It would be silly to call these things telepathy because by themselves they don’t facilitate a way to communicate thoughts between two minds

A lot of animals use pheromones to communicate details about themselves in a far more complex way than we could by smelling.

and unless these two mechanisms are used to communicate ideas between users.

I think some of the peacock spiders, despite being already visually stunning, actually have UV light reflective surfaces (as well as the abililty to see UV) and use those in their mating display. So even while not being able to generate UV light they still use it to communicate in a way that we couldn’t percieve. It might be a bit of a stretch, but in general you could communicate by manipulating/reflecting natural radio background waves, just as many animals do it with visible (or invisible) light.

Are you saying, for example, that extraordinary cultures don’t exist, since they are ordinary for their members?

Well, no. But it does depend on your point of view. From inside that culture other cultures would be the extraordinary ones.

And when you’re talking about the biology of animals it seems quite self-centred to compare everything to us. We are just one very specific animal.

Many animals have a vastly superior sense of smell, can see light outside our visible spectrum or hear sound outside our hearing range. But it would be silly to call all these things “telepathy” just because we humans don’t have these senses.

But yeah, I don’t really like the definition that heavily rely on the subjective qualifiers of ordinary/normal. I prefere the extra-sensory one. Because that clearly puts telepathy in the realm of an yet unknown or fictional mechanism, which is where I think the term belongs.

All of it seems to match radio communication

Huh? No. All of these exclude radio communication quite specifically.

If some animal could pick up radio waves, it would necessarily have to have a sensory channel for radio waves. Radio waves are physical signals. Quite normal signals, too.

And while it’s certainly not an ordinary sense in the real world, in the hypothetical where some animal did evolve the ability to pick up radio waves, it would be an ordinary sense for that animal.

Flowers can communicate with bees via ultraviolet light, which is not a human sense. So by your definition flowers can telepathically communicate with bees. That sounds odd to me.

Also the exchange of electromagnetic radiation is physical interaction.

if you define it as not using any senses it doesn’t, but that would be a useless definition, because nothing could possibly satisfy it.

But that’s very much my point. Telepathy, as defined in the dictonary, does not exist and so nothing should satisfy the definition.

But it would be rather inconsistent. It’s just another part of the electromagnetic spectrum and we wouldn’t call visual communication telepathy.

None really since proper telepathy, defined as “extrasensory communication” doesn’t exist. There has to be some physical way to send and recieve information and the ability to pick up a physical signal is what a sense is. So if something communicates it’s always sensory.