The hostility comes from the wooers, IMO. I don’t see the “clamor to squelch efforts to apply scientific method” just a big yawn and a meh. We’ve been trying for a very long time and ghosts just refuse to show up for testing. There is nothing to test. Ghosts, paranormal events and demons simply do not exist.
Yeah, right. You use an obnoxious term like that, and the hostility comes from them, and you are not hostile in the least.
Nope, not in the least. Grow up, Peter. Look, I’m not going to patronize grown ups who believe in fairies and ghosts by using pseudo-scientific sounding words that they’ve tried to torture into use. I’ll show the respect they desire after they come up with even one tiny shard of of testable evidence from within the entire whole of the paranormal claims.
Nice bit of not-hostility going there.:rolleyes:
Meteorites. They were “paranormal” back in the day, then someone proved they exist after all, and instantly they became normal.
You can never prove “the paranormal” exists because anything proven to exist stops being paranormal by definition.
What does any (supposed) hostility I have for your posting style have to do with my feelings for people who believe in the paranormal?
The difference between meteorites and ghosts was that meteorites were solid, tangible objects and available for all to see and test. Not understanding an event and not having an event to test are two very different things.
Welp, you certainly seem to be leading us toward thinking these statements are true. You *do *want the anti-ghosters to say there’s a possibility ghosts exist, don’t you?
Again, there was too much evidence of meteorites falling from the sky in plain sight for the skeptics to maintain their stance. It’s not the same case with ghosts. They haven’t become an everyday occurrence or observable phenomenon. Therefore, the analogy fails.
Think about this in a more mundane setting: When cars were first invented, there were staunch horse & buggy advocates who thought the car would never catch on. How many years did it take until they were convinced otherwise? There was no way to know at the time. If you asked the horse & buggiers “How long will it take for you to change your mind about cars,” they wouldn’t have been able to answer, if they answered at all, because they couldn’t conceive of life outside the horse & buggy world.
In that case, cars were definitely part of everyday life, and the effects of their presence could be observed and measured. Not so with ghosts. The methods used to observe and measure them are largely unreliable. That makes your question virtually impossible to answer. You’re asking them when they’ll change their minds about something that can’t be verified.
If you want the anti-ghosters to admit the possibility ghosts exist, you’re going to have to try something different than logic traps.
They saw them fall from heaven did they? Did they see an angel lob a rock down?
But here not only have you incorrectly parsed my words, you’ve also missed the point of what I was saying.
If a person actually sees a meteorite strike the ground it will typically be for only the last second or fraction of a second of its fall. They don’t know how high it has fallen from, let alone its “origins”.
Yes, obviously.
This does not falsify a hypothesis of meteorites coming from the earth however.
Note that one of the theories of meteorites was that they were material ejected from a volcano. People had certainly witnessed rocks being thrown up to high heights by volcanic eruptions.
Not at all. I’m aware of this key difference which is why I also threw in the iron filings analogy (which is like the meteorite analogy in that we don’t see anything other than the filings).
I’ve used the iron filings analogy in two previous posts and you’ve yet to comment. Why can we conclude that a meteorite is the phenomenon, and it’s special in itself, but the iron filings are not?
So, with all the improvement in technology, why isn’t the evidence for ghosts becoming stronger?
It was thought, by some, that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. As time went on, it became more likely, then a reality. The evidence became stronger.
Rocks from the sky? Over time, it was shown that there was a reasonable explanation connecting streaks in the sky with rocks on the ground. The evidence became stronger.
Demons? No improvement in evidence. Planets? Robot flybys improved the evidence. BigFoot? No improvement, just more hoaxes. Plate tectonics? Huge accumulation of good evidence. Do you see a pattern here?
I’m an audio engineer, and I am not pursuing it because I find quite reasonable explanations for patterns in noise when recorded by cheap equipment and highly amplified. Ghosts are not a reasonable explanation and audio engineers are not mystified except by amateurs who don’t know any better.
Yes. That word was synonomous with the sky back then.It was literally the same word in a lot of languages. There was no dstinction.
No, but that wasn’t theclaim. The claim was that they sawthem fall from the sky. You’re clock wooster is the one he thinks he saw a ghost.
They knew it fell from the sky.
No it doesn’t, but you’re still trying to compare a hypothesis to a claimed observation. Rocks falling from the sky is the observation. Maybe something picked them up from the ground is the hypothesis. In your hypothetical, your ghost is not a hypothetical; explanation for an obdervation, it is the claimed observation itself.
Not at all. I’m aware of this key difference which is why I also threw in the iron filings analogy (which is like the meteorite analogy in that we don’t see anything other than the filings).
Because it’s irrelevant. Explanations for these respective observations are irrelevant. One observation is rocks falling from the sky, the other is “I saw a ghost.” The latter is not posited as an explanation but as the claim itself.
Who says I’m defending the existence of ghosts? We are getting more documented strange evidence though. None of it points to dead uncle Frank kicking around the attic, but there have been some cool anomalies caught on tape. The problem isn’t lack of evidence for unusual phenomena, it is that the collectors of the evidence point to woo for the explanation and irrevocably taint it. I’ve seen some cool thermal/ infrared footage cropping up lately for example. If we assume that it is not a hoax, (how to do this was the point of this thread if you recall) The we are left with some neat footage of unusual origin. Could it be miniature ball lightning? some strange eddy of hot wind from out of the blue? maybe. I’d like to find out though.
As we learn more, and more people begin to have that equipment available we ARE getting more evidence. The problem is that it’s really hard to separate real documentation from fakes. Since woo is so often cited, even the good stuff is thrown out with the bathwater so to speak. Bigfoot is a good example. Science learned fairly recently that there really WERE huge primates living within the time range of our primitive ancestors. Hell we just found a pretty large, flat faced monkey in an area we thought we knew all the wildlife in. More people+ more cameras= more evidence. It also equals more hoaxes, and that was the point of the thread.
As an aside, I agree that pattern recognition and random white noise accounts for a great deal of EVP like “whispers” and a lot of supposed speech, but there is also another category of them that is obviously music, or tonal noises. That HAS to have an origin somewhere, so I think that it would be worth figuring out how it is showing up on the equipment. It might be possible for example, that something in the building is acting like a small speaker or resonator and reverberating or somehow producing noises just at the edge our natural capacity to hear it. At night, when everything is quiet, people might well begin to hear it on the edge of their ranges when the ears are sharper. If that is the case, then we could devise a test for it, and make one more paranormal claim go away, get it?
Evidence of what?
Excellent point.
It’s like the case of alternative medicine, which once tested and proven becomes simply…medicine.
The “paranormal” is a mixed jumble of primal fears, anecdotes, misconceptions and badly collected and analyzed data which has prosaic (normal) explanations when all is said and done.
Sure. If you and other interested parties have the money and time to study it, whatever it is, go for it.
Psst…we know the air is full of radio waves, we know radio waves are full of voices and music, we know cheap electronic equipment acts as an antenna and…think there just might be a logical connection? Or do you still want to wish for ghosts?
Anything out of the ordinary Dio, and you know it. I’ve been really polite while you and Czarcasm hijacked this thread to hell and back, but I’m losing patience really quickly. I’m speaking in generalities, because I am asking for criteria that would support “clean evidence”, not nit-picky criteria for one test in one place at one time. I’m quite aware that being specific is how science is done. unfortunately, people who resort to woo can’t usually be more specific, than “I see weird lights out there” or “we hear strange noises”.
So for example, Let us say that you are presented a videotape. On it you have footage from three cameras running at the same time. on your nightvision you see nothing. On the IR you notice a light briefly flaring, on the thermal you see a small heat blob that coincides with the IR footage. Now, we can see plainly in the footage that there isn’t anyone there, nor is there an animal. So we have a weird little light that would stump most people. If this has happened before or with any regularity it might scare the crap out of people. So you have to determine if someone is playing silly buggers with you. The point of the thread, was how to ensure that your evidence was as clean as possible. If it turns out that you are filming a real oddity, it might be worth investigating the cause of that weird little light. Will it change the world? probably not. Is it interesting and will solving it make someone else feel better and more secure in science to explain the world? Absolutely.
As a side note, I don’t want people who scare this easily conducting this kind of research. I’d be suspicious of their results.
I’m aware of that. It SHOULD be doing it all the time though or least consistently, not just randomly for no good reason. WHO FUCKING SAID ANYTHING ABOUT IT BEING A GODDAMN GHOST? Cite me one cite in this thread where I supported the causation being the spirits of the dead? Can you repeatably demonstrate the reliable collection of such noises and identify the origin of the sound? Most people I know can’t, and the explanation isn’t ghosts, but if you can’t show it, or more importantly fix it, then you aren’t going to ever put the woo to rest. All you are going to do is demonstrate disdain, spout a lot of tech speak the average person won’t get and leave them with the same problem: I hear weird shit at night.
On the other hand, digging a little deeper might reveal the source of the problem and an easy way to fix it. That would not only add to debunking further woo, but show a pretty damn solid basis to turning to science for answers rather than woo. If you don’t want to play then piss off, I get that plenty of you think it’s a waste of time. Personally, I think that if more of us did science at the home level, we’d be a hell of a lot better off. It is exactly arrogant ass attitudes like that post that drive people away from listening to a good explanation.
You’re right, it is better that nobody ever looks at it at all. We can all laugh and point and do nothing while everyone turns to woo for the answer because nobody helped.
Here let me give you an example that will illustrate my position.
At the home I lived in previously we were across the street from a large cattle pasture. It was about 3/4 of mile to the other side. Located centrally there was an irregular shallow pond in the pasture. Along the fence line on our side were occasional thick clumps of brush. One cold, clear, night We started noticing arguing voices coming from outside. Being fairly late at night, I decided to make a round of the house and be certain there wasn’t anybody outside. Once out there, it was obvious that the voices were coming from just behind on of the brushy areas. After a few minutes of no response to my inquiries I decided to call the police. The fight seemed to be escalating, and I didn’t want it spilling into my yard, or someone getting stabbed or shot. The police responded, but by the time he had got there the voices had subsided quite a bit. He went and had a look briefly along the fence line. He was about to give up when the fighting started up again, quite clearly coming from the brushy area. He hopped the fence and took off after the voices. After a few minutes he came back confused. We waited around for a few minutes more and the voices resumed fighting. It turns out that on that specific night, sound was somehow traveling across the water, and bouncing onto the brush pile, making it sound as if the people really were right there. It fooled everyone and made us pretty nervous.
Now imagine that something similar but less obvious is happening in someone’s home. Something is acting as a resonator and it only is audible when things are nearly silent, and occurs only occasionally. It could very well give someone the creeps. You hear a voice, you go and look, there isn’t anyone around. If it only happens when conditions are just right, like in my example, it might only happen once a month or even less. Those incidents have a way of sticking in your lizard brain though, and for lots of people that isn’t a far jump to haunted house. It doesn’t occur frequently or for long enough for them to track it down. Get it?
Now here’s a situation we often see. Acid Lamp, are you a qualified audio engineer? No offense, friend, but what you describe as “strange” and “cool” is, to an experienced audio engineer, quite common, ordinary and explainable. A frequent part of our job is trying to eliminate interference from unwanted EMF and there’s so much floating around in modern society that it is sometimes hard. Producing weird sounds is easy and so is explaining them. I can eliminate most “ghosts” with filters and wiring changes. Isn’t it odd that the supernatural are so weak that I can kill them with a filter?
Pick one:[ol][li]I am interested in learning about logical, proven, but mundane explanations to phenomena I don’t understand, or[*]I would rather pursue wild-ass fantasies that have no connection with reality but sound really neat.[/ol][/li]
ETA: I hear weird shit, too, sometimes, and sometimes I might be puzzled about it, but I don’t jump to the illogical conclusion that it is paranormal. Isn’t that what you are doing? Or are you “just asking questions”?
OK, let’s extend this discussion to video as well as audio phenomena. AL, do you have a solid background in video? I do, as well as audio, both of which I work with every day. I have seen many examples of “anomalies” that any video, optical or photographic expert is quite familiar with and they are not paranormal at all.
I spend a lot of time trying to eliminate flares, reflections and other unwanted lights because they are usually not what I am trying to capture. There are many sources of unwanted lights – reflections inside the camera lens, just to name one common problem.
I think that may be where the problem lies. Science has improved a lot beyond the home level. If you can’t find an explanation yourself, I suggest you consult an expert rather than making up ridiculous theories or assuming the paranormal.
I just did. EVP is often caused by RF picked up by a crude antenna and interpreted by the gullible as something else.
I get that you investigated and found a reasonable explanation. Good for you. Others might have assumed a haunted house, you did not. That’s admirable. And your point is…?