Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?
A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
212 replies
Science has never in the history of science reliably shown a single interaction between physical entities and any sort of non-physical force. The only way ghosts could be real is if you redefined the term “ghost” to the point of breaking, like saying that the memory of a person is a ghost.
Plus, it fails the smell test in a million ways. What makes a ghost exist? Why aren’t we positively lousy with ghosts? Are there rules? What would they be and what mechanism is there to both quantify and effect them? Why do ghosts follow the rotation and revolution of the earth but otherwise aren’t physically bound? How can one have any sort of cognition? If a ghost does, how can it perceive anything without intercepting photons or other physical phenomena? If there are ghosts and somehow they have cognition and perception, are we obligated to leave Netflix on when we leave for work?
Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.
If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the "physical world" too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.
If a bunch of people were going around saying I got this weird burn on my skin after holding this rock for a while, scientists would have discovered radioactivity a lot sooner.
There are a bunch of people going around claiming to have interacted with ghosts, and we've got bupkis.
That reminds me of this meme:
I found it here after an internet search trying to find it again, but I'm not sure if it is the original source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cryptozoology/comments/1c7btq9/ill_just_leave_this_here/
The indigenous Australians, the Mirarr people, identified an area in Northern Australia as sickness country which was very coincident with a high concentration of uranium.
They just avoided the area instead of poking it
https://d28rz98at9flks.cloudfront.net/145214/145214_00_0.pdf
Aw man. The northern tip of Australia has the cleanest air in the entire world. That data is from pre-y2k
Not sure about that, you might be thinking of the Southern tip. Indonesia often conducts burn offs with a lot of wind blowing smoke over Australia as well as cultural burning conducted by the indigenous in the region. I remember seeing the haze growing up and walking through the burnt country at the start of the dry.
Fucking magnets,
How do they work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
Magnetism is a physical force, like gravity. Measurable and consistent.
You keep saying "physical force"...
That's not a real term in physics.
The only possible explanation, is you mean any force that is already explained by physics, is that what you mean?
Because that would be the same as insisting we know everything, which no one who knows anything about physics would ever try to claim.
So...
What exactly do you mean when you keep saying "physical forces"?
One of the definitions of "physical" in the American Heritage Dictionary is:
I mean there’s no way to go from immeasurable to measurable except in scale, and anywhere north of quantum scale, physics has been reliably predictable and measurable. Ghosts’ purported impact is on a scale well above that which is unexplained.
Why do you say ghosts' purported impact is on a scale above that which is unexplained?
Quantum fields impact the universe on a scale above their own. It's entirely possible that the explanation for ghosts is on the quantum scale or smaller, and the observable effects are just that: effects of a much subtler phenomenon.
Yes, quantum scale has macro effect, but the macro scale is predictable and rigidly causal, negating any meaningful quantum scale interactional impact. A macro causation effected via quantum interactions is a de facto macro interaction.
None of what you've said is n this thread makes any logical sense...
Which would be fine cuz it's about ghosts, but you keep acting like physics backs up your wild statements and made up vocabulary...
What vocabulary did they make up?
I’m not making shit up as I go. If you don’t understand something, it isn’t consequently nonsensical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_mind)#Problem_of_causal_interaction
The phrase doesn't appear once in your link. Or anywhere else in reference to physics...
You 100% made that up, and at this point I don't really care why
Nope.
Explain please?
The earth's magnetic field is fluid and changing, magnetism is affected by electrical current or heat.
I don’t mean that any given magnetic field is unchanging, I mean that the principles are stable and well-understood. We never see magnetic fields just randomly change with no reason or else navigation and all kinds of other technologies would be fucked forever.
Saying "science has never reliably shown something" is not the same as "science has definitively proven something false." Claiming otherwise is anti-scientific and logically fallacious.
According to the scientific worldview, we don't know what we don't know until we know it. Otherwise, we would never discover anything new.
I'm not saying ghosts are real. I'm just encouraging a healthy skepticism, whether for or against. So I'll play devil's advocate and respond in turn to each of your "million ways" it fails the smell test.
We don't know, but there's a lot we don't know. What makes gravity exist? What made matter and energy exist? What causes the big bang? What is the origin and nature of dark matter?
There's a lot we don't understand about the universe, so the answer could be as simple as a cloud of electrons or even photons, or as complex as a field of quantum fluctuations, dark matter, a previously undiscovered type of boson, a state of matter beyond plasma where the particles vibrate so rapidly that they're mostly unobservable, a range of electromagnetic frequencies with wavelengths so fine that our instruments can't detect them, or even an entity in a higher dimension that ephemerally crosses the plane of our familiar third dimension.
The answer depends on the above, but it could be that we are and just can't observe them under ordinary circumstances. Or perhaps there's a different place where they go, or possibly a different dimension, and we only notice the ones who get stuck here somehow. Or perhaps there's some sort of ethereal ecosystem which keeps the ghost population in check like birds do for insects.
Probably, but there are plenty of rules in the universe we don't understand. What rule is responsible for gravity? Why does dark matter behave the way it does? Why do quantum fluctuations behave the way they do? Why does spacetime behave the way it does? And why do quantum mechanics and general relativity seem to describe contradictory sets of rules for the same universe, albeit at different scales relative to the one at which newtonian physics are accurate?
Until we figure out unified field theory, dark matter, and that higher dimension thing, we can't pretend we've described every rule in the universe.
This has already been addressed under "what makes them exist?"
It could be that their physically-boundedness is just subtler than most things we've observed. They could maintain their relative position gravitationally or by friction, or possibly through electromagnetism, quantum entanglement, exertion of conscious effort, or simply some higher-dimensionality which allows them to be present anywhere they want at a given moment.
How can any living human have any sort of cognition? There's a lot we don't understand there either. It could be that consciousness is a property of electromagnetic fields, in which case it would explain it if the ghosts were made of electron clouds. Or perhaps consciousness is a property of quantum fields, or something else we don't understand such as a higher-dimensional entity with more complex states of matter and energy, that simply can only perceive and interact with the world in three dimensions because those are the limitations of the physical organism it has developed to inhabit and maintain itself.
So the answer to ghost cognition depends on the answer to human consciousness, which is still one of the major mysteries of the universe.
Alternatively, perhaps ghosts aren't conscious at all and only appear to be, but they're really more like a complex sort of jellyfish, mindlessly following patterns that were set by the mind of the conscious entity prior to the death of the physical organism.
Perhaps it directly perceives electromagnetic waves that enter its field of existence, or perhaps there's some higher-dimensional perspective that allows them to observe the 3-dimensional world from the outside.
We don't intercept photons when we dream, yet our brains construct images. So physical sensation is not a necessary precondition to mental perception.
No, that's when they're busy conspiring with your cats. And I'm sure they would have plenty of entertainment observing the antics of the living without requiring mortal means of diversion.
I think you could rationally explore ghosts in the “radically redefining” them arena. Ghosts could rationally exist as an artifact of your mind, and saying that is not the same thing as saying they don’t exist. Hallucinations exist. They aren’t real, but they exist. Ghosts could rationally exist in the exactly same way, as processes in our own heads. It’s when you start saying they interact with the world in a way outside people’s heads that you can’t really reconcile.
Except that’s not what we mean when we talk about ghosts. Ghosts are meant to be actual beings with an actual existence, if very different from living beings.
The concept of ghosts exist (as does for all things for which we have words). Some people do believe ghosts exists, and some might have seen ghosts (just like someone actually sees a hallucination). All this doesn’t mean ghosts exist, or else the actual concept of non-existence doesn’t exist - which makes the fallacy evident: if we are to consider that all concepts actually exist (further than just an idea), non-existence has to exist.
I'm now a manager, but I work in contract security, and have been in more buildings that were supposedly haunted than I care to count. Including buildings that have numerous stories of freaky shit happening.
Doors closing "randomly" or very-not-randomly. Spaces suddenly getting cold. puddles showing up in bathrooms that someone supposedly drowned in. Stairwells that sound like people walking down them at specific times of night.
odd noises. Freaky noises.
I have never once been in a building where I could not identify a perfectly natural cause. Here's a few incidents off the top of my mind that I remember very specifically. There are some few commonalities to people who see ghosts. or demons, or any other supernatural entity.
Ghost stories are perpetuated by the credulous, who find things that are decidedly weird, and then stop looking any further. or they hear a story- suicides, murders, etc- and attribute every weird little thing to that.
or they're told by straight up liars and ran with by people who would run with scissors and untied shoes. a lot of times, it's started by people who have an inability to admit they don't know something.
Regardless, if ghosts were real. if they were common, and if they interacted with the natural world, then we would have actual, tangible evidence for their existence. You'd be able to point at one and say 'aha! a ghost!' that doesn't happen.
These are just some of the examples of things I've heard about and found to be otherwise.
::: spoiler One example was a guy who claimed ghosts were always going around closing every fire door every night at 23:00. On the dot. Every night.
And yeah. doors were being closed as described. Guess what? All the doors had one thing in common.
They were being held open by magnetic door holders. they're fire doors. Building code here requires that they be self-closing in the event of a fire alarm to prevent the spread of fire. But that's really rather inconvenient in long hallways where people don't want to be opening big heavy doors everytime they're bringing a cart of shit through.
Thus, the electromagnetic door holders that turn off whenever a fire alarm goes off.
Well. if you guessed that the fire system had been programmed to turn off all the door holders at 23:00 each night, just long enough to let any being held open close... you'd be right. All it took to verify that was to send a five minute email to the facility engineer, who spent all of ten minutes checking settings on the fire alarm system and turned it off. ::: ::: spoiler Another example of doorholder mayhem is one in which the doorholders were slowly going bad.
This was when I was a manager, and I was doing a sort of covert investigation where I go in and have them train me on the site. there were problems.
those problems all stemmed from a fundamental lack of curiosity. Which stemmed from a fervent belief in the supernatural. Voices in spaces that are supposed to be empty? they weren't teenagers smoking dope, it was spirits.
One example of spirits that loved to fuck with him? one hallway had firedoors that sectioned off a t-shaped hallway, that was lined with businesses (mostly offices.) he was supposed to go down the hallway, checking and locking all the doors and generally making sure everything was in good order. the firedoor in the middle of the hallway, kept closing on him.
Rather than looking into what the issue was, he wrote it off as demons fucking with him, specifically.
The reality was that the doorhoder was going bad (probably had been for a long time. as that happens their holding power gets weaker. this door holder's holding power was just strong enough to hold the door when it was static, but any kind of touch or slight pressure was enough for it to close.
Including changes in the air pressure as you walked past. When I pointed this out to him. Well. Lets just say he's no some other company's problem. ::: ::: spoiler another example is voices in unusual places
Guess what? walls be thin, yo.
Frequently, office buildings with multiple tenants are remodeled in strange ways. especially if they're older- things get partitioned weierd. spaces get remodeled and lighting and power doesn't be as you'd expect.
In any case, in this particular building, the idiot in question didn't realize that the very short custodial closet didn't go all the way "back" from the hall- she should have, though. She'd also never gone into the space that wrapped around the maintenance closet to run beside the space that she kept hearing voices in "that shouldn't be there!"
Those voices were caused by people working late.
::: ::: spoiler my personal favorite, ghost steps coming down stairs.
this particular building is historic- that is to say, it was a tire warehouse built in the 1890s. It's really quite a lovely building. Giant limestone block foundation, old tan brick. cedar beam construction.
one of two stairwells that hit ever floor has fire sprinkler stand pipes running through each landing. not surprising, considering. the building is old. It's drafty as fuck. And at night, in order to save energy, because it literally predates central air, they turn the system off at night (or run it to a lower set point.)
This results in a fairly consistent rate at which it cools off. the fire stand pipes cool off at a different rate, though, and clunk against the landings the pass through. They do so in a way that sounds like someone walking down the stairs.
Incurious guards just wrote it off as some ghost or something, but all of the long term tenants will tell a story about how there was a guy that died from a tractor tire falling on him. (didn't happen, by the way. Though numerous people did die here. mostly jumpers.)
::: ::: spoiler Radiators make some creepy noises.
I mean. Seriously. gurrgle gurrgle. burble burble. Tickety tick.
still not ghosts. :::
::: spoiler big cats sound like screaming women. yeap. okay, need to clarify, I mean, our local lynxes and bobcats, as well as the occasional mountain lion passing through.
If you ever saw Annihilation, with the "help me" bear. yeah. it's like that. Randomly. Out of the dark woods. and not coherent words so much as screams. (that account happened to border a large statepark that had some cats living in it.) ::: ::: spoiler Sudden changes of temperature
So, most office building's HVACs work on positive pressure. This way, when a door gets opened, the hot air goes out rather than the cold air coming in. (or cold air going out, hot air coming in. Depends on where you are and the season.)
for whatever reason, one of the office spaces just had massive open vents (I personally suspect this was a remodel that got left in the wall. the vent just connected the main lobby/entryway to the space (above a plenum ceiling)
Another feature of building HVAC systems are the airlock doors as you come and go. Guess what happens when you open both airlock doors and have a window you're not supposed to have open, open?
All your air rushes out, getting replaced by cold air. ::: ::: spoiler Puddles in Bathrooms Okay. so, water goes from high places to low places, and tends to follow the 'easiest' path, even if its somewhat convoluted. If you have an inexplicable puddle somewhere, you have a water leak somewhere.
what you don't have is some kind of poltergeist taking a bath. Doesn't matter if a person committed suicide in the bathroom, or rather, if you're told that's what happened. (it's not.)
Turns out that the rooftop had a leak, and that was travelling down through 8 floors to show up in a bathroom. because that's where the pipes the water was following kinda sorta came out.
not sure about your local critters, but red foxes also have vocalizations that scare people sometimes
e: if there are lynxes around then maybe foxes aren't, because these two compete heavily
Many animals do, yes. Even mice whose sole offense is skittering about.
I hear coyotes outside my bedroom window every night and I’m so glad I know what they are. The first time I ever heard them, I was alone in a tent surrounded by them. Absolute Blair Witch horror for about 5 minutes until my brain was awake enough to realize what I was hearing.
While we're here, I just witnessed a Crow trying to talk like a parrot. Shits getting weird
I'd avoid planetary alignments, pixies. maybe starwberry milkshakes, but those are hard to pass up. especially the malted ones.
This was fun to read
Uh huh, likely stories. Sounds like something a ghost would say 🤨
I mean, it sounds like your friend genuinely doesn't understand the scientific method. That doesn't necessarily make them unreasonable. It just means they had a sub-standard science education.
He’s wishy washy on the scientific method, not because he doesn’t understand it but because he believes it’s wrong (or at least incomplete)
We’ve spoken about this on several occasions and either his arguments make no sense or I’m genuinely too dumb to get them.
Arguments against it typically make no sense.
That's essentially a "god of the gaps" argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong 'yes'.
Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.
Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it's energy. There's no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we'd have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We'd be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv^2^, and the two sides of the equation balance, always.
More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they're invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn't strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they'd by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you'd at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don't have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we'd have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don't, and there really just aren't any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.
As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.
With all due respect, you've latched onto 1. my introductory literary device for framing the argument, and 2. where I dismiss the book based on my argument, but missed my argument, which I would succinctly state as: By definition, we don't know anything about the supernatural, but we know the natural world extremely well, and we can explain the way that it behaves fully and completely without supernatural influence. Not only do we lack evidence of the supernatural, the evidence that we do have rules it out.
This is absolutely something you could scientifically test.
The scientific method is building up knowledge by noticing a pattern, coming up with an explanation for that pattern, then thinking what further effects that explanation would imply, and looking for those effects.
So when someone claims something is “outside the realm of science”, how could that be?
Often it’s either because it isn’t reproducible (it’s a miracle that supposedly happened once and never will happen again) or it doesn’t affect anything.
If it isn’t reproducible, it’s hard to believe that it happened that way. Perhaps you are missing some details?
If it doesn’t affect anything, why care?
I’ve heard of many, many attempts to scientifically prove supernatural effects and none that showed a result. Most ghost stories I’ve heard have other more reasonable explanations if you think about it. Memory tends to be unreliable so sometimes details may be added or changed to fit the expected explanation, even if the person doesn’t intend to be misleading. Of course, sometimes people do exaggerate or make things up deliberately.
Nevertheless, if you have some decent examples of actual evidence of ghosts, I’m genuinely curious.
I'm not really sure why you chose to reply to me, as opposed to anyone else who replied on this thread. You can believe whatever you want.
There's no evidence that ghosts exist. Yes, there are many unexplained things. Yes, existence of ghosts is not impossible. But without evidence, it's impossible to argue for something.
I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't believe in it. I'm just going to tell you that I won't.
Debunking: https://psychologycorner.com/skeptics-review-surviving-death-2021-netflix-original-series-movie-analysis/
I know, but seeing as most of the content comes from the book...
What was it that convinced you?
Near death experiences are a tricky thing to study. There are physiological explanations for much of it, such as weird brain activity is likely to be interpreted as a weird experience.
The problem of this argument is confirmation bias. An anecdote of seeing information you couldn’t have seen and being right is going to be more memorable than seeing information and being wrong.
The scientific method involves looking at both the cases where it seems like something happened and the cases where nothing happened (e.g. someone said they had an experience but it clearly didn’t match reality). If you cherry pick just the events that “showed” what you want, that’s confirmation bias.
I did some googling of my own and found some studies on the topic from seemingly reputable sources that suggested physiological explanations might not be sufficient to explain the patterns they saw. Several of these had the same first author. I also found plenty of studies suggesting physiological explanations can be sufficient, as well as some specific criticisms of the couple studies that suggested they weren’t sufficient.
It’s interesting for sure that there is a doctor or two who seem to believe in the supernatural. The topic of near death experience seems to be of research interest regardless of any supernatural theories because of what it tells us about the brain.
It seems we will likely arrive at scientific consensus about near death experience in the future. I wouldn’t hold my breath that supernatural theories will survive that process.
I think I saw the case this was talking about during my googling. It said “brain activity was not expected” which is not the same as “there was no brain activity”.
That’s the problem with a book like the one you are describing. It’s deliberately cherry picked, exaggerated, and biased to drive you to a certain conclusion.
I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.
Here’s a place to start.
Thanks for explaining. To be honest I'm still not sure why that convinced you. If you wrote a book with a few hundred, even a few thousand anecdotes about people levitating I would still believe in gravity.
That is the part I doubt the most. Because if that was true, if this so called credible science in your book wasn't misinterpreted or simply faked, the scientists responsible would have gotten a nobel price and world wide recognition. But they didn't. If ghosts (or near death experiences, for that matter) were measurable in a repeatable or otherwise credible way it would be done on a wide scale. Scientists basically live for the chance to be the one who challenges a paradigm - and this one would shake everything we know about the material world, every scientific discipline, religions even.
There's simply no good reason for such "credible science" to go unnoticed. There is at least one very good reason for faking it: It makes money.
Dude...no one fact checks those books and bullshit sells.
No one buys a book that says nothing happens when you die.
No one comes back from clinical death unless the medical staff fucked up.
As a reasonable person, I can admit that it's always "possible" that ghosts exist. Meaning, that I am not 100% positive that they don't.
I can also admit that there could be unicorns on Pluto, because it's nigh impossible to prove a negative.
The difference is that unicorns on Pluto is something you just made up right now as a smug dismissal of a reasonable stance.
Ghosts, on the other hand, are our attempt to explain an unexplainable phenomenon that tens of millions of people have personally experienced here on Earth. Outright dismissing the idea that there's zero chance something weird is going on isn't that far from claiming absolute certainty that ghosts are real.
A few hundred years ago you'd have been thrown into an insane asylum for insisting there are these tiny invisible living beings all around us - and that it would be smart for surgeons to wash their tools before sticking them inside another person.
That's the only intellectually honest way to look at anything considered "supernatural". We're flawed beings with imperfect perceptions of reality.
I'm always surprised to hear people believe in ghosts, not because I consider it particularly ridiculous, but rather because ghosts have no relevance in my life. I don't need them to exist to explain what's happening around me.
Every few years or so, I might hear a noise where I don't have an explanation, but that always feels adequately explained by me not knowing things. I'm constantly surrounded by living beings as well as materials that are subject to gravity, temperature, humidity etc.. Occasionally, they'll make noises quite naturally.
imo it's just an aspect of the fear of death, some believe in ghosts because it gives them hope there's any sort of afterlife
I once saw something I can't explain. Had I been alone, I would've just told myself I was imagining things, but the fact that right after I saw it my friend goes: "Did you fucking see that?!" convinced me there really was something there.
We went back immediately and it was gone - despite this happening in the middle of an open field with nowhere for it to disappear to. Do I think it was a ghost? No, it was most likely a human. But it was an unexplainable, genuinely weird event. Having experienced something like that makes me a lot more sympathetic toward other people who claim to have seen similar things. This wasn't a floorboard creaking and my mind filling in the blanks. I absolutely saw a figure.
We have built systems that have detected:
We have come into a world where people carry around, nearly 24/7, devices capable of recording high definition video, measuring variances in light, magnetism, vibration, storing time correlated data and even processing over it with enough proficiency to put digital bunny ears or makeup on you in real time.
Despite all this, we have no evidence and no mechanism by which we even might expect ghosts could exist. It's reasonable to say you can't be 100% certain they don't exist, but it is also wildly unreasonable to say they do.
Yeah but did those scientists ever point the James Webb Telescope at that creepy house at the end of my street?
I dunno. Maybe. They get up to some... shenanigans.
It's not important that you believe in ghosts. It's only important that they believe in themselves.
We have countless reports but no actual confirmed evidence. Nothing that constitutes proof.
You also have to wonder, where are all the billions of ghosts, both people and animals? We'd be seeing them everywhere.
And how far in the animal kingdom do ghosts go? People have reported ghost dogs, horses, cats, apes, chickens, bears. Do we get ghost mice, spiders, rabbits, whales? If not, why?
Ghost sharks, they could have been anywhere when they were alive.
Given that sharks are older than trees, and the ocean levels were much higher for millennia, you'd certainly expect to see shark ghosts swimming along 30 feet in the air.
Not to mention dinosaur ghosts. Those bastards were here for millions of years, and they were numerous. I'd expect the odd Ankylosaurus or Triceratops sighting.
Lmao what evidence? Everybody has a phone nowadays, how come there is no proof?
If ghosts are dead people, with the passing of time there should be more ghosts and be easier to spot.
If ghosts are from people who died violent deaths or whatever, how come nobody sees them in places such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima etc.?
More simply: if ghosts existed there would be many people who have seen them. How come there's a lot of people who believe in ghosts but almost nobody who has seen them (allegedly)? It's the classic "I want to believe"
One estimate I can see of the total cumulative human population is about 100 billion people, if there was just a 1% chance of becoming a ghost when you die there should still be about a billion of them on Earth currently.
Imagine if 1 in 9 people on Earth was actually a ghost.
Funny how the better and higher resolution phones get, the blurrier alien proof gets. and there was more photographic proof before literally everyone got cameras on them 24/7..and of course, aliens only care about landing in the US.
Here I made a meme you can send him back
https://imgflip.com/i/al4sce
The only evidence is anecdotal, there just happens to be a lot of it.
So no, I'd say it's unreasonable to believe in ghosts. (Though I do love ghost stories and folklore.)
Ghosts are fun to think about and make good stories, but there's never been one bit of reliable evidence. So no it's not reasonable to believe in something that isn't real.
For decades James Randi offered a million dollars for any evidence of supernatural shit that can be tested. Many people tried, but none were able to produce evidence to earn the money.
If ghosts were a very rare occurrence and only 0.00001% of all dead people produced ghosts we would still be completely overrun by ghosts everywhere, they would be mundane in how common they are. And that's not counting ghost animals, ghost dinosaurs, etc.
The impulse to believe in ghosts can be explained as well. For most of human evolutionary history we had predators (cats, bears, wolves, hyenas, etc). If you heard a noise in the bush and didn't assume it came from an agent you were more likely to be ambushed than if you assumed it was an agent even when it was just the wind. The survival trait biased us towards assuming agency even when it's not. When you hear a noise in your home at night your first though isn't settling foundations, it's intruder.
Big if true. He should send that to you instead of making memes.
Yeah, this is literally it. There is either evidence and that's the end of the argument, or there isn't and you're just having fun talking about ghosts.
Dude just thinks he's special. There would be ANY evidence by now. The superiority of the meme is laughable. Your friend is a fool.
From my perspective, ghosts are basically the result of...
/3. Infrasound
The bar for “convincing” is very low when you want to believe.
all it takes is some freaky shit sometimes. People forget that a lot happens in the world that deviates from their baseline and that it isn’t always paranormal.
Technically, if he is convinced then it's convincing evidence. The fact that you and I are not convinced is a separate matter.
What is a reasonable person?
A 100% rational person? Probably not. A person who was smart enough to do well in school and keep a well paying job? Yes.
Can a reasonable person believe regardless of evidence in ghosts, in deities and gods, in folklore, in aliens, in superstition, in the importance of themselves, in their culture or nation, in their position in society and their gender roles, in mums cooking being better, in bad luck treating them unfairly, in the importance of their habits and rituals, in sticking to how they've always done it, in any number of irrational things that they hold close to heart?
I'd say apparently they can. People are not logic processors. People are people.
Sort of all depends on what is meant by a “reasonable” person.
you cannot be indoctrinated in any religion without believing in ghosts.
There is no reliable scientific proof. Thread/post end.
No. It's unreasonable. Tell your friend that I specifically said he's a twat
If ghosts existed it'd be the biggest fucking news and all research would focus on it. Proof of an afterlife? Another universe beyond this one? We'd go there instead of space. Elon would want to set up a colony.
It’s interesting how many people in this thread seem almost angry at the possibility that someone believes in ghosts.
This seems to be a phenomenon I'm coming across increasingly frequently in real life. People outraged about "how dare you think that....".
This has always been quite common online, but I never saw this much IRL. Sometimes I have to shut down a conversation with someone because they're getting too worked up to talk about the issue.
Lemmy is full of movement atheists.
He actually believes that ghosts exist while proclaiming to be an atheist who thinks the scientific method is flawed. He's pretty retarded and we're pointing it out.
Can you explain how you would use the scientific method on the supernatural?
If ghosts were real, then I can think of a few people throughout history who would have been swarmed by them. Adolf Hitler would have approximately 13 million spirits haunting him by the end. Something like 100,000,000,000 humans have ever lived, and somehow all the ghosts are from culturally relevant time frames? For all the US civil war ghosts people have seen, you'd think there'd be orders of magnitude more native Americans haunting this place. Did the European colonists just make sure to let the Indigenous peoples finish all their business before hunting them to near extinction?
I knew an athiest who believed in ghosts. no idea how he squared that.
Don't you just need to believe in a soul? And haven't philosophers been pondering that in various ways for a long time?
I think this post on another thread nails the core of the issue for me and it's pretty independent of religion (since I think potential mechanisms could be independent of religion):
https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/3507873/-/comment/14195254
Its wierd to me when someone does not believe in god because of no evidence but will believe in ghosts, spirits, elves, fairies, aliens, magic, etc with no evidence. To me atheism is not believing in the supernatural at all be it god or the philosphers stone.
It doesn't need to be supernatural though - just something we don't yet understand. Aliens aren't supernatural - they're just life from a different planet. It's not just lack of evidence why I don't believe in God. The whole concept collapses under scrutiny.
Aliens at least seem like something that could conceivably be real. We already know there's life in the universe. Claiming we're alone is already a kind of a crazy position in itself.
I don't see why the concept of god collapses under scrutiny. Sure any specific does but so does like specifically romulans existing.
Ah, I see.
I'd argue we all believe in a thing or two that we don't have great evidence for when confronted. And I'd argue the size of the collection of things we could believe is mind bogglingly large. So then you end up with combinations like this.
But yeah, agreed from the framing in your comment that believing both is pretty logically inconsistent.
Thinking through this idea a bit more, I think there are a lot of people that would describe themselves as atheists that believe that certain things will improve their health in a way that others would describe as lacking evidence and should be included on that list. If you push on that idea then I think you'd start getting tension and pushback from a lot of atheists. I'm sure there are other categories you could do this with but I'm not thinking of others quickly now.
I mean for myself there are things I do that can't say have rigorous scientific proof but usually have some basis and personal experience that it works for me. I mean if I found prayer effectively solved problems for myself I likely would not be athiest even if no studies showed that. I take fish oil because an eye doctor recommended it for dry eye and my personal experience is it helps but I have no study to back it up. I take a vitamin supplemented cod in particular because my doctor said I needed to get more d and that was the only way I was willing to get it. I take a diosimin supplement because when I had a bad hemmoriod it was prescribed to bring it down and I found out it was also prescribed as a profolatic at lower doses so I basically self medicated. Seems to help. When I talk about the effects of these on myself I should mention im bad at consistantly taking them and when I don't I notice stuff. I like long baths and it seems to have a variety of beneficial effects especially with sleep and stuff so its good when done to be done at night. I think I have seen studies but not things I would consider rigorous. I mean. I really don't think I have anything that does not have some basis and im pretty aware of how weak or strong the basis is of most things I do.
Aaah the plot thickens
the dude I knew was all like well evp's and im like yeah and play records backwards to hear satan. They are like well all these researches with hauntings and im like yeah and all the verified miracles the churches detectives do.
Can a person with reasonable beliefs have an irrational one? Certainly.
Can someone reasonably believe ghosts exist? No, it is a unreasonable belief.
The question's a little weird.
Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? Yes, obviously, people do and many of them would be considered generally reasonable. They manage their lives okay, they make good decisions most of the time, they're not gibbering maniacs, they're reasonable people.
But: is it reasonable (meaning, grounded in good evidence) to believe in ghosts? I'd say it depends on what you and your friend specifically mean by "ghosts", but in general no. If ghosts were real, they'd be more observable.
And "Hitchens said so" is pretty weak sauce, so I hope that's an uncharitable summary of your argument.
Reason on its own doesn't bring enough to the table. Without critical thinking (and even with it) reason can lead to any conclusion.
If the data you reason on is flawed (and it is for everyone) then you'll end up with wrong conclusions no matter how reasonable you are.
I've got some unexplained phenomena that happen from time to time at my lab (workplace). Valves closing for no reason, oddly specific equipment failures, that kind of thing. I don't believe it's ghosts, but also I genuinely can't think of any reason for why those kinds of things could happen. I just say that it's ghosts anyways because it's fun.
In any case, my belief is that out of all supernatural phenomena to possibly believe in, ghosts are the least horrible thing to believe in, so anyone who believes in ghosts gets a pass from me
remind me... was it caltech or MIT that had an infamous light switch that, was hooked up to nothing but could shut down servers?
What type are we talking about? Sexy?
Or scary?
Either way, Dr Beverly Crusher would be aroused.
(yes it was a tough choice between this and the yoga one)
They can be both at the same time.
Nope. All "evidence" is fake. For example pretty much all UFO vids disappeared once 4k cameras got invented
You got no idea what you're talking about
Even within the perspective of religious philosophy, the existence of ghosts in the sense of a spirit that stays on Earth and causes noticeable effects is difficult. Mainly- ghosts would not be made of matter, but could interact with matter. Within the realm of religious philosophy there are all sorts of explanations for the "mundane" version of this question of how a spirit attaches itself to the matter of the body in the first place, but all of those explanations kind of go out the window when the spirit sticks around and starts interacting with other matter. If ghosts only appear in sensory visions and do not truly interact with matter (I believe this was the view of Aquinas), then you have a major problem in proof and then ghosts effectively do not exist for practical purposes. The Catholic Church believes that the dead can appear to the living in visions but takes no stance on physical manifestations.
Within science, of course, there has never been a scientific observation of any supernatural being such as a ghost or effects it might have. But that doesn't disprove the idea of purely spiritual apparitions. Then again, it also doesn't disprove that Zorlon the Gorilla God appeared to me in a dream either. I think we can pretty conclusively say that you can live your life under the assumption that ghosts don't exist and be completely 100% fine.
Man, the downvote ratio really goes to show how many people vote without reading a post. I imagine a lot of them would agree with you, but they just saw the meme and thought, "That's stupid." Which is ironically a vote in your favor.
I have both feet planted firmly in the real world but I have experienced three or four undeniably supernatural things in my life and yeah it does happen sometimes.
It terrifies me sometimes (recently had a dream about ghosts and I was so wondering in the dream if I've lost my mind). My partner was scratched by a misogynistic ghost during a ghost tour and we recorded audio and after they said "I'm scared" you can hear laughter. That and Chris Watts case has kept me scared some nights driving home thinking of the afterlife. https://youtu.be/5To4nn4ZVc4
I mean, that's a pretty horrible case, but that video is a bit dumb.
It doesn't show anything, really. There's a fetus linked to a nuclear bomb and a skull arristically placed with some liquid around it people interpret to be oil because of the implication. You literally see such scenes all the time. It's a bit of a coincidence that it was shown then, but still.
So what, do you think ghosts learned to video edit and animate scenes and fed it to some broadcasting network?
I would like to know what that footage is from, actually.
Police body cam footage (you can find more "paranormal footage" from it) but I've had a difficult time finding the government uploaded source.
I haven't seen compelling enough evidence to believe in the supernatural.
That said, we do seem to be well on our way to engineering ghost-like phenomenon. People will set up LLMs and generative AI systems that imitate dead people, if they haven't already...
No ghosts IRL? No problem! We'll make ghosts!
Thanks Humanity. 🙄️
they did that for Christopher Pelkey, so he could testify at his killer's sentencing. For some travesty of justice, the judge was an idiot and allowed it as a "victim impact statement".
Like right after Charlie got Kirked Christians started sharing AI videos of him talking about forgiveness and shit.
Glenn Beck is making a "George AI" and Prager U in partnership with the White House are making Founding Father AI systems to lie to children about history and Christianity.
Horrifyingly there's also HearAfter Ai.
ghosts are like religion: can neither be proven nor disprofen. what do you even consider a ghost? i do faintly believe in spirits:
when i am sitting at the grave of my grandfather, it does feel as he is around somehow. is that because i miss him and wish he is still with us? likely...
a friend of mine recently lost her father. they are both accomplished mountaineers. on a solo tour, she told me, she heared her father's voice reminding her to be careful - while not paying attention during a dangerous passage. was it her father reaching out? was it her subconsciousness taking the persona of the father? we will never know...
in the end it doesn't matter in the slightest, what these feelings of ghosts or spirits really are. if our ancestors keep watching out for us, that is great. if our subconsciousness keeps watching out for us, while taking on different personas, that is great. life goes on the same - even if it all was just imagination.
Isn't it irrational to believe in things that cannot be proven or disproven?
Seriously. There is no reason to believe in something that not only isn't proven to exist, but can't. That argument could be applied to nearly anything.
Vampires? Can't prove they don't exist, so may as well believe in them.
Fairies? Same.
Flying spaghetti monster? Prove it doesn't exist.
Like, I don't want to knock other people's religions, and I'm not so arrogant as to think I have all the answers, but I just can't stand the "you can't prove XXXX doesn't exist" argument.
it is not irrational, to observe (or experience) something and not being able to explain it.
i do not have any reason to assume my friend is a liar. so she heard her fathers voice. how or why she heard it we will never know, as she was not hooked up to a brainwave scanner or similar.
apparently we have different people from different times having experienced similar things. thanks @[email protected] for pointing to the Third Man Factor! so i would say it is quite reasonable to believe something can happen to us humans in extreme situations. is it just our imagination? quite possible! especially considering the more extreme stories mentioned in the wikipedia page surely drove those people to or past their individual limits. but that brings me back to my last paragraph: it doesn't change anything or even matter. those voices, or whatever they where helped those people survive extreme situations and live to tell the tale. whether it was a deceased loved one, a valkyrie from norse mythology, friendly tree spirit, their subconsciousness wanting to survive, ... or just hallucination due to thirst/starvation/exhaustion.
the effects didn't change. so whatever the cause is, shouldn't change my, your, or anybody else's life
I agree, and that's where I would stop, I can't explain it, I don't know what this is.
I think in general it matters what we believe to be true or not, you might think that in a certain situation believing a false thing can result the same (or better) way than not believing but beliefs are not restricted to certain situations and will inform our decisions elsewhere, maybe with more dire consequences. A quick example would be mediums who pray and scam grieving people out of time and money.
mediums are a completely different thing, as they peddle a 'wonder product'. claiming things without proof and asking for money. but that modus operandi is not restricted to non-science. radioactive underware was a thing...
i am talking about people who did experience something and how they choose to interprete that experience for themselves. if you ask me, it was most likely their body and mind being pushed across certain borders - which made them feel things that where not actually there. if you asked me about my grandfather, i would tell you that he is most likely not here or there and it is just my imagination. but it gives me a little bit of comfort to at least allow the possibility that he is somewhere.
those are all personal choices about personal experiences, which do not affect anybody. but if someone start selling a product or even a religion. they crossed a line and are (trying) to affect other people.
Can you disprove all mediums? What if someone has an experience with them that they can't explain but felt powerful and they made a personal choice to believe that they did talk to a dead relative.
why would anyone spend time to disprove mediums (if not for the fun of it)? like anything in science I have to prove MY hypothesis. so if a medium wants to claim what they are doing is actually ghosts, the burden of prove is on them.
i would claim, that a reasonable person would attribute the medium (not a ghost summoned by the medium), if they are seeing things, hearing things, whatever a medium does... while they are in the room with that medium person. again, the medium needs to prove anything happening is not just them messing around. i guess they could put some LSD into my coffee before leaving and make me see things alone. but i am pretty sure the LSD would be detectable and the person responsible for drugging me arrested.
a medium and other trickery cannot be used as explanation for those people who experienced the third man factor. while it is totally OK for you or anybody to say "{...}, and that’s where I would stop, I can’t explain it, I don’t know what this is.". the scientific approach would be to form a hypothesis, and start doing experiments to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. the problem is, that i cannot think of an ethical way to do such experiments. which is why, i don't believe we will be able to prove or disprove such a thing. so let's go with Occam's razor and prefer the explanation where people hallucinate things, due to body and mind being pushed beyond limits.
The second example kind of feels like the Third Man Factor.
thanks! didn't know there is a name for it
If you ever watch the video of Karl Sagan describing what the fourth dimension is, that is a slight possibility for explaining poltergeist ghosts, possibly even alien abductions.
I think it's fine if people believe in ghosts and spiritual stuff. My wife believes in ghosts, genuinely and fervently. I don't really care to battle her on this because regardless of what she believes and what I believe we ultimately end up doing the same thing in the end - nothing. I think it's a bit childish, but it's no more or less unreasonable than faith in a god or a higher power and people will fight you over that.
I think the delineating factor is how much belief in ghosts or the supernatural play into your decision making and your worldview.
If a person believes ghosts are real, but never really act on that belief, it's harmless.
if a person believes ghosts are real and alter their behavior in meaningful ways as a result, it's maladaptive.
For example, say you hear a creaking noise in the middle of the night that startles you awake. Person A, Person B and Person C each check to ensure there's no intruder in the house and determine that all the doors and windows are still locked and there are no signs of forced entry.
Person A comes to the conclusion that it was just the sound of the wood joists expanding or contracting as the temperature fluctuates and goes back to bed.
Person B comes to the conclusion that the sound could have only been produced by a ghost and therefore their house must be haunted, and so they call an emergency priest to come exorcise the house with holy water and they stay up all night clutching charms and wards to fend off spirits.
Person C comes to the conclusion that the sound could have only been produced by a ghost, says a quick (10 second) prayer for protection/guidance for the lost spirit and then goes back to sleep.
You can see how Person A and Person C have conflicting views about the origin of the sound, one which relates to scientific explanations for real phenomena and the other that delves into spirituality and faith to explain it. Regardless, they are both able to resume their normal behaviors (sleeping) afterward, while Person B shares the same view of the origin of the sound as person C, but their view is extremely disruptive and illogical. Their belief in ghosts requires them to take extreme measures to feel protected against them, but there is no evidence that anything bad would have happened as a result if they had chosen to do nothing instead. Nor would there have been a guarantee that something bad would not have happened anyway if they did all of the "proper" things to remain safe from ghosts.
Does your friend consider themselves on the left or the right side of the graph?
Any graph like that where it puts their own beliefs as 'smart' and others beliefs as 'dumb' is inherently a pretty useless graph. Graph says them smart, you dumb. Does the graph not convince you? LOL.
OP's friend is here, we can talk to them.
Depending on where you live, your friend might be eligible for using public transportation completely for free with a special id. It is also possible that their job security is going through the roof. One needs to be tested first, though and from what you wrote about them, I'd suggest that you or another person close to them escort them to a clinic. This way they don't get lost and can get help speaking with the personell when the instructions or other information get too complicated for them.
no, its unreasonable
I'm not going to rule out the possibility of something existing that we don't know of yet.
However, if we're supposed to look for anything in any way, we first need to know what we're looking for. So, what's a ghost? Is a a soul, and if so, what's a soul?
I think that's an interesting question with or without ghost.
People who believe in souls, should attempt to explain what a soul is and how they experience their existence. Is it an emergent feature of the electrons or brainwaves that can travel in other dimensions that our normal physics can't detect or something completely unknown?
People who have experiences with ghosts and souls should be investigated. How do they detect their observations? Are they somehow able to sense things that happen in other dimensions? That'd be really cool, and I still won't rule it out. The human mind can do weird stuff. For instance echo localization like bats do, seeing more colours than normal or even just perfect pitch. Stuff like that is provable and shows that our senses can be expanded by training. Perhaps we even have dormant senses like seeing magnetic fields like birds do.
So let's say some people can see ghosts but we just can't measure it currently, because we don't know how it works. We can still make an experiment where we compare the observations from these special skills and see if they align. If it turns out that the people who can see ghosts agree, then we should definitely investigate it further and find out what happens in their heads when they see ghosts. Where does the brain impulses come from? That'll teach us about the special sense, which could then prove the existence of ghosts.
I doubt their observations match up in a controlled environment. It's a shame because it would be really easy to prove the existence of ghosts.
The more you know the less stuff you're comfortable ruling out.
There's nothing that disproves ghosts, but there's nothing that proves them either.
You could have said "souls" instead, because that's just another word for consciousness. But it doesn't work for ghosts
absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
not proof, no. but it is evidence.
There's nothing to disprove ghosts because there's no real definition of what a ghost is.
If someone gives me a real unambiguous agreed upon definition of what a ghost is, I'll explain why we know they don't exist.
I'd refine that a bit. By "soul" most people are referring to a perceived "center" of consciousness where the experiencer is located. Things happen in consciousness, but the "soul" or "self" is what we think those things are happening to.
That's generally called the brain
And with some meditation practice one can realise the self doesn't actually exist.
and reality is just a set of biochemical signals you can radically change with some mushroom compounds.
That's perception.
Reality is just a big question mark.
That's why I said perceived center of consciousness. I don't think self exists either.
No, they can't
Your friend is likely to be a bit of a numpty
What do I think?
I think anyone who claims to know and understand every aspect of the world as it truly is resides at the top of Mt. Stupid on the Dunning-Kruger graph (yes, I know it's a disproved theory, but it's still a useful descriptor of the way some people behave).
I also think anyone who believes in phenomena with little to know evidence can never actually end up on the right side of the bell curve meme (a curve that is also the result of faulty science, but still illustrative of some humans' experiences).
I also think that terms like "ghost" or "magic" or "miracle" have so many connotations and interpretations, that it's easy for miscommunication to happen if people don't spell out exactly what they mean when talking about them.
I think ghosts are real in the sense that I believe people experience things they can't explain, and so resort to blaming invisible sentiences, and I believe those experiences are real; I have many doubts over their explanations of those experiences.
I also think that anyone who enters into a discussion holding my stance, but framing it as "ghosts are real," is looking more to start an argument than have an actual meaningful discussion.
2 of 5 Americans believe in ghosts.
2 of 5 Amercians still support Donald Trump.
See this Venn diagram
So my ex wife left me because she's a ghost. Got it. /s
You could ask him where he sees himself on that chart and what evidence he has that it's not on the left side?
IMHO "ghosts" is just an older word vor virus.
People in earlier times knew that some diseases jumped around from person to person and that that could be dangerous, but didn't have a proper explanation for it.
So they assumed that there must be something invisible in the air that creates the kind of spooky effect that people fall ill sometimes without being touched or physically hit in any way. Kinda spooky, if you think about it and only know about mechanics, but not about cellular biology.
Religion tends to justify itself in the face of absolutely no evidence with "proof denies faith." It's a garbage argument, but it's accepted.
Ghosts don't have any similar excuse to fall back on when we fail to see any credible evidence whatsoever.
Is the soul a thing? Does consciousness exist as more than the sum of the electrical network of the brain? Who am "I"? These are all interesting and probably unanswerable philosophical questions. "Do ghosts exist" though, is a pretty straightforward no.
Depends on how you define "reasonable". Personally I interpret it as "rational" in this context, and I believe that a perfectly rational person with imperfect knowledge would acknowledge that ghosts cannot be 100% disproven, and as such there is a chance that they exist. And once you're past that threshold, belief doesn't have to conflict with rational thinking.
Again, personally; I believe they don't exist. Otherwise we'd be seeing a lot fewer Victorian era ghosts, and a lot more Neolithic ectoplasm. Also, which requirements in terms of species are there for a haunting to commence? Can a horse become a ghost? What about a gorilla? Or a Neanderthal? Seems weird that only homo sapients get to play around with rusty chains and linen...
Neolithic ectoplasm
Alright, I'm stealin' that!
sounds like a good band.
IIRC native americans have some myths of ghostly horses who lived on after death as spiritual beings.
Ghosts, no way.
Goblins on the other hand....
Nope.
Ghosts are real but only jedi masters (like the one in the meme) can see them. Unfortunately, jedi masters are not real.
So Anakin can't see ghosts?
Do I believe in ghosts in the literal sense of an actual spirit hanging around in the physical world haunting places and people? No.
Do I think it's fascinating to see how the idea of "ghosts" are used in a cultural sense usually representing an individual or group's desires, thoughts, feelings, etc. after they've passed on and usually storytelling around respecting their wishes or finishing what they started so they can finally be "at peace"? Yes.
I also find it fascinating in a tragic way how people who've gone through extreme grief and loss can cling to the idea of ghosts, particularly of loved ones. Perhaps the pyschie doesn't want to let go of that person so much that it can manifest as audio-visual hallucinations that feel incredibly real to the individual.
After all, we all perceive the world through our brain: it is the filter for everything.
I've experienced some strange stuff personally, but I don't think I've seen an actual ghost. I remember having a dream about a close relative the night they died suddenly and we all found out in the morning. But that could be my memory post-rationalising something.
I've seen a milk bottle fly out from the back of the fridge but I swear I remember that the fridge wasn't rocking unstably and that the milk was definitely at the back of the fridge. But I could have seen incorrectly because who pays attention to the precise location of a milk bottle when opening the fridge.
And I've encountered machines that appeared to be haunted. An ex-gf's iPod classic she kept because it is a time capsule of her music would randomly turn itself on, play 10 seconds of a random song, then turn itself off again.
I can feel how a ghost story would fit all of these and feel like it would make emotional sense to me. Like there's some deep part of our evolutionary psychology that supports feeling this way. Why?
Now in that sense I believe people genuinely experienced "ghosts" that aren't actually there but are a part of their perceived reality and I find that fascinating.
It’s fun to think up thought experiments that explain away the reasons we can’t prove they exist.
Time isn’t linear, we’re just limited to experiencing it that way while we’re alive.
After we die, we experience time differently; in an impossible-to-describe way, but is akin to a book with limitless pages. Your existence is a bookmark in this book, and dying makes you lose your place.
It is possible to re-find your place, but with unfathomable access to unfathomable histories and futures, there is a near-infinite choice of other events and timelines for a ghost to visit and observe and experience.
Coupled with that, there are laws— some sort of physical laws, not arbitrary— to visiting the pages of this book, in that they can only be done in areas that do not cause pages before or after to change dramatically. A ghost is a spec of ink on the page; it cannot write letters, words, or sentences. If anything like this were ever done, we would never know as our minds would simply accept the memory as fact without knowing, or delete the memory of a ghost the way we space out driving on a highway or having to look at our watch a second time.
Lastly, our senses are all on varying spectrums; some of us able to see, hear, smell, experience things others cannot. One of our senses is a sense of time. Some people’s sense of time operates on a scope of a wider caliber than others, experiencing things others cannot, which is why some of us may have experienced ghosts while others haven’t.
edit: I guess it needs clarification based on the downvotes, I don’t believe any of what I just wrote (except the true bits like time not being linear & sense scopes). I don’t believe in ghosts/have never seen one, but I try to stay open-minded for friends who might disagree.
You are confusing Thought Experiments with daydreaming.
Yikes
fwiw I don’t believe any of what I just wrote.
It’s just a creative exercise imo/fun worldbuilding
No way; ghosts? Just pished bastards. Nessie is real though - you don't mess with Mr McToot he'll set Ferocious Ness on you.
It is disturbing when people take this kind of mysticism seriously. I could say a lot about this but it may be best just to refer to the words of Carl Sagan:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
I believe in it, but only because things have occurred to me that cannot be explained by science.
And even those that have occurred to me I doubt some of, but those that happened to me and those with me simultaneously? That I have a harder time explaining.
Just 2 examples I can think of, out of multiple:
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler First was my computer turning on at night (this was awhile back and that old computer was loud and had a bright blue power light). The first night it didn't scare me - I thought maybe the power tripped or something and that somehow turned on the computer (it was connected to a power strip with a fuse switch to protect it from surges). I turned off the power strip switch and just went back to sleep. I would just turn it back on in the morning.
Second night, it happened again. Woke up to it on. Thought maybe Windows had a virus or something (Windows 7 at the time, upgraded recently from Vista) and maybe it wasn't actually shutting down. Just turned it back off. Next day, take a look, can't find any malware, shrug.
Third night, again. Same routine. Except, the monitor was on standby this time too. Just told myself I probably just forgot to switch off the monitor, even though it has a bright orange light that is on when on standby. Thing about me is even as a preteen, I had difficulty sleeping with any lights on. But still, maybe somehow missed it. Next day I reinstall Windows cleanly.
4th night, same routine. Monitor was also on again. A little eerie but maybe just forgot again.
5th night, same. Except, when I go turn off the power strip switch, I noticed something I had momentarily forgot: I had completely unplugged the power strip to the wall. There was no power running through it. Yet both it and the monitor were powered on.
Now, I don't know about you, but I think it's very reasonable at that point in time, to start freaking out a bit, because while my knowledge of physics at 13 wasn't that great, even to this day I don't know how a computer and monitor can stay on without being connected to a power source, much less turn on in the first place.
I did not sleep there that night. But, the next morning, I did investigate. Everything was off by then. I tried pressing the power switches on the computer and monitor. Nothing. The power strip was indeed still disconnected. I even opened up the computer in case someone somehow in my household where only I was tech savvy or the government put a battery inside to remotely turn it on for some reason. Nothing, hardware was normal. I convinced myself I must've been dreaming. I turned the monitor screen to face the wall though anyway.
Except it happened again on the 6th night. And this time the screen wasn't on standby but on. How did I know? Not only was it emitting a grey light onto the wall it was facing, but the switch light was green. You had to press a button to turn on that monitor. And I had not plugged that computer back. It still had no power.
I'll admit, I wasn't brave enough to turn the monitor around and see what was on the screen. Maybe you would, but again, I had, at that point, other experiences happen to me in the past. This one just had more physical proof.
I did, however, go wake up my dad and asked if he saw that the computer was on. He did indeed see it was on. Therefore, I now know I'm not just dreaming it. I told him to go unplug it, since he didn't know it was already unplugged, just to be sure. He went, froze, and said it's not plugged in. He thought I was messing with him, I told him no, this has been happening and in wanted to make sure it wasn't just me seeing this. We exited the room.
Next day we got rid of the computer, and I got a new one. :::
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler This other example is much shorter, but basically me, my aunt, mom, and 2 cousins were celebrating my cousins birthday. His birthday, coincidentally btw, is on Halloween. After he blew out the candles on the cake the lights began to flicker, and a glass statuette of an angel my aunt had on a shelf flew at us and cut his sister on the face as it exploded against the wall. Then the lights turned off only in the dining room and kitchen. There was a pale woman suddenly in the kitchen wearing a black dress with red high heels, brown hair, and a yellow flower pinned on her dress we all saw and confirmed with each other later. The lights then turned back on.
They are not the type to play that kind of prank. After that happened, me and my cousins on 3 said at the same time what we saw. My aunt and mom said they saw the same thing. This I also cannot explain. It'd be one thing if we said different things, but we didn't. :::
With all that said, despite everything that's happened to me, ironically I'll be the biggest skeptic you'll meet when something strange does happen, or when watching those ghost videos or such. I think the grand majority of ghostly sightings are probably just hypnogogic hallucinations. I think the huge majority of online videos and photos are faked, and explain how they can be faked easily (helps that I worked in one of those Halloween houses setting things up).
I don't think belief in the paranormal is by default irrationality, and I personally cannot state that without being a hypocrite after what has happened to me. I think belief without skepticism is, however, irrational. If anything, my experiences pushed me heavily into the sciences growing, looking for possible explanations for them.
And therefore to me, it is only logical for someone who has not experienced something unexplainable in any possible way to by default doubt the paranormal. That should be the default. Everyone should be a skeptic until it happens to you.
But it's also left me pondering - how do you, rationally, test for these things? If they are actually uncommon - the true paranormal events without explanation - how would you go about setting up an experiment? Nevermind getting enough samples to test for - most of these things just happen suddenly. A lot of events that are actually unexplainable happen without warning, with no ability to control when it might occur. And that's before adding in that some of these things might have the possibility of human level intelligence and/or be malicious.
I think something is occurring in regards to the paranormal events. I just don't think we have the technology yet to figure out what. Sure for now we have names like ghosts and ghouls and so on. But maybe eventually in the future we'll be able to explain the things even better - particularly the ones without current explanation I'm referring to - and then it'll just be another thing, much like miasma simply became bacteria and viruses and so on
People in this comment section have no idea what they're talking about
Real? Who cares? It's fun!
Well, we care. That’s why I asked. It’s just that some people are certain about they position on this and refuse to back it up.
And of course it’s fun, I’ll happily suspend belief for 90 minutes to allow me to be creeped out by a good ghost movie, but that ends when the credits start rolling.
The closest thing I have seen that may explain ghost encounters is that many ghost sightings that cannot be explained from physical things tend to be in places with a stronger magnetic field, and there is evidence that a small number of people are extremely sensitive to magnetic fields and can be affected by strong fields by seeing or hearing things that aren't there, so it is possible that many ghost encounters are just people overly sensitive to magnetic fields hallucinating.
Such as with certain specific ghost, alien, or demonic encounters that can be explained by hallucinations during sleep paralysis.
then every MRI machine would be haunted
People have experienced hallucinations in MRI machines, tho.
This is why everyone sees ghosts while getting an MRI.
Have you ever seen a ghost and their complex conjugate in the same room?
Ghost could be real. I've seen a ton of stuff that is easily explained watching the various shows. But I've personally witnessed stuff I can't explain. I've been through historic cemeteries in the middle of the night > once. Never anything then though, where it's supposed to be dense with the shit.
I don't truly believe in them, but I'm saying there's a chance. I think desert rock rust is a good example of there is stuff out there we can't detect, but see the effects of
no one has any evidence in thousands of years of human existence.
Belief in spirits is how people try and cope with mortality and the reality of when you die nothing happens.
People really can't just say "I don't know" on the Internet huh?
You mean Desert Varnish?, it's caused by dew and clay or silicates dusting the rock and the heat of being in the sun.
Maybe not genuinely, but i think im a reasonable person and I have a slot in my head for ghosts. I dont truly believe in them but have seen and experienced some weird stuff that I cant explain, and since I cant recreate the weirdness to test out a bunch of different things until they can be explained, "a ghost did it" is a convenient box to put them in.
I have a similar mental box for aliens in the sky.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
I'm someone who's quite used to try and see things through the lens of Science. I'm a nerd, after all. But I've also been, especially since 2023 (when I momentarily was part of a Luciferian group), someone who does actual ritualistic practices, I'm quite religious.
I don't really believe in ghosts in the typical (e.g. kardecist) sense, partly because I want to believe that death can dissolve the ego once and for all. I mean, hell no!, I'm not going to reincarnate again, Demiurge can go pound sand.
However, in a nutshell, I believe in two things.
First, the thing we call "spiritual" would be some kind of actual, spatial dimension, a field/brane (as in M-theory); "spirit" is just non-baryonic matter which, similarly to neutrinos, have very weak, almost undetectable, interaction with ordinary matter (maybe spirits are neutrinos, who knows?); and everything, from living beings to asteroids, all made of "star stuff" (to quote Carl Sagan), would have simultaneous "spirit stuff". I'd be "pan-animist" (i.e. everything got a spirit).
The other part of my belief: dæmons, entities, archons, Demiurge... And, most importantly, The Dark Mother. I believe in their existences as cosmic principles. For dæmons, entities and archons, I believe they're analogous to living beings (self-organizing structures) but baryonically incorporeal, some of them knowledgeable about interacting with this baryonic realm.
For Demiurge (popularly known as "God") and the Dark Mother Goddess (often unbeknownst to those who believe in "God" because patriarchy tried to erase Her from human knowledge), they're both... ineffable, I don't even know how to start making scientific sense of both, they're manifestation of several laws of physics themselves.
Goddess, specifically: She's the entropy, She's the field across which EM radiation propagates, She's in the silence, She's the singularity and the event horizon and She's also the black hole; mainly, She's Darkness. She's Death Herself. We're wired to see Darkness and Death as "evil", what to flee from, but I came to the conclusion that good and evil are nothing but artificial human constructs, and when one detaches themselves from mundane measurements, Demiurge is actually the closest to "evil" because he traps the matter into this existence, distancing us from our true origin, the Mother and Her Womb. Death is Mother trying to rescue us; life, reincarnation (Samsara), is Demiurge trying to keep us trapped in this theater. A cosmic tug of war.
Like fractals, they both unfold within their Wholes: Sefirots emanated from Demiurge, Qlippots from Mother, Goetia dæmons as mixed emanations.
Both also unfold into Great Manifestations as rebellious complementarities: Lucifer (from Demiurge) and Lilith (from Dark Mother Goddess). I've experienced them manifesting physically many times like "ghosts" would do, particularly Lilith, whom I directly worship.
Dunno how "reasonable" I am, tho.
People who don't believe in ghosts just assume that people who believe in them think they are like blankets moving all by themselves like they are in cartoons. That is, of course, not the case. It's much more complicated than that. Atheists sometimes really fall for the dumbest arguments possible
Are you able to provide specific evidence that ghosts AREN'T real?
Can you prove there isn't a teapot in orbit around the moon?
Russell's Teapot orbits the sun. There isn't room in this solar system for two orbiting teapots.
Prove it!
There might be for all I know!
Their point is that one could come up with a billion hypotheticals for what might theoretically exist, because we cannot disprove it. If we spent as much time humming and hawing whether each one actually does exist as we do for ghosts, souls, gods, Big Foot etc., then you won't be doing anything else in life.
That's why it's a typical position to just say that they don't exist until proven otherwise.
Or in the more general sense, this is Occam's Razor: If there's multiple possible explanations for something, then one should assume the simplest explanation until proven otherwise.
And if you hear a door slamming shut in your house, then wind is a much simpler explanation than ghosts.
yes.
the utter lack of convincing evidence that ghosts are real is evidence that ghosts are not real.
An utter lack of evidence thus far
and I'm sure you're the one who is going to find the evidence.
it is not as though humanity hasn't been looking for evidence of the supernatural since... well... probably before hommo sapiens were a thing...
gee..it's only been thousands of years
Never imaged
Never measured
Never captured
Never seen by people without mental health issues.