real telepathy". Because the definition is intrinsically built on negation. def isItTelepathy(anything): return False A lot of obfuscatory words are thrown at the definition, but it's what it amounts to. Or, more fairly, this is not the only definition but it's a very popular one. Free will has a similar problem. The definition a lot of people want to use is a negative one. It can't involve any predictable process. It can't involve any seen process. And so on. Well, when you feed a definition like the above into logic, you get some pretty broken answers. Some people do give definitions that can be turned into real answers, but you can detect someone operating on the completely-negative definition by the way they get upset, sometimes even in a moralistic way, at the idea that you might have said something meaningful and insist on pushing their total-negation definition at you again. There's an interesting conversation to be had on the matter in potentia but it requires so much effort sidelining the people who become offended if you actually proffer a definition and hold to it and perform actual logic on it that it's hardly worth it. So we pretty much get nowhere because we are essentially not allowed by about 80% of the people trying to have the conversation to have a concrete definition at all, not even for a moment, not even "for the sake of argument".