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A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
I've got some unexplained phenomena that happen from time to time at my lab (workplace). Valves closing for no reason, oddly specific equipment failures, that kind of thing. I don't believe it's ghosts, but also I genuinely can't think of any reason for why those kinds of things could happen. I just say that it's ghosts anyways because it's fun.
In any case, my belief is that out of all supernatural phenomena to possibly believe in, ghosts are the least horrible thing to believe in, so anyone who believes in ghosts gets a pass from me
Nope. All "evidence" is fake. For example pretty much all UFO vids disappeared once 4k cameras got invented
Man, the downvote ratio really goes to show how many people vote without reading a post. I imagine a lot of them would agree with you, but they just saw the meme and thought, "That's stupid." Which is ironically a vote in your favor.
Even within the perspective of religious philosophy, the existence of ghosts in the sense of a spirit that stays on Earth and causes noticeable effects is difficult. Mainly- ghosts would not be made of matter, but could interact with matter. Within the realm of religious philosophy there are all sorts of explanations for the "mundane" version of this question of how a spirit attaches itself to the matter of the body in the first place, but all of those explanations kind of go out the window when the spirit sticks around and starts interacting with other matter. If ghosts only appear in sensory visions and do not truly interact with matter (I believe this was the view of Aquinas), then you have a major problem in proof and then ghosts effectively do not exist for practical purposes. The Catholic Church believes that the dead can appear to the living in visions but takes no stance on physical manifestations.
Within science, of course, there has never been a scientific observation of any supernatural being such as a ghost or effects it might have. But that doesn't disprove the idea of purely spiritual apparitions. Then again, it also doesn't disprove that Zorlon the Gorilla God appeared to me in a dream either. I think we can pretty conclusively say that you can live your life under the assumption that ghosts don't exist and be completely 100% fine.
I have both feet planted firmly in the real world but I have experienced three or four undeniably supernatural things in my life and yeah it does happen sometimes.
I haven't seen compelling enough evidence to believe in the supernatural.
That said, we do seem to be well on our way to engineering ghost-like phenomenon. People will set up LLMs and generative AI systems that imitate dead people, if they haven't already...
No ghosts IRL? No problem! We'll make ghosts!
Thanks Humanity. 🙄️
they did that for Christopher Pelkey, so he could testify at his killer's sentencing. For some travesty of justice, the judge was an idiot and allowed it as a "victim impact statement".
Like right after Charlie got Kirked Christians started sharing AI videos of him talking about forgiveness and shit.
Glenn Beck is making a "George AI" and Prager U in partnership with the White House are making Founding Father AI systems to lie to children about history and Christianity.
Horrifyingly there's also HearAfter Ai.
Depending on where you live, your friend might be eligible for using public transportation completely for free with a special id. It is also possible that their job security is going through the roof. One needs to be tested first, though and from what you wrote about them, I'd suggest that you or another person close to them escort them to a clinic. This way they don't get lost and can get help speaking with the personell when the instructions or other information get too complicated for them.
Does your friend consider themselves on the left or the right side of the graph?
Any graph like that where it puts their own beliefs as 'smart' and others beliefs as 'dumb' is inherently a pretty useless graph. Graph says them smart, you dumb. Does the graph not convince you? LOL.
ghosts are like religion: can neither be proven nor disprofen. what do you even consider a ghost? i do faintly believe in spirits:
when i am sitting at the grave of my grandfather, it does feel as he is around somehow. is that because i miss him and wish he is still with us? likely...
a friend of mine recently lost her father. they are both accomplished mountaineers. on a solo tour, she told me, she heared her father's voice reminding her to be careful - while not paying attention during a dangerous passage. was it her father reaching out? was it her subconsciousness taking the persona of the father? we will never know...
in the end it doesn't matter in the slightest, what these feelings of ghosts or spirits really are. if our ancestors keep watching out for us, that is great. if our subconsciousness keeps watching out for us, while taking on different personas, that is great. life goes on the same - even if it all was just imagination.
If you ever watch the video of Karl Sagan describing what the fourth dimension is, that is a slight possibility for explaining poltergeist ghosts, possibly even alien abductions.
No, they can't
Your friend is likely to be a bit of a numpty
I'm not going to rule out the possibility of something existing that we don't know of yet.
However, if we're supposed to look for anything in any way, we first need to know what we're looking for. So, what's a ghost? Is a a soul, and if so, what's a soul?
I think that's an interesting question with or without ghost.
People who believe in souls, should attempt to explain what a soul is and how they experience their existence. Is it an emergent feature of the electrons or brainwaves that can travel in other dimensions that our normal physics can't detect or something completely unknown?
People who have experiences with ghosts and souls should be investigated. How do they detect their observations? Are they somehow able to sense things that happen in other dimensions? That'd be really cool, and I still won't rule it out. The human mind can do weird stuff. For instance echo localization like bats do, seeing more colours than normal or even just perfect pitch. Stuff like that is provable and shows that our senses can be expanded by training. Perhaps we even have dormant senses like seeing magnetic fields like birds do.
So let's say some people can see ghosts but we just can't measure it currently, because we don't know how it works. We can still make an experiment where we compare the observations from these special skills and see if they align. If it turns out that the people who can see ghosts agree, then we should definitely investigate it further and find out what happens in their heads when they see ghosts. Where does the brain impulses come from? That'll teach us about the special sense, which could then prove the existence of ghosts.
I doubt their observations match up in a controlled environment. It's a shame because it would be really easy to prove the existence of ghosts.
The more you know the less stuff you're comfortable ruling out.
There's nothing that disproves ghosts, but there's nothing that proves them either.
You could have said "souls" instead, because that's just another word for consciousness. But it doesn't work for ghosts
absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
not proof, no. but it is evidence.
There's nothing to disprove ghosts because there's no real definition of what a ghost is.
If someone gives me a real unambiguous agreed upon definition of what a ghost is, I'll explain why we know they don't exist.
You could ask him where he sees himself on that chart and what evidence he has that it's not on the left side?
What do I think?
I think anyone who claims to know and understand every aspect of the world as it truly is resides at the top of Mt. Stupid on the Dunning-Kruger graph (yes, I know it's a disproved theory, but it's still a useful descriptor of the way some people behave).
I also think anyone who believes in phenomena with little to know evidence can never actually end up on the right side of the bell curve meme (a curve that is also the result of faulty science, but still illustrative of some humans' experiences).
I also think that terms like "ghost" or "magic" or "miracle" have so many connotations and interpretations, that it's easy for miscommunication to happen if people don't spell out exactly what they mean when talking about them.
I think ghosts are real in the sense that I believe people experience things they can't explain, and so resort to blaming invisible sentiences, and I believe those experiences are real; I have many doubts over their explanations of those experiences.
I also think that anyone who enters into a discussion holding my stance, but framing it as "ghosts are real," is looking more to start an argument than have an actual meaningful discussion.
2 of 5 Americans believe in ghosts.
2 of 5 Amercians still support Donald Trump.
See this Venn diagram
Religion tends to justify itself in the face of absolutely no evidence with "proof denies faith." It's a garbage argument, but it's accepted.
Ghosts don't have any similar excuse to fall back on when we fail to see any credible evidence whatsoever.
Is the soul a thing? Does consciousness exist as more than the sum of the electrical network of the brain? Who am "I"? These are all interesting and probably unanswerable philosophical questions. "Do ghosts exist" though, is a pretty straightforward no.
