what would alien minds look like to a psychic

this is as much of a curiosity question as one that I want to use. I was wondering what you would think the interaction between a psychic and an aliens mind would look like, asuming the psychic hadnt seen one before. Would the colours and sounds of thought be the same, would it flow the same way, could a human even understand them?

You're the only one who can decide that. We don't know how psychism works in your setting, or how alien your aliens are.

Well... the only example I can give is a scene in one of my stories, where a psychic human makes mental contact with an AI created by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien race. The way he ends up perceiving its graphical user interface is Matrix Raining Code arranged in Alien Geometries so impossibly physics-defying (a very high-dimensional n-cube) that he suffers an aneurysm on the spot^note as the character in question doesn't have the required level of mathematical knowledge to interpret what he's seeing even on an abstract level, his brain basically suffers Explosive Overclocking from its natural pattern-seeking and -recognition capabilities trying to make sense of something he's fundamentally unable to make sense of.

So, while it is indeed possible that an alien's sensory data might not translate the same way to a human brain, it is also possible that it might not translate at all.

edited 6th Jun '15 5:54:25 PM by amitakartok

The most likely answer to that question, I think, would be that alien brain signals would be unreadable to a psychic, like a different language.

In my GURPS setting, I've been using an "alienness" stat as a modifier to all rolls involving understanding another species, psychic or otherwise.

For example, baseline human to Atlantean (humans seperated from the baseline by 3000 years and a bit of genetic tampering) is a 2-point penalty (two baselines with widely diverging cultural backgrounds would still be penalized by 1). Human (any) to Trassak is a 4...the Trassak are somewhat strange in mentality by human standards, but still comprehensible. Human to Shifter is a 12...they're a collective lifeform composed of biological nanotech and utterly alien by human standards ^note Although Shifters in general tend to have very low penalties, if any, to understand humans...infiltrating other societies is pretty much their Hat, after all...

Characters can become familiar with specific alien mindsets and buy off this penalty, but each such familiarity has to be bought seperately.

Of course this is a RPG rules abstraction, but I figure it illustrates the route I took in world-building on that subject...reading alien minds is possible ("mind" in this case is a concept that transcends species, but differences can be significant enough to make understanding very difficult.

edited 7th Jun '15 6:19:55 AM by MattStriker

What do humans minds look like to a psychic?

Im seeing some really good ideas, with pretty much all of them comming down to one major thing: it would make very little sense.

I think I have some ideas now: some things would be recognisable, some images, but the colours are diferent, sounds with different tones, all mixed up. It could lead to some interesting ideas.

In Vigil, Fettel can obtain psychic information by eating their flesh, including Ethereals. It seems that information from those can be subconsciously processed to fit his awareness, but some think cannt be processed (symbols who had different meanings between species/ community). Fear, however, seems to be similar for most sentient beings.

It's also implied that XCOM actually takes pain to find how to translate psychic impression of one species into something can be understand to human. Given their role as peacekeeper and guys-who-get-called-when-space-nasties-appear, this quite makes sense.

In some settings, aliens are just funny looking humans; in others they're bizarre.

I mean, you have more in common with the strangest and craziest human than you do with a alien made of magnetized plasma that lives on the surface of the sun.

Which might make them harder to understand, but I don't know how you want psychic powers to work, really.

Come to that, I'm not sure that it's entirely clear that the perceptions of a human mind would necessarily all that straightforward to a human psychic. When I see the colour green, is it the same as when you do? When a sentence runs through my mind, is the experience the same as when one runs through yours? When I feel love, is the experience the same for me as it is for you?

(That said, I'm no expert in the current state of neuroscience—it's entirely possible that the above has been answered at some point, and do stand for correction.)

Of course, I would generally presume that psychics would have some way around this issue; I'm just pointing out the opposite extreme of the idea.

Then again, if this isn't a problem for psychics, then answering why it isn't might, in some cases, help with the question of how they handle at least the less-eldritch of alien minds. If psychics have some sort of interpretative layer to their ability, then an alien mind might still filter through, if strangely.

As I want them to be, the psychic powers of my setting are from technology, except for the alien race that inspired said technology. I see them as working as data transfer, taking over the impulses of one person to the other, with the impulses going to the equivilent zones (sounds to the hearing center, immages to the seeing center)

This could work, however, you must takes pain to shows thow it's processed; for examples, aliens who had different range of hearing and visible light, just like some real life animals. Or different taste buds. Pain tolerance. Things like that.

I like the "illegible to a mind-reader" angle. Like looking at text that is written in an alphabet you know but a language you don't.

A mind reader if the way he reads mind is visual could be treated to memories of the Alien and see some of the things of their past.

Or if they get the current view, see how alien they look to the Alien.