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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?
No, they can't
Your friend is likely to be a bit of a numpty
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
It’s fun to think up thought experiments that explain away the reasons we can’t prove they exist.
Time isn’t linear, we’re just limited to experiencing it that way while we’re alive.
After we die, we experience time differently; in an impossible-to-describe way, but is akin to a book with limitless pages. Your existence is a bookmark in this book, and dying makes you lose your place.
It is possible to re-find your place, but with unfathomable access to unfathomable histories and futures, there is a near-infinite choice of other events and timelines for a ghost to visit and observe and experience.
Coupled with that, there are laws— some sort of physical laws, not arbitrary— to visiting the pages of this book, in that they can only be done in areas that do not cause pages before or after to change dramatically. A ghost is a spec of ink on the page; it cannot write letters, words, or sentences. If anything like this were ever done, we would never know as our minds would simply accept the memory as fact without knowing, or delete the memory of a ghost the way we space out driving on a highway or having to look at our watch a second time.
Lastly, our senses are all on varying spectrums; some of us able to see, hear, smell, experience things others cannot. One of our senses is a sense of time. Some people’s sense of time operates on a scope of a wider caliber than others, experiencing things others cannot, which is why some of us may have experienced ghosts while others haven’t.
edit: I guess it needs clarification based on the downvotes, I don’t believe any of what I just wrote (except the true bits like time not being linear & sense scopes). I don’t believe in ghosts/have never seen one, but I try to stay open-minded for friends who might disagree.
Maybe not genuinely, but i think im a reasonable person and I have a slot in my head for ghosts. I dont truly believe in them but have seen and experienced some weird stuff that I cant explain, and since I cant recreate the weirdness to test out a bunch of different things until they can be explained, "a ghost did it" is a convenient box to put them in.
I have a similar mental box for aliens in the sky.
Nope.
Depends on how you define "reasonable". Personally I interpret it as "rational" in this context, and I believe that a perfectly rational person with imperfect knowledge would acknowledge that ghosts cannot be 100% disproven, and as such there is a chance that they exist. And once you're past that threshold, belief doesn't have to conflict with rational thinking.
Again, personally; I believe they don't exist. Otherwise we'd be seeing a lot fewer Victorian era ghosts, and a lot more Neolithic ectoplasm. Also, which requirements in terms of species are there for a haunting to commence? Can a horse become a ghost? What about a gorilla? Or a Neanderthal? Seems weird that only homo sapients get to play around with rusty chains and linen...
Can a horse become a ghost?
IIRC native americans have some myths of ghostly horses who lived on after death as spiritual beings.
Neolithic ectoplasm
Alright, I'm stealin' that!
sounds like a good band.
No way; ghosts? Just pished bastards. Nessie is real though - you don't mess with Mr McToot he'll set Ferocious Ness on you.
@yizus@lemmy.world @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
I'm someone who's quite used to try and see things through the lens of Science. I'm a nerd, after all. But I've also been, especially since 2023 (when I momentarily was part of a Luciferian group), someone who does actual ritualistic practices, I'm quite religious.
I don't really believe in ghosts in the typical (e.g. kardecist) sense, partly because I want to believe that death can dissolve the ego once and for all. I mean, hell no!, I'm not going to reincarnate again, Demiurge can go pound sand.
However, in a nutshell, I believe in two things.
First, the thing we call "spiritual" would be some kind of actual, spatial dimension, a field/brane (as in M-theory); "spirit" is just non-baryonic matter which, similarly to neutrinos, have very weak, almost undetectable, interaction with ordinary matter (maybe spirits are neutrinos, who knows?); and everything, from living beings to asteroids, all made of "star stuff" (to quote Carl Sagan), would have simultaneous "spirit stuff". I'd be "pan-animist" (i.e. everything got a spirit).
The other part of my belief: dæmons, entities, archons, Demiurge... And, most importantly, The Dark Mother. I believe in their existences as cosmic principles. For dæmons, entities and archons, I believe they're analogous to living beings (self-organizing structures) but baryonically incorporeal, some of them knowledgeable about interacting with this baryonic realm.
For Demiurge (popularly known as "God") and the Dark Mother Goddess (often unbeknownst to those who believe in "God" because patriarchy tried to erase Her from human knowledge), they're both... ineffable, I don't even know how to start making scientific sense of both, they're manifestation of several laws of physics themselves.
Goddess, specifically: She's the entropy, She's the field across which EM radiation propagates, She's in the silence, She's the singularity and the event horizon and She's also the black hole; mainly, She's Darkness. She's Death Herself. We're wired to see Darkness and Death as "evil", what to flee from, but I came to the conclusion that good and evil are nothing but artificial human constructs, and when one detaches themselves from mundane measurements, Demiurge is actually the closest to "evil" because he traps the matter into this existence, distancing us from our true origin, the Mother and Her Womb. Death is Mother trying to rescue us; life, reincarnation (Samsara), is Demiurge trying to keep us trapped in this theater. A cosmic tug of war.
Like fractals, they both unfold within their Wholes: Sefirots emanated from Demiurge, Qlippots from Mother, Goetia dæmons as mixed emanations.
Both also unfold into Great Manifestations as rebellious complementarities: Lucifer (from Demiurge) and Lilith (from Dark Mother Goddess). I've experienced them manifesting physically many times like "ghosts" would do, particularly Lilith, whom I directly worship.
Dunno how "reasonable" I am, tho.