It is not speculation, the speculation here is coming from the other direction. Indeed, this entire discussion on ghosts is predicated by the unsupported assumption that they exist! Musicat was responding to this:
This describes a collection of hypothesized unknowns hammered together into an alleged and thus far unverified effect, placed allegedly (and arbitrarily) outside the purview of living beings and of modern science. It seems rather difficult to me to define a myth in these terms, hence why Musicat said “a ghost is anything that doesn’t exist”, which seems to me the final resolution of the definition quoted above (particularly the part about not being of physics – if it’s not either this is an argument from ignorance or ghosts simply do not exist as anything other than a concept).
Also, a ghost is not the agency of blancmange pudding; Sasquatch is not the agency of Belgians; telepathy is not the agency of trigonometry. Defining something by guessing what it is not provides no guarantee of discovering what it is. And since the problem is that “real” ghosts simply have not been observed and documented, if we finally get our hands on one it may turn out that ghosts are the agency of well-understood principles of science. A first step would be to observe a ghost, demonstrate that it is a bona fide ghost, and then build up from there based on the available information – not on extremely poor evidence such as urban/popular legends, fiction, hoaxes, hallucinations, etc.
Okay, Abe. If you insist that’s what my definition boils down to, toss it out. It was a first draft. I don’t personally believe there are ghosts, but I admit that if they do exist, they do so in spite of what I want to believe.
Your definition taken from the OED does more or less what mine does:
You arbitrarily place it outside the purview of any living being, which you chided me for. This definition, in fact, declares what we think the phenomenon to be despite the absence of any clinical data. My definition only tried to explain what it looked like, and what we know it isn’t. Maybe that’s not scientific enough for you.
I guess I’m trying to come at it from a diagnostic point of view. If this (a ghost sighting) were a new disease we’d compare it to every disease which has come before and compare its symptoms with what we know. When it exhibits symptoms we cannot easily corral, what then? We give it a name and list its symptoms and analyze it further.
It’s true that we have no hard measureable data on what these sightings are or what they are made of. I don’t know that I want to jump to the conclusion that because we don’t know what it is, it’s therefore a disembodied spirit.
Well that’s kinda what you have so readily assisted us in doing.
Way back on the first page it was asked “How do you define what a ghost is” or some such question. I’ll look it up later, I’m too tired now.
We have a definition for phenomenon which do not fit neatly into those we can easily describe. It is like the UFO definition; we’ll call it a ghost if it looks like a ghost, acts like a ghost smells like a ghost, etc., unless we can determine it is something else.
What you have also neatly done, as you mentioned in the post previous to this one, is that you (and me, too, I hope) have eliminated the unscientific, superstitious assumptions that people have been using for so many years.
We are smart enough to admit it could be just about anything, even a non-ghost, and we have provided a framework in which we can advance intelligent discussion about a phenomenon that thousands experience annually, and a path to explore it free from assumption.
Now, the next step (since we have been embroiled in definition for three pages) is to go back and see where we were in the discussion when it was stalled by the :: “Before we go any further, we need a definition we can agree on.”
Fish you have fleshed out a definition that no reasonable person can protest. I owe you one; I was drowning. I will refer back to that definition for some time to come.
Let me get some rest and I’ll be back to see if I need do any more in this thread.
S¬
…^
Don’t get me wrong, FISH, I think your definition is pretty clever and I am not chiding. However the definition seems … unnecessary. Aside from the fact that it could be applied to a host of supernatural concepts, from God to poltergeists, it does, as far as I can see, resolve into “a ghost is something that doesn’t exist”. I know you don’t maintain that a ghost must necessarily be outside the purview of science, but that seems a reasonable interpretation of your prose.
Yes, we are describing a well-established, if thus far entirely fictional, concept. Not an object, which your definition seeks to nail down for the benefit of Snakespirit’s quest for the paranormal. I think that is an important difference. And any object, even if it is made of something as elusive and hard to detect as, say, neutrinos, is securely under the umbrella (or reach) of modern science. We simply have no evidence of anything that isn’t, since science seeks to cover an understanding of the world and its contents, no matter how exotic.
But we don’t know enough to make any such predictions, which is likely to lead down many a wrong and counter-productive path – that was my argument. I think the OED definition is modest and good enough enough to be describing adequately the concept of a ghost as it crops up in popular mythology and imagination; and, indeed, a defining characteristic of the concept of ghost is that it is some leftover of a living being (to my knowledge commodes, apartment buildings, and other inanimate objects are unrepresented by ghosts). This could turn out to be entirely wrong – as I said before if ghosts exist they might turn out to be effects projected by people with very large pineal glands – but we do know about the concept of a ghost, much as we know about other concepts though they may not necessarily exist (e.g., pink unicorns). The problem is making the leap from concept to object, which we have no grounds and no evidence (no direction even) to do.
It seems a doomed exercise until a ghost is actually produced, though I doubt you are holding your breath on this any more than I am.
What we have come to is that there are many things which people wrongly assume to be ghosts which, when subject to rigid examination, turn out to be explained through other means.
There remain a number of occurences, however, which are not explainable, for one of several reasons: Either the phenomenon was unable to be adequately scrutinized to determine a physical cause, or, even after examination the phenomenon is currently inexplicable.
The definition fleshed out by FISH above (under duress, he admitted), is one which eliminates the assumptions we have no business making about the phenomenon (e.g., it is a spirit, being, dead person, etc.), and describes how the phenomenon appears. As many have already said, we won’t know exactly what a ghost is until we can get one to hold still for us. Until then, I hope this answers your OP.
Meaning, it’s an indefinite definition. What is the benefit of that? We already have a term for unknown phenomenon; we call them ‘unknown phenomenon’.
A definition for ghosts that means approximately ‘unexplainable phenom that seems alive’ is not only drastically inconsistent with the common conception of the term, but it muddles the issue; an apparition is ‘ghostly’ if -and only if- we don’t know what caused it. If it is ever proven to be the result of the spirits of dead people, it won’t be ghostly anymore!
Pretty much everyone knows what ghost means. It’s a portion or vestige of a dead entity that operates independently of the part of the dead entity that sits there and decays. Presumably there could be a fair amount of variance within this category of being; after we deomonstrate entities of the general type we can subclassify to our hearts content. That doesn’t require ambiguating the definition though.
As far as I can see, the only potential benefit to generalizing the definition to the point that it is nonspecific is, you can then legitimately call something a ghost without bothering to try and figure out what it is first. And that seems like cheating.
Just to let you know I’m still alive, and have read most of the posts. Thank you all for your contribution, it pisses me off that Ghosts can’t be completely explained away thats all.
It sounds like you won’t be satisfied until 100% of all “sightings” can be explained in a non-paranormal manner.
That ain’t gonna happen in the real world, for such reasons as:[ul][li]Not all facts are available[]Not all observations or claims can be confirmed or refuted[]Some stories are false, fake, distorted, or hoaxes[]Since most stories are about past events, they cannot be reproduced for testing purposes[]The existance of phenomena that cannot be detected cannot be proved or disproved.[/ul][/li]This in no way proves that ghosts exist, nor does the inability to satisfactorily explain an event suggest that it is paranormal. It just suggests that we don’t have enough evidence to make a determination. Yet or ever. Such is science.
Like the academic exercise of “all crows are black,” where finding a googol of black crows doesn’t syllogistically prove that statement, in a practical sense, the more black crows that are found, the more likely it is that the statement is true. All it would take is a single white crow to disprove it; likewise, a single, solid, unquestionable ghost could cast doubt on all the previous explanations. We haven’t yet found one.
So, the accumulating negative evidence points, more and more strongly, towards the non-existance of ghosts, at least in the conventional, popular definition of them as the spirits of dead beings haunting old houses.
Yes, yes, of course anything we see can be waved away as a known principle of physics: after all, we understand optics pretty well, and anything we see is a result of the interpretation of patterns of light. That doesn’t necessarily mean we know what we saw.
Instead of saying a potential “ghost” is something proven not to be the agency of un-conscious application of known principles of physics, then, perhaps I should revise that to say that the unknown appearance we wish to categorize is positively ruled out as any other known non-living force. This would exclude God (known), aliens (living), funny shadows (known), hoaxes and hallucinations (excluded previously), and peanut butter (mmmm).
And I know it’s sort of unnecessary to try to redefine what we colloquially “know” about what a ghost is and where one comes from. Once again, perhaps ghost is too loaded a word; that’s why I originally suggested a UFO-equivalent word such as appearance for a Mysterious Sighting, a word that had no particular bias for the veracity of the phenomenon observed.
In any case, for the reasons Musicat listed, many of these sightings will go unproven (in either direction). Until now, the most we can say is that the only reliable data points that continue to accumulate are “I think I saw something!” and “I haven’t found a disembodied spirit yet.”
The difference between the all-crows-are-black metaphor, unfortunately, is that there is a dearth of claims to have seen white crows. People continue to vociferously maintain that they have seen returned spirits and haunts and such.
Part of the benefit of the new definition is that it allows us to explore other reasons for such appearances or manifestations we commonly call “ghosts.”
If we assume they are spirits of the dead and look for evidence to support that, what if it turns out they are other-dimensional conscious beings pretending to be spirits of the dead? We will have had a pre-conceived notion misleading our research. The possibilities for what they are is endless.
I was alseep one night at my girlfriends house. Well, technically, ay her parent’ house. Whatever. I was asleep.
All of a sudden, I was awoken and instantly aware of something, some “presence” on my chest. I tried to feel it with my left hand, but was horrified to find it immobile, as if pinned down by a heavy weight!! I reached up and recoiled in horror. There was something on my chest!! I lay there for some time trying to work up the courage to see what it was. I slowly inched my other hand up to my chest and felt a…cold, rubbery, yet undoubtedly organic “thing” just laying there, unresponsive. Emboldened, my fingers wandered around, trying to deduce its size and dimensions.
So, what was it? Incubus? Succubus? Queen Mab? Red Lectroids from the eighth dimension?
No, it was my left hand!!. My left arm had evidently fallen asleep and (when I turned in my sleep, probably) flopped down on my chest, awakening me. When I touched it with my right hand, it couldn’t feel a thing, and it wasn’t till I reached my left elbow that I realized what was up.
This all happened in the space of about 5-10 seconds, but they were the creepiest 10 seconds of my life.