Very well said** KGS**, I too have read both threads and must say that** DtC** is IMHO, a ranting, raving bully!
Leave meenie7 and her invisible friend alone, no harm no foul as far as I can see…
You two have no problem with the possibility that Meenie may be mentally or physically ill? Her delusions fit into your worldview full of rainbows and unicorns so she shouldn’t make sure that she is not genuinely sick? How creepily sadistic are you?
She doesn’t think it’s imaginary. She says she thinks it’s real.
Lying or delusional are still the only two options. If you think anything else is “warranted,” let’s hear it.
Did you actually just say smething this fucking stupid on THIS message board? Do you have any idea how scientific method works?
No, I didn’t. I said her posts didn’t accord with my experience of how schizophrenics talk, but I never said I had any special “insight.”
I did that only in my first post when I didn’t know, but so what? How am I supposed to be able to glean a poster’s gender from a gender-neutral user name?
Has it occurred to yoyu that it might NOT be benign? Is there any harm in making sure?
Saying it’s “real to HER” is as meaningless an objection as you could possibly come up with.
Nothing I’ve said requires any special qualifications. This is a straw man.
Let’s not move the goalposts; you didn’t say those two options were the only ones that were “warranted”; you said “There are no other possibilities.” Now, it’s possible that in two minutes the earth will turn into a giant soap bubble and the vaccuum of space will fill with lime jello by virtue of an unknown and previously inapplicable law of physics. Darn near anything is possible - the only exceptions being things that are the way they are by arbitrary definition. Yes, there are scores of multitudes of plethoras of things that we consider to be so astronomically unlikely as to be nigh-impossible, but that’s not the same as actually impossible. Ghosts are currently, at worst, at a nigh-impossible level of unlikeliness. But they remain possible, if only by the slimmest hairline level of possibility.
Do you? Far from being “fucking stupid”, it is a perfectly fair question which acurately points out the gaping error in your statements about how scientific study relates to proving things. (Which is probably why you reacted so frothingly negatively to it.)
For the record I don’t argue with any of the rest of the post to which this is a response.
You are such an arrogant piece of shit, thinking you’re some kind of caped crusader to save people from themselves.
God, you won’t even let people talk about ghosts in a thread about ghosts.
Could your vanity get any worse?
I’ve been reading this thread with some awe and interest, but I don’t want to get involved with the main thrust of it. However, the above seems a bit too high school philosophy to let pass. Let’s live in the real world.
(1) “Marcus” could be a genuine, bonafide ghost, or other type of discorporeal spirit. Admittedly, this option’s a bit of a dark horse, but if you’re going to pretend to be a scientist, you must at least entertain the option.
(2) “Marcus” could be an imaginary figure which has sublimated into reality. Umm…yeah, that sounds a bit confusing. (Sorry, haven’t had my coffee yet.) Let’s put it anotherway – he is “good” delusion as opposed to a “bad” delusion. After all, the word “delusional” does carry a negative connotation.
(3) “Marcus” could be a combination of any or all of the above. None of these options are mutually exclusive.
What the fuck does scientific method have to do with any of this??? Meenie was sharing an anecdote regarding paranormal experiences, nothing more. I don’t recall her trying to change anyone’s opinion or convert anyone to Marcusology. She didn’t get called out on the carpet until the thread’s ill-fated side trip into Great Debates, which brought the RandiFans out of the woodwork. Why the heck does she need to prove anything to you??
Choice of words, sentence structure, overall tone, and in particular the whole hugging-and-kissing-at-the-movies part sounded much more like the fantasy of a teenaged girl as opposed to a young gay man. I dunno, maybe I just pick up on those hints naturally. Oh, and the excessive use of smileys was a dead giveaway. 
Nothing in what she said sounded like anything worse than a harmless, private fantasy. Frankly, as long as a person is able to get to work on time, pay the bills, and maintain an acceptable level of personal hygiene, it doesn’t matter two whits what they believe. Why must you assume that her beliefs are a potential danger to herself or others?
As for the potential harm in consulting a psychiatrist – I’ll recuse myself for now. It’s bloody expensive, though, and not always covered by insurance.
Oh, bullshit. You have mentioned “professional work with schizophrenics,” for one thing. Does this mean you treat schizophrenics as part of your daily routine? Or does it mean that the cubicle-dwellers next to you are staffed by clinically diagnosed schizophrenics? (By the way, I worked alongside a schizophrenic guy once. Fascinating individual, though he did tend to scare the piss out of everyone else occasionally.) You’ve made some bald-faced assertions regarding Meenie7’s mental health, to the extent of suggesting she might even have a brain tumor. Care to back that up, or are you just talking out of your ass? On the other hand, if you don’t want to answer the question (due to privacy concerns or whatever) then fine, I’ll let it lie.
Okay: real world fact: Science has not disproven ghosts. Hell, it can’t even find the things. Therefore persons who lean on science to claim that they know ghosts aren’t real are at best mistaken and at worst full of shit. Science doesn’t know that ghosts aren’t real any more than it knew that there was no such thing as quarks in 250 BCE.
In the real world, the average practically-minded and healthily-skeptical person doesn’t believe that ghosts exist, even for a moment. However, that’s due to the stark and widespread lack of a reason to believe (and occam’s razor); not because we’ve scientifically proved anything about them either way.
This is all perfectly true but doesn’t really get us anywhere. Science hasn’t ‘proved anything . . . either way’ about an infinite number of subjects. We are allowed to apply critical thinking to what we hear, however.
Which is exactly what begbert2 is saying.
Was it? Fair enough, but I took begbert2 to be saying therefore we can’t apply critical thinking to any issue. Science doesn’t really prove anything if you want to be strictly accurate. But where does that leave us? Anyway, I may have misconstrued, so do ignore me.
Right. But critical thinking doesn’t mean asserting that science has concluded things that it hasn’t actually concluded. You may (and I encourage you to) not believe in ghosts due to your critical thinking, and you may easily find yourself believing 100% that there’s no ghosts. But attributing your own personal conclusion to science and then trying to argue from its authority on the matter is factually incorrect, rhetorically dirty pool, and something that you can reasonably expect to get called on.
I can’t believe we actually have retards on this board trying to argue that “ghosts” have to be scientifically disproven and thinking they’re making some kind of point. never mind finding them, there isn’t even a workable scientific definition of the fucking things. One thing we do know is that consciousness can’t exist without a brain. There are no fucking ghosts. m’kay? Anyone who thinks that’s a real possibility is posting on the wrong fucking board.
That’s rich.
I can fix typos. You’re still a moron who believes in fucking ghosts.
And if you thought the kiss felt damp and cold…
Yes, but Science doesn’t actually conclude anything. I think that’s sort of the point. What it does do is give you a set of tools with which to judge evidence that is set before you.
Argument from authority is always difficult but sometimes unavoidable (who knows everything first hand?). But argument from unauthority (we can’t actually prove it one way or another so let’s give up) doesn’t get us anywhere either.
It’s inevitable. It’s all about religion, indirectly. Did you notice how the people defending the “ghost hypothesis” are using the same arguments often used to defend religion ? And often it’s the same people. The same facts, the same logic that make ghosts so implausible also make religion implausible; they can’t admit the implausibility of ghosts without implicitly admitting the implausibility of God, souls and all the rest of it.
This thread is an example of how religion corrupts the thought process of people in general, not just on the specific subject of religion. It requires - in fact encourages and demands - poor judgment, and that corrupts people’s judgement about the world in general. Like ghosts.
Yeah, yeah, ah hominem, vitriol, vitrol, ad homenem. Wow, that’s a convincing argument you’ve got going there. I’m sure if you keeep it up we “retards” will abandon our understanding of how science actually works and join your frothing side.
Fact: science would have to define ghosts to assert they didn’t exist. That they don’t should be a clue.
Fact: we don’t know that consciousness can’t exist without a brain; we know that it’s nearly certain that human consciousness exists in and created by the brain, which is a basically ironclad argument against living humans being controlled by souls in any way. It is not an argument against a soul passively recording our mind and memories and personality and then continuing them in the form of a ghost after death, or of a ghost being created at the moment of death with a duplicate of the former person’s mind and memories and personality. There’s no real reason besides wishful thinking to believe any of this happens, but there’s nothing in science that indicates that it’s not happening, either, aside from a shortage of sightings which is not definitive proof.
Fact: It doesn’t matter if Marcus isn’t a ghost-as-we-traditionally-think-of-ghosts - he could be a pixie or a sprite or a nature spirit or an elemental or a trickster god pretending to be a ghost, and your false dichotomy would still be wrong. So you haven’t a chance in hell of using science to fix your false dichotomy.
Though, even if you’re dumb enough not to be able to understand that, there’s still space for you on this message board. There’s no rule against being stupid or wrong (or in my case, being right), after all.
(And if Der Trihs thinks his response applies to me, then he really hasn’t been paying attention. :))
Leaving a longtime lurking hiatus for a “driveby”… I’ve been following this thread with great interest!
Ok here’s my completely unscientific feeling of what’s going on here:
90 % Meenies bullshitting us for 9 pages running (it’s pretty obvious by this point isn’t it?).
9,99999 % Meenies got serious mental or health problems and need to get professional help.
< .000001 % Ghosts actually exists; Campuses are full of them like hogwarths, but with glowing eyes and cold hands & Meenies the little boy from 6th sense.
I’d also take a wild guess that Meenies got a head full of fantasies of being quirky like that girl from Amelie or that resurrected one from Pushing Dasies or whatnot and kind of feels that for a girl it’s actually alright to pathologically tell lies cause you know girls can do that if they are just polite & sweet.
Jerking her along we got the alliance of the internet dudes with hand on dick in pant; the hopeless romantics & the new agers; and the ones that can’t help feeling fatherly or motherly towards a seemingly vulnerable girl thats polite and sweet and therefore think normal rules don’t apply.
Meanwhile Meenie sucks up the attention.
DtC may not have been a master of tact and consideration at all times in this thread but since he obviously feels strongly about these issues and argues his beliefs with complete honesty and seriousness I can certainly see where his frustration is coming from.
Meenie: it’s been entertaining & in the case of the 10 % alternative(s) - hope i didn’t hurt your feelings and the best of luck.