Do you beleive in ghosts?

[malakaix]

I never said i believed them, i said i believe that you believe them.

 

[Vader]

I know...but you also said that you wouldn't call me absurd or full of shit if I made those claims. You can believe that I believe x while believing that x is false.

 

[malakaix]

You can believe that I believe x while believing that x is false.

Which is what im doing, but as soon as i call you absurd or full-o-shit this incites an argument which is based purely off personal experience's.. an argument where both sides are trying to convince the other of there own personal belief, what would be the point of this?

 

[Vader]

^The point would be to try and get closer to the truth through reasoned argument, or at least arrive at an internally consistent, elegant and intuitive theory. Isn't that what philosophy is all about? Especially metaphysics and ethics, I mean, there's no empirical evidence at all in those fields, but I don't think that makes them pointless.

 

[malakaix]

^The point would be to try and get closer to the truth through reasoned argument, or at least arrive at an internally consistent, elegant and intuitive theory. Isn't that what philosophy is all about?

Your right, i guess these days im more accepting of people's belief's even if they don't coincide with my own.

 

[L2R]

They weren't meant to be complete analogies, just to be similar in the relevant respect. The magician example was merely meant to challenge MDAO's assertion that people are justified in believing what they think they have seen even if it seems highly unlikely. It doesn't matter whether or not the illusion is a product of deliberate deception, the important thing is that things are not always as they appear to be.

As for "all the silliness", they were counterexamples specifically to Xorkoth's claim that:

They are apt for this purpose.

what you fail to realise is that:

1- mdao is correct because there are varying degrees of probability. a shared experience, even though it cannot be reproduced in controlled environments, is still far more probable than a magician being truely magical.

and

2- xorkoth is correct in that it is equally as nonsensical to assert your skepticism as fact without evidence due to your life experience (missing the subject experience) as it is for another to assert their faith as fact without evidence due to their life experience (including the subject experience).


based on probabilities alone, ghosts which have countless claims of individual experiences is FAR MORE likely to be factual than a teapot behind the moon which has no actual claims of sighting/experience. the lack of explanation, in and of itself, is not grounds for absolute dismissal.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

Why should ssom listen to your rationalisations? He knows what he saw, and it doesn't matter if you think you can explain it away with your science and your reason.

Agreed. He's completely free to reject my interpretation of his experience, based simply on the fact that he experienced it, and I didn't.

If one is a strict empiricist, then seeing is believing, and that's that. I think it's possible to admit that appearances may be deceiving, and yet be slow to reject the possibility that, in any given situation, things are indeed exactly as they seem. I'm not saying I hold or advocate this philosophical position. But it's defensible, and perennially popular, since in the end, what we behold with our own eyes is all any of us typically have.

I saw a magic show the other day. Can I now claim to know that a woman can be levitated, or that a man can hold his breath for 12 minutes, or is my intuition that what I saw was an illusion correct?

Neither, really. All you can claim is that you saw a stage act, where things appeared to happen that you don't see happen every day. Only the magician and his workers know for sure what lies behind what you saw. Your argument that he's an illusionist is well founded and probably correct, don't get me wrong. But if he were actually a man of extraordinary powers, who passed as a humble illusionist to all people for motives known only to himself, would you necessarily know the difference?

The point would be to try and get closer to the truth through reasoned argument, or at least arrive at an internally consistent, elegant and intuitive theory. Isn't that what philosophy is all about?

Bah! Not in my view. To me, philosophy is curiosity and question-asking as a sport, where the prizes to be won are wisdom and an altered perspective on life. (Note that this conception of mine is neutral on the importance of seeking objective truth.) But we're getting way off topic here.

 

[JayJohnson]

I was high on pod tea, had a cocktail, and was preparing another batch of pod tea in the kitchen. I was nicely buzzed from the opiates and a drink - but not wasted, and not nodding off. The front door was open, it was a sunny afternoon, about 3:00pm.

From the corner of my eye I see something moving in the doorway/hall, about 12 feet away. I look up and in the middle of the doorway, slowly gliding forward, was the shape of a person, about 5 foot 4 inches. Looked like a white gown, but the head/hands were dark (which looked like either the hair was covering the face, or the `person` was blacked out.) The whole figure was semi-transparent, more solid than not, but I could make out what was behind the figure. The whole time from when I first saw it in my peripheral vision to when I looked straight at it, it just kept slowly gliding past at a constant speed.

I backed up against the counter, and made a sound like I've never made before. It was a laugh made up of disbelief, fear, and astonishment. I knew i was alone in the apartment, but I just saw a person `walk` through the hallway (from the bedroom to the bathroom.) Except it wasn't a person, because it was slightly transparent.

I knew I had to do something, so I yelled `GET OUT OF THERE!!` Found some courage, grabbed my biggest kitchen knife, and went to look in the bathroom to see if someone/something was there. Thankfully nobody/nothing was.

Those who don't believe in ghosts can use my alcohol and opiates to dismiss it as a hallucination. I have a hard time writing it off because I have loads of experiences with opiate dreams and nodding off, and hallucinations from psychedelics. This experience was unlike either of those.

So my question is, what was that? I'd like to hear from the non-believers, and believers, in ghosts.

 

[Vader]

Impacto Profundo, did you read my first response to you? My counterexamples were never meant to have the scope that you have attributed to them. I didn't say that our credence in ghosts ought to be the same as our credence that the illusionist's tricks are genuine; I was just pointing out that we ought not always to take things at face value.

it is...nonsensical to assert your skepticism as fact without evidence

What is absurd is telling someone their belief is absurd when you do not have evidence to the contrary

These are not equivalent. The whole point of scepticism is that you are reluctant to make claims to knowledge. My teapot/ninja/time-freeze examples were intended with a very limited scope, to show that people can have absurd beliefs that are not falsifiable.

MDAO, I think this is a very interesting issue and look forward to discussing it with you. Unfortunately, I don't have the time currently.

 

[Coolio]

Ghosts are hallucinations. There is such a thing as consensus hallucination; set, setting, shared experiences, cultural familiarity, etc. can lead to groups of people on psychedelics all seeing/hearing/feeling the same shared hallucination. No reason to believe groups of sober people couldn't be privy to the same kind of shared hallucination when primed right for the experience.

 

[Coolio]

If anybody has had anything similar happen to them please Private Message me. I find the symptoms of the frozen body very strange... Maybe its so i didn't run and let anybody know but this is all very strange. Before this happened i used to watch those ghost shows on the discovery channel and think it was just a bunch of morons trying to get publicity but now i have a belief in ghosts.

Dude this is textbook "sleep paralysis" and "night terrors". Tons of people have this problem; it isn't strange at all. One of my friends has had these types of experiences all of his life. If it recurs, you could go to a psychologist and they could probably help.

 

[Coolio]

there have been too many times i have felt a presence, even smelled cologne, felt arms hold me, and heard words spoken right when i needed reassurance.

Isn't a projection from your subconscious overlaying sensory memories onto your current perceptions a much more likely explanation than supernatural interference with your physical body and world?

 

[Coolio]

I look at it this way. The brain is capable of creating visuals and experiences that aren't an actual representation of reality, but rather a malfunctioning of sorts during the process of representation. It can create it's own reality that exists no where beyond the brain itself.

...
Quite literally, it is all in your head. .

Many people refuse to believe that their brain has that much control over reality as they experience it; that completely sober, it's possible to hallucinate supernatural sequences. They take their own memory of it as having been real seriously, which is not a good idea.

False memories are also a very frequent occurrence in the human species...

 

[Vader]

If one is a strict empiricist, then seeing is believing, and that's that. I think it's possible to admit that appearances may be deceiving, and yet be slow to reject the possibility that, in any given situation, things are indeed exactly as they seem. I'm not saying I hold or advocate this philosophical position. But it's defensible, and perennially popular, since in the end, what we behold with our own eyes is all any of us typically have.

I used to have a belief similar to this; in fact I wrote my dissertation on something like it. However, I now think that this naive realist approach to epistemology (my term) has many problems. Take, for instance, someone who believes that sticks bend when they enter water. Now, their experience confirms that hypothesis. However, we can explain the apparent phenomenon with reference to scientific theories about light, namely that its velocity changes when passing between two media of differing density. I think that we would regard a person who totally disregarded that explanation in favour of their naive understanding as, well, naive, and rather stubborn and foolish.

But if he were actually a man of extraordinary powers, who passed as a humble illusionist to all people for motives known only to himself, would you necessarily know the difference?

No, we would have no way of knowing at all. We have to make an inference to a best explanation. Now, this is usually simple, as the data available fits one explanation better than the other. However, in the case a sorcerer posing as a trickster, both theories seem to explain the phenomena equally well- they are underdetermined. There can be no objective way of deciding between the two. So how can we decide which is the right one to believe? I guess you have to go down a Quinean route, that we should think that he is an illusionist because this fits better with all the rest of our "web of belief". However, such coherentist theories of justification give us no way of choosing between two internally consistent webs- and we're back where we started. So, for someone like me, someone who leans towards a (relatively) reductionist view and doesn't really want strange things like ghosts in their ontology, the only real strategy would be to try and find some internal inconsistency with the idea of ghosts. I'm not sure how easy that would be. Interesting stuff...

 

[L2R]

Impacto Profundo, did you read my first response to you? My counterexamples were never meant to have the scope that you have attributed to them. I didn't say that our credence in ghosts ought to be the same as our credence that the illusionist's tricks are genuine; I was just pointing out that we ought not always to take things at face value.

Your examples were then overkill, and communicative of more than your intention. A simple "things shouldn't always be taken at face value" would have sufficed plenty, and there would have been no disagreement on that point.

These are not equivalent. The whole point of scepticism is that you are reluctant to make claims to knowledge. My teapot/ninja/time-freeze examples were intended with a very limited scope, to show that people can have absurd beliefs that are not falsifiable.

Sorry, i misworded and shouldn't have used scepticism there. Replace that word with comething like "belief in the falshood of any particular phenomena".

 

[doesntmatter]

Isn't a projection from your subconscious overlaying sensory memories onto your current perceptions a much more likely explanation than supernatural interference with your physical body and world?

Not a direct rebuttal (more food for thought), but it seems to me that the greater the understanding we have of our physical world, the more apparent it becomes that it's comprised of things than we can't physically perceive. It's a perpetual scratching of the surface kind of thing. Layer after layer.

Some people live life only believing something if they can see it (test it). This is good. It's good to test things. Personally I think you need to be able to experience life from the opposite side of the equation as well. Believing in what your heart tells you about the things you can't see.

One thing I've always found interesting is the widespread documentation of something flying around in the sky. There are records from as early as records were kept, even before then on cave walls, of something strange flying around in the sky.

Maybe there's a hole in us that this physical world can't fill.

 

[n3ophy7e]

I have a story that frightened me to death and i cant explain it.

Ok it started 4 weeks before the actual sighting, i was about to go to sleep in my dorm room "i was still fully concious" when my whole body went cold and i felt very strange for around thirty seconds, next thing you know i was frozen i couldnt move a bone in my body. I tried to scream for help but i could'nt this lasted about ten seconds and stopped abrubtly. I thought i had just had a siezure, i was so scared i was about to drive to the hospital. I couldnt sleep the rest of the night due to fear.

This same phenomonon happened about once a week for four weeks when the extremely frightening sighting happened. This time i was trying to nap in my dorm room and the Siezure like syptoms happened but faded very quickly, i was used to it by now so i just made my way through it the next thing i know it happened again but stronger than ever. As this happened the sheets on my bad started moving up and down rapidly like something was under them. I WAS SCARED SHTITLESS i tried to close my eyes to escape it and I did but they were forced open and i look up and there is something standing over me looking like a Gauntlet. To be honest but i didn't want to The fucking thing looked like the death creature. It stood over me for 10 seconds... I couldnt see a face so i took it as a warning.

It has been about two weeks since the sighting and the siezure/freezing has only happened once but it was very minor. The strangest thing is I told my friends about it and that's when it stopped happening.

Since this has happened i have slowed down my drug intake, and have not driven under any type of intoxication. I took the sighting as a warning. So since it stopped maybe i cheated death.

This was without a doubt sleep paralysis. I suffer from it frequently so I know all about it. It is not harmful nor is it attributed to anything paranormal. Having said that, no-one really knows why or how sleep paralysis occurs. And even though it can be scientifically labelled, it doesn't make it any less terrifying when it happens, especially when we aren't aware of what is actually occurring!

I believe that A LOT of "paranormal" experiences can be attributed to sleep paralysis, especially anything that happens at night when you're in bed.


Having said that though, I am now a firm believer in ghosts purely because I have seen a few of them. Before any of you judge, I am a very scientific person, both in the way my mind works and also my fields of interest. I am definitely not the type of person to flippantly come to the conclusion that some "unexplainable" event was due to something paranormal. With the multiple ghost sightings I've experienced I have gone through every other possible explanation for what I saw, before coming to the tentative conclusion that it was a ghost. Some of which I am still dubious about but still have no other explanation.

Two accounts are absolutely solid though. One of which is extremely unsettling for me to recount, so that's for another day, but this is the first experience:

In 1999 (I was 14), my family and I were on holiday in Tasmania, an island state of Australia where for a period of time about 200 years ago convicts were brought to live in the gaols in Port Arthur. While we were in Port Arthur we decided to go on a ghost tour one night, just for shits and giggles. None of us expected to "see" anything, it was just for laughs. We embarked on the tour, and went through all of the old cottages and barracks and gaolhouses, the tour guide told us a few yarns and it was spooky and whatnot, we had a great time. The whole group (about 20 of us) was walking across the main lawn in the middle of the buildings, I was walking alone, towards the back of the pack, and for some reason I looked back towards one of the cottages which we'd visited (about 50 metres away). And I saw a translucent-white figure glide slowly up the side of the cottage and disappear around the back of the building. It did not make any "walking" movement, it "glided", for want of a better description, and it didn't have a solid outline.
At the time I saw this I basically just put my head back down and hurried over to my mum, but said nothing of it.

Later that night back at our holiday house we were discussing the ghost tour and how exciting it was etc, and my oldest sister said "Did anyone see a lady walking up behind the governor's house when we were walking across the lawn?"
And I immediately said that I saw it too and described what I'd seen, and my older brother and both of my parents said they saw it too. The only ones who didn't see it were my younger brother and my other sister. But 5 out of 7 of us all saw it and have described it in the same way, as a gliding translucent figure which went up past the side of the cottage and disappeared behind the building.

Now, my mother in particular is very sceptical when it comes to anything paranormal. But even to this day she can not explain what we all claim to have seen.

We know what we all saw, and none of us said anything at the time so we couldn't have possibly contributed to each other's memories of the sighting.

Since then my dad has researched that particular building at Port Arthur, and there have been many sightings of a female figure in and around that particular building.

 

[lostNfound]

I am a firm believer in ghosts. I made a thread in Aus Social a couple years back but I can't find it, I wonder if it got pruned. I hope not.

It explained my experiences, wish I could find it; all I remember was that it had supernatural in the title.

 

[Coolio]

In 1999 (I was 14), my family and I were on holiday in Tasmania, an island state of Australia where for a period of time about 200 years ago convicts were brought to live in the gaols in Port Arthur. While we were in Port Arthur we decided to go on a ghost tour one night, just for shits and giggles. None of us expected to "see" anything, it was just for laughs. We embarked on the tour, and went through all of the old cottages and barracks and gaolhouses, the tour guide told us a few yarns and it was spooky and whatnot, we had a great time. The whole group (about 20 of us) was walking across the main lawn in the middle of the buildings, I was walking alone, towards the back of the pack, and for some reason I looked back towards one of the cottages which we'd visited (about 50 metres away). And I saw a translucent-white figure glide slowly up the side of the cottage and disappear around the back of the building. It did not make any "walking" movement, it "glided", for want of a better description, and it didn't have a solid outline.
At the time I saw this I basically just put my head back down and hurried over to my mum, but said nothing of it.

Later that night back at our holiday house we were discussing the ghost tour and how exciting it was etc, and my oldest sister said "Did anyone see a lady walking up behind the governor's house when we were walking across the lawn?"
And I immediately said that I saw it too and described what I'd seen, and my older brother and both of my parents said they saw it too. The only ones who didn't see it were my younger brother and my other sister. But 5 out of 7 of us all saw it and have described it in the same way, as a gliding translucent figure which went up past the side of the cottage and disappeared behind the building.

Now, my mother in particular is very sceptical when it comes to anything paranormal. But even to this day she can not explain what we all claim to have seen.

We know what we all saw, and none of us said anything at the time so we couldn't have possibly contributed to each other's memories of the sighting.

Since then my dad has researched that particular building at Port Arthur, and there have been many sightings of a female figure in and around that particular building.

You went on a "ghost tour" and were surprised when you saw a "ghost"? The most likely explanation, is that the people who put on the tours also have someone dress up in a ghost costume and glide between some buildings on wheels, as an attention getting maneuver.

Last, when you say "couldn't have possibly contributed to each other's memories" what are you basing that on? It's well known that one person telling another person a story can create false memories that the second person then remembers actually experiencing from then on. The power of suggestion can change other peoples' realities.

 

[Roger&Me]

i took a photo of one or more i dunno how many
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/showpost.php?p=6830408&postcount=9

Looks like the mark of a few well-placed muons to me.