# I Heard My Father's 'Ghost' Yesterday. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 25, 2012, 7:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586 "2012-01-25T07:15:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/21 "2012-01-25T17:53:04Z")
> [@DianaG](#): > > Bingo. I often hear my mother calling to me to wake up in the morning. She’s not dead. I heard a gunshot right when I was waking up the other day. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/22 "2012-01-25T17:54:56Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > Ok, and for you it is definitely “not ghosts” i.e. not real in anyway and for me it is possibly something real. What does that have to do with subjective experiences and verifiability? I agree there is “something real” in that **Jim B.** definitely felt something happened, and lots of people have had similar experiences. The question is what happened. The plausible explanation is that he thought he heard something, but it wasn’t a ghost talking to him. That’s not an issue of subjectivity and objectivity and verifiability and what’s “more real” and whatever you were trying to say. It’s that ghosts don’t exist. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/23 "2012-01-25T18:00:32Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > Ok, and for you it is definitely “not ghosts” i.e. not real in anyway and for me it is possibly something real. See, I used to believe in the supernatural to some extent, but when I finally experienced auditory hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and the such, it seemed more plausible to me to lump all those sorts of experiences under “tricks of the brain” rather than dividing them into “tricks of the brain” and “possibly real supernatural phenomenon” when the feeling of the two experiences was identical. Why should I think one is mental and the other supernatural, and how would I know the difference? ---
**Author:** ![SiXSwordS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/49beb7/32.png) [@SiXSwordS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SiXSwordS)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/24 "2012-01-25T18:11:41Z")
> [@Jim\_B](#): > > How could a temporary illusion?/hallucination? sound like it was coming from the other room? Anecdote: For whatever reason, I have been experiencing auditory illusions frequently for two or three weeks. In one case I distinctly heard the doorbell and was about to get up to see who it could be before I realized it was the wrong doorbell. I moved recently and the doorbell I “heard” was the doorbell from my previous place. It sounded exactly right for my old place. ---
**Author:** ![mishagoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ea666f/32.png) [@mishagoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mishagoe)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/25 "2012-01-25T18:24:36Z")
> [@Paranoid\_Randroid](#): > > No one doubts that people have the subjective experience of seeing and hearing things that couldn’t physically be there, interacting with deceased loved ones, or hovering over their operating table before traversing a tunnel of light. (Or whatever.) These experiences are undoubtedly “real” in some sense. But by what principle of scientific enquiry should be assume one possible explanation (that they are what they appear to be) when other explanations perform just as well but _much_ more closely match up with our background knowledge? Becaue when you agree they are "undoubtedly “real” you mean real as in “couldn’t physically be there”. Your background knowledge is bascially this contradiction, so it should not be surprising that you tend towards epxlanations of the type “not physically real”. Therefore since it is not really real, it must be hallucination or the brain filling in bits and pieces it expects, so then it must be real in the special sense that it isn’t real in the world but an artifact of the brain’s representation of the world. Except of course the brain’s representation of the world is in the world, so by definition is real at least as far as the physical neural activations of the brain network, irrespective of the content, i.e. the subjective mental experience. So you must at minimum be saying there is an aspect to mental experience that while grounded and correlated in the physicallity of the brain, is for all intends and purposes, interchangeable and non-speciifc and can be correlated with any other substitutable sujective mental experience. In other words, there is an aspect to reality that is wholly subjective and cannot be specifically linked to an objective phenomenon. You accept that but you don’t accept ghosts. I don’t get the difference. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/26 "2012-01-25T18:29:29Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > This means that one could argue they are simply tricks of the mind, and while that explanation appeals to many, is still not confirmation that these experiences are anything other than what they are reported to be, namely an experience of a deceased relative or friend appearing and talking to us. This seems like a misapplication of the [principle of parsimony](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_parsimony) to me. I get the sense, from talking to people, that it’s the beloved returning as ghosts explanation that “appeals to many,” not the “tricks of the mind” explanation. And by your argument, I have to be right, since I _feel_ that way. There’s no confirmation that my experience is anything other than what I report it to be. ---
**Author:** ![mishagoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ea666f/32.png) [@mishagoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mishagoe)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/27 "2012-01-25T18:42:18Z")
> [@Sailboat](#): > > This seems like a misapplication of the [principle of parsimony](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_parsimony) to me. > > I get the sense, from talking to people, that it’s the beloved returning as ghosts explanation that “appeals to many,” not the “tricks of the mind” explanation. > > And by your argument, I have to be right, since I _feel_ that way. There’s no confirmation that my experience is anything other than what I report it to be. Beloved and appealing it what sense though? It may be appealing to people because it is parsimonious with their experience. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/28 "2012-01-25T18:44:51Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > Beloved and appealing it what sense though? In the sense that people who are dead stay present and death isn’t the end of your conscious existence. > [@](#): > > It may be appealing to people because it is parsimonious with their experience. That’s not what parsimony means or how it works. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/29 "2012-01-25T19:07:10Z")
The human mind works in such a way that it is always trying to make sense of what it perceives by filling in the blanks of what’s missing to make sense out of it based on past patterns and memories. When we see an outline made of dots forming a shape like a star our brain thinks “star” even though all we are really seeing is some dots. When you see an elephant through a picket fence your mind is smart enough to see an entire elephant even though you are only seeing 50% of it. It’s filling in those blanks based on past memories. And all this filling in of blanks is not limited to images. It’s sounds, smells, tastes, tactile cues. So if you hear a sound that’s unidentifiable your mind is going to try to match it up with something it can identify even with all the missing information. An odd noise of “a…e” suddenly gets filled in as “Jamie!” I get an odd phenomenon every morning when I turn the shower on. Something about the noise of the water in the pipes behind the wall my mind fills in as child screeching outside in the back yard. The first few times it shook me and I had to go look for myself. ---
**Author:** ![florez](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b9e5f3/32.png) [@florez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/florez)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/30 "2012-01-25T19:15:09Z")
If you heard your beloved father’s voice and it brought comfort or joy to you, than who cares about the rational reason. You heard it, and you did not have to share it with us, but you did. I believe things like this can happen and do happen more often than we will ever know of. ---
**Author:** ![mishagoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ea666f/32.png) [@mishagoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mishagoe)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/31 "2012-01-25T19:15:33Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > That’s not what parsimony means or how it works. This is what it means (not my definition, plugged from the web) Parsimony is a method for choosing the simplest explanation among a variety of possible explanations for phenomena when decisive evidence is unavailable. Would you not agree that the set of “possible explanations” from which the selection is made is what is debatable here? ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/32 "2012-01-25T19:35:05Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > This is what it means (not my definition, plugged from the web) > > Parsimony is a method for choosing the simplest explanation among a variety of possible explanations for phenomena when decisive evidence is unavailable. > > Would you not agree that the set of “possible explanations” from which the selection is made is what is debatable here? And returning from the dead is a simpler explanation than someone misinterpreting sensory input? A world where people are infallible but physics makes mistakes? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/33 "2012-01-25T19:38:44Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > Parsimony is a method for choosing the simplest explanation among a variety of possible explanations for phenomena when decisive evidence is unavailable. And there’s no such thing as “parsimonious with their experience.” We don’t live in separate worlds where different explanations are parsimonious to different people. The explanation that **Jim B.** had a hypnagogic hallucination, for example, is more parsimonious than an explanation that involves ghosts or souls or ESP that work through unexplained means. That’s true for everyone. I think everyone understands that sometimes things feel creepy or weird and the most reasonable explanation doesn’t always make our doubts go away. But that doesn’t mean that ghosts become the most logical explanation. ---
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/34 "2012-01-25T19:44:40Z")
> [@Hampshire](#): > > The human mind works in such a way that it is always trying to make sense of what it perceives by filling in the blanks of what’s missing to make sense out of it based on past patterns and memories. > When we see an outline made of dots forming a shape like a star our brain thinks “star” even though all we are really seeing is some dots. > When you see an elephant through a picket fence your mind is smart enough to see an entire elephant even though you are only seeing 50% of it. It’s filling in those blanks based on past memories. > And all this filling in of blanks is not limited to images. It’s sounds, smells, tastes, tactile cues. > So if you hear a sound that’s unidentifiable your mind is going to try to match it up with something it can identify even with all the missing information. An odd noise of “a…e” suddenly gets filled in as “Jamie!” > I get an odd phenomenon every morning when I turn the shower on. Something about the noise of the water in the pipes behind the wall my mind fills in as child screeching outside in the back yard. The first few times it shook me and I had to go look for myself. This. The human mind is excellent at finding patterns, sometimes even when there aren’t any. A person I know was under a great deal of stress, and also has bipolar disorder. She reported hearing things that weren’t there, as if a radio were playing in the next room, or people talking, although neither was true. Her doctor explained that in her stressful and manic state, her senses were very hyper-acute, and her brain was frantically trying to make sense of it all. I’ve had the experience of feeling the presence of someone who’s gone. I was probably thinking about them in “background processing” a good deal of the time, and sometimes my mind happened to hit a mental replay button on a real experience. If it’s comforting, and you like to believe that the person is really still there with you, it’s no harm done IMHO. [Of course if they tell you that it’s important to bury a hatchet in your next door neighbor please ignore that part.] ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/35 "2012-01-25T19:52:45Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > This is what it means (not my definition, plugged from the web) > > Parsimony is a method for choosing the simplest explanation among a variety of possible explanations for phenomena when decisive evidence is unavailable. > > Would you not agree that the set of “possible explanations” from which the selection is made is what is debatable here? Your mistake is in your list of “possible” explanations, because you’ve chosen to include things we don’t know are possible. I can come up with solid and verifiable evidence that hallucinations exist. Can you come up with solid and verifiable evidence for the existence of ghosts? If you still insist despite the total lack of evidence to keep ghosts on your list of possibilities, why do you not include time travelers, Loki the Trickster, bleeding from an alternate universe, or the cat practicing her ventriloquism equally among your list of possibilities? ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/36 "2012-01-25T19:58:13Z")
> [@DianaG](#): > > Bingo. I often hear my mother calling to me to wake up in the morning. She’s not dead. I had the same problem throughout high school and college. Moving out cured it. ---
**Author:** ![mishagoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ea666f/32.png) [@mishagoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mishagoe)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/37 "2012-01-25T21:20:10Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > And there’s no such thing as “parsimonious with their experience.” We don’t live in separate worlds where different explanations are parsimonious to different people. Clearly we do, because we do have competing explanations and theories with their champions as the best one that fits all the facts. There is generally room for debate with most ideas, even if I grant that theories such as Evolution are beyond debatable, but much more is debatable than not. > [@](#): > > The explanation that **Jim B.** had a hypnagogic hallucination, for example, is more parsimonious than an explanation that involves ghosts or souls or ESP that work through unexplained means. That’s true for everyone. Only if you exclude the subject’s own report that it was indeed the spirit/soul/whatever of the dear departed. You have to make the prior assumption that subject can’t be trusted to have had a real experience indicative of something that actually happened in the manner reported. [/QUOTE] I think everyone understands that sometimes things feel creepy or weird and the most reasonable explanation doesn’t always make our doubts go away. But that doesn’t mean that ghosts become the most logical explanation. [/QUOTE] Feelings of creepy and weird doesn’t enter into it. What does enter into it is what kinds of constraints we place around the “allowable” context within which we allow ourselve to close out the explanation of the phenomenon. Your explanation is a fairly good one and won’t get many arguments. However, it has to rely on undermining the actual phenomenon: this reported phenomenon is not the reported phenomenon, it’s something else, it is in fact this substitute experience as in, my dead father speaking was really the next door neighbor cryiing out in his sleep. Perfectly reasonable to say that, it could have been, but you haven’t shown it to be what actuallly happened. You are simply proposing it as the most likely an explanation of that type because it is parsimonous with what you assume is possible to happen. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/38 "2012-01-25T21:23:14Z")
> [@mishagoe](#): > > Perfectly reasonable to say that, it could have been, but you haven’t shown it to be what actuallly happened. You are simply proposing it as the most likely an explanation of that type because it is parsimonous with what you assume is possible to happen. It’s not just an assumption. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2012, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/39 "2012-01-25T21:45:05Z")
I often have audio hallucinations while I’m falling asleep, most often voices of people I’m very familiar with like my mom or sister. Who are both still alive and healthy. I’m sure that, after they die, I’ll still have such hallucinations. But I think it’s pretty safe to say that the ones before death are basically the same as the ones after death, and if the ones before death aren’t ghosts, neither are the after-death ones. For the record, by the way, I’m quite aware while I’m having them that they are in fact hallucinations, and they never seem to say anything of any real significance, so I’m not particularly worried about them. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2012, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586/40 "2012-01-26T02:36:25Z")
I have a history of strong olfactory hallucinations… Basically, if I smell something really strong – cat poop at a friend’s house, gunpowder at a shooting range, etc. – then the odor persists, in my mind, long after it has actually faded away entirely. I will keep smelling it, and it seems as real as anything – but no one else can. I used to think that such odors permeated my clothing, and this was what I was smelling. Hey, it’s true of cigarette smoke… But some semi-scientific experiments have pretty well confirmed that, in some cases anyway, it’s an hallucination. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-heard-my-fathers-ghost-yesterday/610586.md?page=3)