@ProfessorX, I haven’t fully engaged with you on the object-level argument (i.e. proving my claim). I apologize for that, and will make that argument below. Your initial post seemed to be making a meta-level critique: that it was more than incorrect to say that ghosts don’t exist, but “disingenuous”, “intellectually insulting”, and generally un-philosophical. I’ve mostly been responding to that claim.
I think it’s led to a disconnect, and to you perceiving me as evasive or “pretend[ing] not to know”. That perception makes sense given that I misunderstood the conversation we were having, and I can only hope I have enough credibility left to course correct.
To that end, I wanted to mention this up front, and address the other points you raise that bear on my credibility.
I have been told this often enough to accept it, but I’ve never understood it – Aren’t there two people in the conversation? Aren’t we both still unconvinced? What makes me stubborn and you … whatever the alternative is? (What is the alternative?)
Those are sincere questions, though offered more as explanation. I assume the reason I come off as ‘stubborn’ is closely related to the reason I don’t know what that means.
I appreciate this summary, though I insist I am not and have not been pretending not to know anything. I do my best to be scrupulously honest, but I really am unreasonably obtuse.
Please let me know anything else you think I’m pretending not to know so I can address it explicitly.
I said it because I looked up Lizardman’s Constant (TLDR, about 4% of people say they believe that lizardmen control the earth), but it wasn’t as big as I needed it to be to make the point I was trying to make: that lots of people saying they’ve seen ghosts is compatible with ghosts not existing, and not as strong evidence in favor of ghosts as it may initially seem.
To expand on my thoughts on believing in ghosts and intelligence:
Anyone who’s thought through the question is likely to be smarter than the average person, and which way they came down after thinking it through does not provide additional information about intelligence.
That’s a bit tortured, because a plainer statement is misleading. Believing in ghosts is roughly the default belief, i.e. anyone who hasn’t thought it through is much more likely to believe than to not believe. But ‘thinking it through’ requires a certain amount of intelligence, so there’s a kind of selection bias.
For example, I’d bet a higher percentage of children believe in ghosts. Assuming that’s true, it doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not its rational to believe in ghosts, but it does suggest that the set of people who believe in ghosts will include more children than the set of people who don’t believe in ghosts.
That kind of selection effect throws off the average.
So on average, yes, I would expect people who believe in ghosts to be less intelligent than people who don’t, but only because I would expect people intellectually incapable of asking the question to believe in ghosts by default.
I don’t think the same could be said about people who thoughtfully believe in ghosts.
In a conversation like this, or any debate about whether or not ghosts exist, participation is a strong indicator that someone is intelligent enough to have thought about the question, and I do not think the believers are stupider than the nonbelievers on average.
I do know this, and I have not claimed otherwise. They are meaningfully different, and should be treated differently for most purposes.
But they are also meaningfully epistemologically similar in a limited number of ways, and their differences can make it useful to compare them when we’re trying to examine concepts related to those similarities – in this case, where I was trying to examine when it is appropriate to make a knowledge claim, it was useful to invoke a different kind of knowledge claim.
I have never said otherwise. I know those are different claims, and knowing that they are different claims, I am making the stronger claim: ghosts are not real.
I don’t know this. I’m not pretending – I am arguing that it is false, that it can be proven.
And so, on to that:
We disprove the existence of ghosts by an absence of evidence. While we’re all familiar with the truism that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, we also know that it’s false. For example, if I arrive at home and note that my roommate’s bag and coat and shoes are not in the front hall, I correctly conclude that they are not home – the absence of the evidence we would expect to see if they were home is (strong!) evidence that they are not home.
Similarly, given the description of ghosts above, if ghosts exist we should expect to see certain evidence that we do not see.
What counts as evidence? Note that I’m using that term relatively broadly, to mean anything that supports a proposition. Evidence isn’t dispositive, and doesn’t necessarily even introduce uncertainty: the fact that I can’t perceive the curve of the earth really is evidence for a flat earth, even though the weight of evidence is strongly against that conclusion.
So I’m not saying we have no evidence of ghosts, of course we do: we have lots of eye-witness accounts. What to make of those?
First, note that while we have lots of things we tend to lump into the category of ‘eye-witness accounts of ghosts’, I think it’s important to point out that that clustering is imperfect. The accounts differ over time and between cultures: humans, animals, monsters, deities; anonymous strangers or known people (living or dead); benign or malevolent, etc. The observed phenomenon also differs: shadows and light; hot and cold; sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations.
Not only do ‘ghost sightings’ encompass a wide phenomenon, but they do so in regular ways. People tend to see things associated with their cultural beliefs. Native Americans never describe recognizably Islamic imagery, and Islamic Arabs never see a windigo.
So, yes, the existence of these stories offer some evidence. They do share some similarities across culture – there’s a reason they’re all lumped under ‘ghosts’. But the eye-witness accounts are not as strong as it seems when we describe them as a uniform set experienced by “billions of humans”. No single description is supported by billions of eye-witnesses, and there are billions of conflicting reports.
On the other side of the ledger is a glaring absence of evidence. Here again is the definition I’m using, collapsed for neatness:
Working Definition of Ghosts
We’re talking about things that produce effects on the world, effects that should be detectable by boring technologies like cameras, microphones, thermometers, etc.
We have examples of ghost photography beginning almost as long ago as we’ve had cameras. And we should expect that, if the things people say they see are actually “literal, objective, measurable-by-anyone-because-they-are-part-of-shared-reality ghosts”. But as photography became commonplace became colloquial, we don’t see an attendant rise in the rate of ghost photographs.
In fact, we see almost the opposite trend: as people start to understand how cameras work, we see fewer photos that aren’t easily explained as malfunction or fraud (ghost photography fraud, of course, is as old as photography). Today, despite nearly everyone on earth having a high-resolution camera in their pocket, we get the kind of fluff that’s posted every day on r/ghosts: water droplets, bugs, reflections, pareidolia, and, of course, fraud.
(I didn’t have to dig to find those examples, and I’d suggest that they are representative what remains to be explained of the experiences of “billions of humans” who believe they’ve seen a ghost.)
We don’t see a trend of more and more ghost sightings captured on photo or video or audio or any other means of recording “interact[ions] with the physical world” as the devices for making those recordings have proliferated. We don’t see the trend we would expect to see if there were ever a recording taken of a ghost.
Here, the billions of eye-witnesses becomes a liability. The claim is now that these phenomena are a regular occurrence everywhere on earth, and everyone has a camera in the pocket (and on their doorbell and on their dashboard and in their baby’s room and in their bedroom etc. etc.), and the best we’ve got is… this? The lack of evidence is damning!
Instead, the trend is what we would expect to see if recording things supports alternative explanations: we see lots of people misinterpreting boring phenomena; we see lots of reasonable explanations for things that initially appear confusing; we see surprising coincidences that just don’t involve anything like a ghost.
We see example after example where humans misinterpret phenomena as ghostly, and approximately zero that defy explanation.
Yes, “approximately”. I don’t want to overstate my case, and I don’t need to. And those cases are evidence, in the sense I describe above. But they just aren’t strong evidence. How many unexplainable things would we expect to see in a world where ghosts don’t exist? It’s certainly much, much less than we’d expect to see the unexplainable in a world where ghosts do exist. But it’s not zero. In fact, it’s roughly how often we actually see them.
Does this rule out ever definition of ‘ghost’? No. Is it still conceivably possible that by some wild luck or elaborate epicycle we could just not be capturing the ghosts? Yes, literally always. But the weight of this evidence is enormous, the space of possible worlds it puts us in is vastly weighted in favor of worlds where there are no ghosts, where humans see things that aren’t there and in pre-scientific societies that gets explained by reference to ghosts and demons and monsters and myths and that fully explains why humans keep thinking they’ve seen those things.
If empirical observation can produce knowledge – and in practice we all believe that it can – then we can know that there are no ghosts.
Sure. Most of the time when people reject phenomena using this method, they’re right. It’s is a reliable way of rejecting phenomena. That’s why counterexamples stand out.
I don’t know how much it’s worth getting bogged down into the details here, but I don’t think this is a reasonable comparison.
The entire order Plesiosauria has been extinct for 66 million years. The order Artiodactyla, of which Omura’s Whale is a part, didn’t exist until about 10-15 million years after Plesiosaurs went extinct. And Omura’s Whale has multiple extant relatives, it was mistaken for them for decades.
So we can be confident there are no living Plesiosaurs to a degree we never could have been that there are no living Omura’s whales.
I readily concede that immaterial things with no measurable physical effect on the world are quite hard to disprove!
Does that actually satisfy you, though? Are you willing to concede that ghosts have never been caught on camera; never made a light bulb flicker; never changed the temperature in a room; never gone bump in the night; etc.? All of those are the kind of measurable-by-anyone phenomena I’m rejecting when I say, “there are no ghosts”.
If we agree that that kind of ‘ghost’ doesn’t exist, we can talk about what remains. But I think it’s a pretty small residue of possibility, and I’m skeptical it wouldn’t satisfy anyone who claims to believe in ghosts.
Not to assume, no. But it would have made sense to consider other explanations.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that ghosts actually don’t exist: Can you think of no way that it could be bad for the world if some significant fraction of people falsely believed in them?
People get killed for witchcraft. Still.