While Science Fiction often rides upon advanced technology, that's not all there is to it...
Surely. The problem is, the other sciences, those that do not contribute directly to technology, usually only help us understand our world better and do current things better (like, e.g. better psychoterapy, better plant cultivation, better religious service) and not do new things. And the fun of science-fiction worlds is about the new things and how people react to those, I think.
There are many who theorise that the human mind is much more powerful that we know about, and that we only use a tiny amount of our brain / potential.
This is old talk with, arguably, nothing except books and movies coming from it.
That's nothing to do with spirits or collective alien minds... It's biological or psychological, it's science... isn't it?
Yes, it's discovering about our world. But if you try to force such non-technological thinking about world to produce a techonology-like, visible, new way of doing things, you end up in pseudo-science. There is actually a huge market of those widgets that claim to activate the dormant 90% of your mind. Go ask biologist or psychologist about them... But they will often not be able to prove that the widgets do not work, just as they would not be able to prove that a truly working widget is not a fraud --- this is a part of the non-technological, non-mathematical nature of those sciences. So, actually, a theologian or salesman may have a more accurate theory of these widgets and their apparent success, but again the account would not be provable and would not allow you to construct a woriking widget yourself nor to prove that such construction is impossible.
If you've read some of Ursula LeGuinn's work, then you know what I mean. It's definitely science-fiction
Isn't it, mostly, fantasy?
Are we making a fantasy game? I do not object, but if the game starts with movie of a frowned UN councilmen looking out of the window of his office at the fall of a nicely animated alien spaceship, and then you find yourself bashing at such spaceships with swords and conjuring hordes of bears to beat at the aliens, the game will turn into yet another genre --- farce.
I claim that PSI, just as X-rays coming from a hero's eyes, just as forcefields generated by a hero's willpower, are based on wrong understanding of science (as is pseudo-science). In this, they are worse than magic swords and summoned bears, that are based on good understanding of fairy-tales and, more generally, myths.
Putting magic swords together with laser weapons may be good joke, but putting PSI and laser beams from a superhuman eyes with anything else is cheese. We don't see it, because our childhood fairy-tailes were full of it, and because current social perception of science is full of pseudo-science.
Sorry for the rant.