Aeon magazine posts a short article by Matyáš Moravec about philosophers at Cambridge in the mid-twentieth century who took a serious interest in telepathy at a time when the same university was a center of the Analytic school.

Of course it would lead to interesting places were it proven that telepathy exists. How does it work, exactly? Who has it and who doesn’t? How does one develop the ability of one’s mind to communicate directly with other minds? What have people used that power to do thus far in the history of the world? The questions just keep coming, each more fascinating than the one before.

But it strikes me that the question of whether telepathy exists is, if anything, even more interesting if the answer is no than it would be if it were yes. I can read my own mind, why can’t I read yours? Once we allow ourselves to be puzzled by that, we find ourselves facing a very weighty business. To give a full account of a world in which minds exist apart from each other, impermeable by each other’s operations except indirectly as mediated by sensory stimulus, we would need, at a minimum, the whole of brain science, and perhaps of several other disciplines as well.