DOES anyone on this board believe in ghosts?

[GIGObuster]

@Freudian_Slit

How is Bruce Lee being killed by Shaolin monks more real than God or Gollum?

Everybody loves Kung Fu fighting…

Some more than God it seems.

[Sablicious]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

I’m not going to try to dissuade you from using the word magic that way, but I don’t really see the use of it – if magic is just ordinary interaction, everything is magic, and nothing is. Kinda robs the word of meaning.

Not unlike ‘love’.

[aruvqan]

I am a 3. I had been perfectly awake and playing with an imaginary playmate that matched the description of a person who was dead, and I had no way of ever having seen a picture of him, he had already been dead about 60 years at the time I was born, the only extant picture of him was half the country away and I had not yet visited that place. Other odd occurrences had been known to happen in that house, and happened after we moved out. And a 3 year old doesn’t actually have the concept of live and dead quite yet. As hard as various people tried, the assorted happenings have no normal explanation. I call it haunted, your mileage may vary.

I actually very much like TAPS, they actively try to debunk things before grudgingly telling people that they might have something in their house/building and they should log any happenings to see if there is a pattern.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Not only is there no evidence for ghosts, but the way they are conceived in popular imagination is violative of the laws of physics, or even a coherent scientific definition. Basically, they are impossible. It’s not unreasonable or irrational to make a default presumption that the physically impossible is physically impossible until proven otherwise. To me asking if it’s possible that ghosts even might exist is like asking if it’s just barely possible that witches might be able to turn people into frogs. I’m going to go out on a limb and flatly say no to both. I know that in scientific terms you can’t really say anything is impossible, only extremely improbable, but I think that, in practical terms, things that are astronomically improbable are, for all real world intents and purposes, indistiguishable from the absolutely impossible and may be treated as such by default. If I’m proven wrong (and I won’t be), then I’m proven wrong. I don’t have an emotional investment or religious commitment to not being proven wrong, but I am going to dismiss things which violate thelaws of physics as impossible until proven otherwise.

[Indistinguishable]

God, I wish ghosts existed. I wish death wasn’t final and our loved ones still hung around interacting with us in small ways and this and that.

But, I know ghosts don’t exist. I’m as sure of it as I am of anything else about the world. Sad, but true.

[handsomeharry]

@Kobal2

Seriously ? You’re trying to turn a thread about ghosts into some kind of political partisan chicanery ?.. SERIOUSLY ?

Stranger around these parts,** Kobal2**?
:p:p
Best wishes,
hh

[XT]

Does anyone on this board believe in ghosts? Undoubtedly. There are several posters on this board who believe in the woo. It’s unsurprising, since there is a pretty high percentage of the populace that believes in things like ghosts. In addition you are going to get a lot of, well, ghost agnostics I suppose, who think the question is probably unknowable, or at least that the jury is still out (i.e. the question hasn’t been settled).

What do I think? I don’t believe in ghosts…or, I suppose more precisely, I don’t believe that there is any evidence that such a phenomena that has been presented so far. Most ghost stories are anecdotal, and that isn’t any sort of ‘evidence’, especially since I’ve seen convincing counter arguments that most of the anecdotes can be explained adequately by psychological or environmental effects (sub-audible echos, lighting effects, etc). Of the non-anecdotal evidence I’ve seen, none of it is, to me anyway, compelling. I haven’t seen anything that couldn’t be explained by non-ghostly effects, and much of it is laughable (blurred pictures or silly electromagnetic fluctuation that could be caused by anything at all).

I was watching a show on Science Channel a few weeks ago where they were talking about the physics of ghosts. They basically gathered the ‘requirements’ for what a ghost is supposed to be based on the various effects as defined in the anecdotes. Essentially they determined that ghosts were impossible based on our current understanding of physics, given the supposed characteristics anecdotally related. Granted, there could be some aspect of ghosts that simply defies our current understanding of physics (maybe they are made of dark matter and dark energy, though still can be ‘seen’ in some way we don’t know about :p), but extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs, and thus far, at least as far as I’m concerned, all the proofs are quite ordinary and don’t need a magical/supernatural explanations. Mundane one’s are adequate IMHO in order to theorize what may or may not have happened.
-XT

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@aruvqan

I am a 3. I had been perfectly awake and playing with an imaginary playmate that matched the description of a person who was dead, and I had no way of ever having seen a picture of him, he had already been dead about 60 years at the time I was born, the only extant picture of him was half the country away and I had not yet visited that place. Other odd occurrences had been known to happen in that house, and happened after we moved out. And a 3 year old doesn’t actually have the concept of live and dead quite yet. As hard as various people tried, the assorted happenings have no normal explanation. I call it haunted, your mileage may vary.

I actually very much like TAPS, they actively try to debunk things before grudgingly telling people that they might have something in their house/building and they should log any happenings to see if there is a pattern.

You had an imaginary friend who had a resemblence to somebody you later saw in a picture? That’s supposed to be amazing and unexplainable?

How can you prove what your imaginary friend looked like in your imagination before you saw the picture?

I’ll explain it to you – edited memory. Happens all the time. After you saw the picture, you edited your memory to match the picture. It’s not intentional, and it seems like the way you always remembered it. Memories are not photographic records. They are impressionistic and changable, and subject to suggestion.

[BrainGlutton]

FWIW, the mystic and novelist Donald Tyson (author of the Lovecraftian novels [Necronomicon](April 4, 2008) and Alhazred) says this is The Truth About Ghosts:

Do ghosts exist? Of course they do. Why else would tens of thousands of people from all nations around the world and all periods in human history report seeing them under more or less similar circumstances? The question you should be asking yourself is, granted that ghosts exist – what are they?

The most important thing to know about ghosts is that they are not the souls of dead people returned to communicate with the living. Dead is dead. Unless you believe in the reincarnation of the lower soul with the memories of its past lives intact, there is no coming back (I do not believe in the reincarnation of the personality and memory).

Neither are ghosts physically present when you see them. They are present in the astral world which always overlaps the physical world. You see a ghost when, for various reasons, the separation between the two levels of reality becomes very thin.

From historical accounts, it appears that the perception of ghosts occurs most often at night, in relative or complete darkness, or at least in some shadowed place, usually when the air is still. Certain localities are favorable for the appearance of ghosts – why is difficult to determine. One theory has it that a ghost is a kind of psychic recording of an event in the past that took place at that locality, and that the locality acts as some sort of recording medium, and periodically replays the event under the right conditions.

Ghosts are often described as shadowy or translucent. Only portions of their body may appear – a relative of mine once saw a ghostly hand project itself upward through the surface of a school desk that was stored in a dark school basement. Sometimes ghosts walk out of or into walls, or through furniture. They can do this because, to them, our physical reality is no more than a projected three-dimensional image.

There are many exceptions to this general description, of course. Some ghosts appear as real and as solid as a person of flesh and blood. Some appear in full daylight, and are seen by numerous persons at the same time, or on numerous occasions. More rarely they interact with others, talking and even laughing with them, or touching them. However, as a broad rule of thumb, ghosts appear in haunted places, at night when the light is poor, when the air is quiet, to individuals who are frequently (but not always by any means) going to bed or waking from sleep. Usually they do not speak, or take the least notice of their observer. They perform the same set of actions on successive occasions, as though performing a play, or in a trance state, or as though they were themselves projections of a cinema image.

You may ask how a projected astral image can touch you? The answer is a bit difficult to grasp at first consideration, because it challenges your normal concept of reality. You need to realize that what you see in the world around you is being created by your brain from raw sensory data. Your world exists inside your head, even though it appears to exist outside your body. Because your world is really a mental construction, it is possible for an astral being to appear completely solid and real to your perceptions. When this happens, you may find yourself unable to differentiate between a physical object and an astral object, or a physical person and a ghost.

Usually there is a difference between our perception of a physical object and an astral object, which is why ghosts appear incomplete, dim, shadowy, pale, translucent, and so on. My point is, at times there is no difference in perception between the physical and astral realities. This rarely occurs for the average person, but it does occur. Under this circumstance, any entity or thing in the astral realm can interact with you with all the solidity and reality of a physical entity or thing.

If ghosts are merely astral recordings of past events, how do they interact and communicate with human beings? Usually, they don’t. When they do take notice of a human observer, it indicates that they are not a pure ghost, but an astral entity that has assumed the physical appearance of a dead person. On rare occasions, it is indeed possible to talk with ghosts, or communicate with them through gestures, but when this happens, the ghost is really a spirit of the astral world in disguise.

Astral spirits can assume different shapes and features more or less at will. They enjoy the company of and interaction with living human beings. When the emotions of a human being are very strong – for example, just after the death of a loved one – an astral spirit may put on the body of the departed and appear to his or her lover or family. If you have ever had anyone close to you die, you will probably have experienced extremely vivid dreams in which you are talking with that person. The being in these dreams is not your departed friend or relative, but an astral spirit. Such spirits can appear both in dreams and in our waking reality when the proper conditions exist.

Are ghosts dangerous? Usually not. In their most common manifestation they are merely shadows or images without physical substance. On the other hand, if an astral spirit decides to haunt an individual person rather than a particular place, they can become very distracting. This is especially true if the pseudo-ghost takes on physical substance and is able to touch the person being haunted.

The touch of a ghost is chilly. It draws heat from the surface of the body, and if it persists, this cold gradually penetrates into the muscle and fat. I have had the experience of being embraced for prolonged periods of time by ghostly spirits. It takes a little getting used to. I enjoy it most on hot summer nights. In the wintertime, it makes me shiver and put another blanket on the bed. These astral ghosts are lonely beings, and they like to sleep in the beds of those who do not reject them, in the same way stray dogs or cats like to rub up against friendly persons.

I should mention here that animals sometimes appear as ghosts. One night while lying in bed I had a litter of drowned kittens snuggle up under my armpit for warmth and go to sleep. I didn’t mind, although their attempts to suckle on my armpit tickled like crazy! The poor things still had their eyes closed, they were so young. Their fur was wet, which is how I knew they had been drowned.

From personal experience, many times repeated, I can state categorically that the touch of such a spirit may feel complete physical. At these times there is no way to differentiate the hand of a ghost laid on your shoulder from the hand of a person, except that the ghost’s hand will (usually) be somewhat cool.

I have had so many interactions with spirits over the years, they do not trouble me in the least, but I can understand how being touched by a ghost in the darkness, alone in bed, might startle, or even frighten, some individuals. If this happens to you, relax. You are very unlikely to be harmed, since most spirits mean no harm. If you are really troubled, turn on a light or get up from your bed or chair and walk into another room. This should dispel the astral presence.

The most important thing I can say about ghosts is, never mistake a ghost for the human being it resembles. Not even if the ghost talks to you, and declares itself to be the departed human being. Astral spirits who imitate dead people are seeking attention and love. If you wish to give them this love (as I often do), fine; but if you do not wish to be deceived and bothered by them, turn your mind away from them and focus it firmly on some other task, such as reading a book or washing your hair. They may persist for a time, but eventually they will give up in disappointment and go away.

[Marley23]

I prefer to believe that all ghosts are either well-disguised holographic projections, or crooked land developers named “Old Man” in rubber costumes. In either case the idea is to scare off the rightful owners of the land. Fortunately their efforts are always foiled by snooping kids and their dog.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Der_Trihs

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

I’m not going to try to dissuade you from using the word magic that way, but I don’t really see the use of it – if magic is just ordinary interaction, everything is magic, and nothing is. Kinda robs the word of meaning.

I didn’t say it was “ordinary interaction”; anything but. Drawing a symbol on the floor and having it confine something isn’t “ordinary interaction”; nor is burning a picture of something and having the original catch on fire.

It’s also not scientifically explainable. And if it is, it is an ordinary interaction.

@Sablicious

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

I’m not going to try to dissuade you from using the word magic that way, but I don’t really see the use of it – if magic is just ordinary interaction, everything is magic, and nothing is. Kinda robs the word of meaning.

Not unlike ‘love’.

I think that’s something completely different. Just because something can be explained in terms of its working components, doesn’t make the concept itself obsolete – think of an arm: the fact that it is composed of bones, muscle, veins, tissue etc. doesn’t rob it of any of its armliness; just as explaining love in terms of biochemical neurological interactions doesn’t rob it of its loveliness. The functional details of both the arm and love remain unchanged; they are still the same items you started with, the words still denote the same thing.

That’s different in the case of magic: if it’s defined as not permitting a reductionist explanation in terms of ordinary physical parts, then such an explanation would change its functional details. The magic you explain then isn’t the magic you set out to explain; thus, either that magic doesn’t exist, and there is in fact nothing denoted by the word ‘magic’ (and that’s what I take this to be an argument for), or it’s inexplicable, and the question of its existence undecidable, as you can never actually determine whether or not something is an example of magic, or just something not explained as of yet.

[Indistinguishable]

I’m on Der Trihs’s side on the magic thing; plenty of stories take place in a hypothetical universe with wizards and spells and all the rest of it, all following very clear rules (“If you say these words and make these gestures, then this result will happen”), but with everyone having no qualms calling this magic. People who believe in magic are often thought of as believing that the magic has rules which one could theoretically understand. So I have no problem using the word “magic” for things which are scientifically explainable (in the sense of being testable and shown to follow predictable rules), so long as they just happen to have the right resemblances to the archetypal examples of magical phenomenon.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

The thing is, though, that the existence of gods, ghosts, unicorns, magic, etc., is generally thought to be something controversial, a kind of litmus test separating worldviews incorporating the supernatural from those that don’t; using magic to denote things that happen according to natural laws loses this distinction, as the existence of such things isn’t really controversial. Plus we’d have to keep track of what meaning of magic is used in conversation – the kind that ultimately isn’t any more mysterious than conjurer’s tricks, or the laws-of-physics-breaking kind.

[Indistinguishable]

Well, I’d use “magic” to describe certain hypothetical phenomena following hypothetical natural laws which do not actually exist. The kind of people who believe in these laws often believe in other woo-woo which isn’t real as well; you can still use it as a litmus test.

Just like unicorns, right? There’s nothing physically fantastic about the concept of a unicorn; it just happens to be a kind of animal that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t violate a priori epistemological conceptions of the mechanics of the universe; it just violates the (lack of) evidence.

[Freudian_Slit]

@Der_Trihs

@Freudian_Slit

How is Bruce Lee being killed by Shaolin monks more real than God or Gollum?

Both Bruce Lee and Shaolin monks are or were real? So, in theory they could have killed him at least. Whereas purely fictional creatures like God and Gollum can’t do anything even in theory.

Well, I guess that kind of sort of makes sense.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@Indistinguishable

Well, I’d use “magic” to describe certain hypothetical phenomena following hypothetical natural laws which do not actually exist.

Hmm, I don’t know. To me, magic is fundamentally supernatural, not just of a different kind of nature (just as unicorns aren’t just horses with funny horns, but rather creatures of a wholly different kind – like angels aren’t just people with wings, too). In a universe filled wholly with dark matter, which, as far as is known, doesn’t partake in the electromagnetic interaction (if it exists at all), would electricity be magic? It doesn’t seem magical if you can put it into a Lagrangian (then again, you do sometimes find ghosts there, too).

[aruvqan]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

@aruvqan

I am a 3. I had been perfectly awake and playing with an imaginary playmate that matched the description of a person who was dead, and I had no way of ever having seen a picture of him, he had already been dead about 60 years at the time I was born, the only extant picture of him was half the country away and I had not yet visited that place. Other odd occurrences had been known to happen in that house, and happened after we moved out. And a 3 year old doesn’t actually have the concept of live and dead quite yet. As hard as various people tried, the assorted happenings have no normal explanation. I call it haunted, your mileage may vary.

I actually very much like TAPS, they actively try to debunk things before grudgingly telling people that they might have something in their house/building and they should log any happenings to see if there is a pattern.

You had an imaginary friend who had a resemblence to somebody you later saw in a picture? That’s supposed to be amazing and unexplainable?

How can you prove what your imaginary friend looked like in your imagination before you saw the picture?

I’ll explain it to you – edited memory. Happens all the time. After you saw the picture, you edited your memory to match the picture. It’s not intentional, and it seems like the way you always remembered it. Memories are not photographic records. They are impressionistic and changable, and subject to suggestion.

Because the child psychologist my parents brought in asked me to describe my friend. It was definitely not my grandfather, there was a distinct portwine birthmark on my greatgrandfathers face. My father identified the description down to the pipesmoking and birthmark. My great grandfather built the house and lived [and died] in it. A 3 year old has pretty much no reason to come up with some arcane plan using a dead relative as a play mate. I have no actual memory of what this imaginary playmate looked like, or what possible reason I would have had as a 3 year old to fake an imaginary playmate. I would assume I was just lonely being away from my dad and the little friends I had probably made in base housing for the first time. [My dad was being rotated from Wiesbaden to somewhere in Vietnam, so my mom took my brother and I back to live in the house next to my grandparents. My great grandfather had built 3 houses, one for my grandfather, one for my great uncle, and one for he and my maiden great aunt. We were living in the one he built for he and my great aunt. My dad bought it off my great aunt in 1949 when he and my mom got married but never really lived in it until the 60s.]

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

You didn’t come up with an arcane plan using a dead relative for a playmate. You had an imaginary friend and your father projected your great grandfather into it.

[VinylTurnip]

I don’t believe in spooks, I don’t believe in spooks, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t…

[begbert2]

I believe that lekatt believes in ghosts, type-3-style.
Myself, I technically am a 1, since I’m a 1 about everything outside of statements in abstract systems and a few things based on cogito ergo sum. Forget ghosts not existing - I’m not 100% certain that my left foot exists. Perhaps I’ve been hallucinating it the whole time, solipsist style.

Which is to say, while I’m technically a 1, I’m functionally a 2. I am precisely as certain that there are no ghosts as I am certain that my left foot exists, because based on similar first-hand experience I am that certain that human brain functionality doesn’t leave a gap for a soul to fit in. Thus human souls cannot slip loose their mortal coils and go a-wandering, since there’s nothing to do the slipping.

Though, if by “ghost” you are referring to something other than the disembodied spirits of mortal organisms (as in demons or fairies or the like that have never been mortal), then I’m marginally less certain they don’t exist. I’m still more certain that they don’t exist than I’m certain that France exists, mind you, due to the laws of physics and being more opposed to the idea of ghosts than they are to the nonexistence of France, but my first-hand experience with my foot still sets it just a hair above.