It's not important that you believe in ghosts. It's only important that they believe in themselves.
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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.
The only evidence is anecdotal, there just happens to be a lot of it.
So no, I'd say it's unreasonable to believe in ghosts. (Though I do love ghost stories and folklore.)
IMHO "ghosts" is just an older word vor virus.
People in earlier times knew that some diseases jumped around from person to person and that that could be dangerous, but didn't have a proper explanation for it.
So they assumed that there must be something invisible in the air that creates the kind of spooky effect that people fall ill sometimes without being touched or physically hit in any way. Kinda spooky, if you think about it and only know about mechanics, but not about cellular biology.
I knew an athiest who believed in ghosts. no idea how he squared that.
If ghosts existed it'd be the biggest fucking news and all research would focus on it. Proof of an afterlife? Another universe beyond this one? We'd go there instead of space. Elon would want to set up a colony.
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.
Reason on its own doesn't bring enough to the table. Without critical thinking (and even with it) reason can lead to any conclusion.
If the data you reason on is flawed (and it is for everyone) then you'll end up with wrong conclusions no matter how reasonable you are.
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.
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".

