Abrasives is a vampiric virtue.after all.
(He who laughs last, lasts )
It’s kind of like honor among thieves ?!? ?!?
I really doubt most people who believe in ghosts think they are measurable by anyone. I don’t.
No, that’s simply not true. Someone sees a ghost somewhere and a team of scientists come. The odds are low they will find what they consider an objective explanation for what happened. They may well use deduction within their paradigm to speculate (they will think they are accurately concluding) what it probably was. But sorry unless the team is in place concurrently, and even then we’d just be guessing about how accurate their explanations are. Yes, sometimes they would find a good explanation, a sheet blown through the room. A half eaten hash brownie on a table and aurora borealis reflecting off a mirror. Three pranksters caught with sheets and microphones.
Well this is circular and doesn’t support your claim. You’re saying that whatever parapsychological research out there, for example, doesn’t meet the rigor you expect. That is in no way demonstrating that there are no ghosts.
Rogue waves: sailors and others at sea reported for years, probably millenia, the existence of rogue waves. Solitary giant waves. Scientists, whose models this did not fit, said that emotions were getting the best of these people. The scientists went to their best explanations, just as you do and worked with their models and ontology and dismissed the claims as irrational. Then we had cameras on the bridges of ships and oh, oh. Hm, it seemed more plausible. Then satellite images gave extremely strong evidence that these irrational people were on to something and current models were problematic.
Elephants communicating over long distances: this was believed by natives for a long time, correctly. This was dismissed just like telepathy gets dismissed based on the incomplete knowledge of scientists, working with their models of reality, causation, etc. Whoops. Wrong.
Animals were consider machines, a la Descartes. There was no proof they were experiencers. You could have your career messed up if you, in formal scientific contexts, asserted animals were experiencers and had desires, intentions, etc. Whoops. The paradigmatic biases then started to erode and now this is seen as a boo boo. All the while, long before science opened up to the, well, obvious, indigenous groups, pet owners, animal trainers, and more, you know all the hallucinating, irrational deluded people, lived from the correct assumption that animals were not mere machines (in contrast to thinking experiencers like human).
One can certainly make the case that there isn’t sufficient evidence to scientifically conclude there are ghosts.
But the argument above to demonstrate the claim that there are no ghosts is hubristic and unscientific. Which is fine, as long as it is presented as intuition combined with deduction and a belief.
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If you can’t think of any other explanations for what you experienced. Like “a white swirling cloud-like visitation” could be a cloud, or a puff of smoke or dust, or a mote near your eye, or an eye worm floaty/after-image/whatever you call it (didn’t mean e.g. loa loa, but I guess that too), or a scintillating scotoma, or a dozen other varieties of visual hallucination.
When I suggest you saw what you expected to see, it’s because you go from ‘see something weird’ to ‘must be a ghost’ without even noticing the myriad boring alternative explanations.
But shouldn’t the fact that there are lots of ‘ghost’ sightings that do get explained this way affect how we think about other claimed ghost sightings? A boring-but-fleeting explanation looks just like a paranormal-but-fleeting explanation, but we have good evidence that boring explanations are correct in lots of cases. The only evidence we have of paranormal explanations is that people say that’ve seen a ghost, but we know people see ghosts when there are no ghosts.
Are you referring to specific research?
Rogue waves are rare, few people saw them and most who did died. As technology improved, and boats became harder to sink, there were more reports. Increased scientific study of the sea led to further increases in reports.
Ghosts were long commonly reported and taken seriously, but scientific study changed it. The less scientifically literate a society, the more ghosts sightings. We didn’t see a rapid increase of irrefutable evidence for ghosts as people increasingly carry video equipment with them everywhere they go and film more and more of their lives.
The patterns are inverse: a very rare phenomenon with scant evidence is doubted, and better observation proves its existence, vs. a commonly reported phenomenon is accepted, and better observation fails to support it.
Ghosts were not always a fringe belief: the existence of some version of them has been the dominant paradigm for most societies for most of human history. But unlike your other examples, where rigorous observation proved the existence of something in doubt, rigorous observation of ghosts has consistently undermined them. That amounts to disproof: if ghosts were anything like what they were long claimed to be, we wouldn’t find so many sheets and drafts and pranksters and so much nothing else.
And it’s hard to argue that’s even controversial, when people who continue to hold out for ghosts are left claiming things like “ghosts aren’t measurable”, which … what? Are they part of shared reality or not? What does it even mean to say that they ‘exist’? A point I made above:
You present this as a sort of argument, implied in the question. I see the fact that people, which includes people who are respected and smart enough to know about other more mundane explanations, as a point of inquiry. For some reason you feel the urge to close the door and make the claim in the title of the thread. What do you think your motivation for opting to state something you can’t know and close the door is?
No, I am referring to what is implicit in your post.
Yes, but the point was that for a long time using exactly the arguments you are using, people who did not know assumed they knew that currect science and their ‘more likely correct explanations’ meant those people were being irrational. Philosophical caution should have led them to a more parsimonious position.
Not exactly. Physicalist (monist) models of reality took over much of the humanist/secular world. They didn’t research away ghosts. Ghosts didn’t fit dominant models in that culture.
Exactly. It has not been supported. That’s it. We don’t know where we are in the history of this phenomenon. Technological changes may finally support it, for example, or they may not. Ghosts may also not be visual in the same way other phenenoma are. There may be internal aspects to the seeing in ways we do not understand. What is the psychological urge to make a claim like the one in the title of the thread?
Yes, there are differences between rogue waves, ghosts, elephant communication as phenomena over time. But what we have is a kind of hubris based on scientific models, one that presumes to understand what the phenomenon must be - video cameras haven’t captured the ghost images yet (or at least none have been able to demonstrate that it isn’t something else, which might not be an easy criterion to meet) so really ghosts cannot exist.
After a period of time when people were placed in the irrational category. How do we know how long these periods of time will be for each phenomenon?
Actually those would be extremely rare explanations. What you are expecting is a video where we can rule out plays of light and shadow, for example. IOW the ghost finder has to be able to demonstrate that it can’t be anything else, for those who are skeptical. And again, you are making assumptions about what kind of phenomenon this is. That it is a visual phenomenon of the same kind as seen an owl at night, or some other purely visual phenomenon. The limits of your model are the limits, period, in your view. We can’t understand, in our model, what this could be. If it was real, then cameras would pick it up. No films exist that we, in our model, can’t find a way to explain to our own satisfaction, with other explanations, therefore……Even though many of these explanations cannot be proven either. It must have been light and shadow.
And still none of this explains why you need to assert something you can’t know. I am not saying that you should believe in ghosts.
Where does the urge to tell others they do not exist come from?
Why not say that so far we only have first person experiences for this interpretation of a variety of events and this does not meet scientific criteria at all?
Where do you think your urge to close the door for others comes from?
[T]he claim that “this thing exists in such a way that by hypothesis its existence has no measurable effect on the world” is indistinguishable from the claim “this thing does not exist”.
But no one is claiming that. That’s you mixing your sense of what is going on and your models and your sense of the completeness of moden technology with their claim that it was a ghost. That is structurally what you just did and it ends up as a kind of strawman implicit insult. And given that people are part of the world it’s not even accurate in that portion. We have interpretations of first person experiences in the past that were seemingly only ‘subjective’ or empirical 
- that ended up having being shown to in fact be responses to real external ‘things’. We can parsimoniously wait and see. But there is an urge to close the door and even to frame it as if people who believe in ghosts are making a claim that includes facets of your model.
In the ‘animals are experiencers’ we had a widespread interpretation that this was the case and we had science with a model that disagreed. It actually never was disproven, the old dominant idea in science, it just got harder to justify. We can really prove that animals experience, problem of other minds and all that. I sometimes wonder if the incursion of women, given perhaps slightly different defaults, into science led to the erosion of this delusion in science.
Once we get beyond the ontological issue of it must be something that is captured on cameras, there are other arguments that there are Recurrent location-based experiences where Parapsychologists have catalogued many cases where: Multiple people, across time Report similar experiences In the same physical location Without being told what others experienced. There are crisis apparitions, where a ghostlike presence is experienced. It seems like a person someone knows, but not ‘in the flesh’ then it is found out the person had recently died and the experiencer did not know they were dead and did not have other experiences like this. I had one of these where I slept in the bed of someone. Was woken by an odd bright light, that I don’t think would have shown up on cameras - was it inside me, outside me, was it light? - It was sort of the person whose bed I was sleeping in. Why I felt pretty calm in the interpretation that this was a ghost was 1) she acted in ways I would not have expected - she seemed confused and irritated to find someone in her bed. A reaction I would not have expected in a ghost situation. I ‘watched’ her realize that there was something she didn’t understand, at least that’s what it looked like. A puzzled expression. She looked around. And then she disappeared. The next day we found out she died in the night. Is this proof? Even for me? No. Connect it to other experiences I have had I feel fairly comfortable believing in ghosts, though my belief shifts over time and context. My belief harms no one, even when it is strong and there is less doubt. Not even me. I certainly understand other models and what must be the case for skeptics: coincidence, etc. Peachy, have your beliefs. I’ll have mine, shifting as they are.
And another set of Parapsych studied phenomena: Simultaneous reports. Then you do have researchers who think they have found statistically relevant, for example, em shifts which have been measured and do correlate to experiences. And note: it’s not easy to set up a lab and reduce variables etc. for such phenomena. Not that most of them claim they have proven something.
Now something that happens in these sorts of discussions is that if i mention these things, suddenly I bear the burden to prove ghosts. What I am pointing out is that the way you framed what has happened as far as evidence was binary and it’s not a binary situation. I am focused on your certain in what amounts to an unnecessary claim. Fine, you’re sitting at dinner with friends and you want to make the claim ghosts don’t exist, for whatever interpersonal reasons - interpersonal in relation to the other guests or interpersonal in relation to groups in society. But here, there’s no reason for that claim. I am not interested in trying to prove ghosts exist. There are ontological assumptions in your posts that come from your models. There are assumption that somehow most videos and experiences can be shown to actually be something else. That’s not true. The model leads to the conclusion in many cases that it must be X or Y. Not that the skeptics can demonstrate, in many cases, that X or Y happened. The videos don’t proven or cannot be part of a proof either way. The way you frame that claim, in the quote of yourself, is actually disingenous because it sounds like people make that claim when actually they don’t. But I explain that elsewhere.
and the parapsychologists, in general, are pretty cautious with their evidence. They don’t say it proves ghosts, but rather that there may be something going on that does not fit current scientific models and more research is warranted. Those that conclude that.
But you know what I am realizing. I am at a point in life where I need experiential learning rather than neocortex led arguments. I’ve always appreciated your ability to concede points, if you realize that’s the right response, and your exploratory approach, but I am realizing after a break from participation in forums like this, it’s not what I need. ah, ‘it’ is vague there. This kind of discussion, not the kind one has with you in specific. It’s more like ‘even the ones I might have with you.’
I realized that I was asking ‘why did you do this?’ several times with an implicit and explicit sense that there are psychological factors involved. This often gets aimed by skeptics at believers in various things but I don’t think you did this here. I think the reason I did this is in part because I respect you and there are much more philosophically sound ways to frame a position that you opted not to use. You opted to go beyond, for example, scientific methodology and draw a blanket conclusion about the non-existence of ghosts. That seems, coming from you, more an interpersonal shot across the bow than a position that matches your usual rigor.
A last thought - I hope. I think science has had a problem with relational intelligence. It has been very slow to grant intelligence/experience/sentience to entities not like, well, white men. This has eroded by the default is still present. Now plant intelligence and even experiencing is sort of on the cusp of being accepted. Might turn out the irrational indigenous who thought plants were conscious were right. It didn’t fit models and all attempts to communicate or measure weren’t there, but now there are starting to be. In the 70s it was animals. Hell, up to the 80s it was medical scientific default that babies did not feel pain, despite the correct response of many parents to this dangerous silliness that led to extreme torture for some babies. They are not like us yet, they don’t have words, their nervous systems aren’t mature and like us. The problem of other minds comes in here again, but then only for people with certain defaults and biases.
Not all real things are demonstrable at any given time. They may not have the same kind of ontological status or be present in the same ways we are used to. Are particles in superposition real now or only later when they come out of that? Is dark matter real or dark energy or can we go on inference? Could natives and the female scientist be right about elephant communication even though we don’t know what to measure or what the status ontologically of this is? Can there be action at a distance? Are there near-lying dimensions that have ‘things’ that aren’t present here in the same way things here are, but are sort of partially here, partially sensed by minds? or some minds? I don’t have a model which is fine. The issue for me is can certain experiences lead to it being rational for the experiencers consider ghosts either possibly real or real. I think there are. For people steeped in other paradigms and considering them finished except for details they think I must be deluded. Oh, well.
People who are utterly sure their models will be permanent models, so they can say - well, we tested everything so it can’t exist even though people experience it or intuit it (babies’ pain, animal communication, bird migration intelligence NOT based on the old hypotheses and theories but perhaps based on qm effects unknown until recently and so on).
I see no reason for people who lack certain experiences to be cautious in a philosophical context. Oh I know what you really experienced has a mixed history.
Ball lightning, indigenous belief that trees communicated with each other, prescribed burns that indigenous people used, aboriginal belief in Firehawks or their belief in now sunken lands where they lived, rogue waves, Klamath people’s view of how certain mountains formed and how they were view by pre-volcanology geologists, indigenous views of forest bathing - like a number of these only changes in what science could track (and then would consider real) was the mistake admitted, Polynesian wayfinding which was poopooed, until it wasn’t, Beekeepers (in other words specific experiencers) thought that bees communicated locations to each other, woodsmen and amatuer naturalists asserted that slime molds seemed intelligent and remembered things, ‘old wive’s tales about mother’s life experiences affecting the child’s life met the Weissman barrier, life forms in extreme environments noted by divers, indigenous beliefs in that mother’s fluids should be left on the baby shut down by sterilization programs which are now debunked, rain with fish in it, native use of animal behavior to predict earthquakes and tsunamis, the native view of the value of the colostrum, indigenous labeling certain areas sick-making which turned out to be highly radioactive areas or burping C02 areas and other phenomena, pets knowing when their owners are coming considered coincidence or based on time, but now animal perception of sound of specific engines and even being able to smell certain things at great distances are opening this up, and there are more.
Note: many of these situations involved people who were inclined by temperment or paradigm to actually notice certain phenomena. And these paradigms often emphasized relational, interactional intelligence. Hell, we could even bring in things like systematic sexual abuse and the coverup by the Catholic church and similar phenomena. Several core untested beliefs one could call paradigmatic poopood the claims of many experiencers. Models also, along with the good they do, limit what one can notice and experience, lead to what seem like logical arguments that often have assumptions - we would have known if….- and lead to feelings of superiority from one group with one paradigm or set of models when they deal with others. When in fact bias, skill and experiential differences lead to different experiences.
And yes, I am giving examples where science revised. Great. But unless we want to assert that science is done with revising and ‘my intuition is that this particular issue will never be revised’, more cautious assertions seem wiser. Of course the examples given show situations where science as a whole realized its mistake and paradigmatic biases. What other examples could I possible show a skeptic?
Again, not asking for belief, just pointing out epistemological overreach even that goes beyond the very methodology that is being used as THE route to knowledge: science.
I appreciate your kind words, and I will try to live up to them. In that spirit, I will start here:
I have more to say about the legitimacy of how I’m presenting my position, but I do admit that I have stated my position more bluntly than I might. @ProfessorX made a similar point, and I was dismissive of it.
I also think it’s fair to point to “psychological factors”. I agree it is often used dismissively, but it’s important to notice our own motivations and take care that they are not leading us astray. And on reflection I notice that my tone in this conversation has at times been intentionally blunt, with less nuance and fewer caveats than I might have included in other contexts.
I started this thread in response to the blunt claim that “Ghosts exist”, and my initial claim that “there are no ghosts” is no blunter – though, as a topic title, it is rage-bait-y (and that was probably intentional), which is not ideal.
My more recent posts were motivated by ProfessorX coming in hot (understandably, c.f. rage-bait title). I admit got ruffled and some of my replies were unproductive, but I think our subsequent conversation moved toward nuance, and I thought they touched on interesting philosophical ideas, some of which I hope to continue below.
On reflection, I would soften some of my bluntness, but I also understand where it’s coming from, and not entirely unphilosophical/unscientific.
Stepping back, there seem to be three interconnected levels in the conversation since the recent reopening of this thread:
- Ontology – do ghosts exist?
- Epistemology – can we know that ghosts exist?
- Rhetoric – how should we talk about ghosts’ existence?
I intended to start an ontological conversation and still think it’s worth discussing, but I also understand why you wouldn’t be interested in that conversation.
Your disinterest supports your points in the rhetorical conversation: maybe you would have been interested in discussing whether or not ghosts exist if I hadn’t framed that conversation so bluntly. That’s something for me to keep in mind, especially on topics like this where prior experience makes it easy to be dismissive and hard to be sincere.
But granting that, it doesn’t commit me to conceding the epistemic conversation: Even where it’s not persuasive or productive to say so, it can be true and defensible to claim knowledge. I still think the latter is the case here: I think “there are no ghosts” is as epistemically defensible as many other uncontroversial knowledge claims.
I’m a bit surprised by what I take to be your and ProfessorX’s position on that, and I thought that disagreement was the most interesting part of my exchange with ProfessorX, and I’d be interested to hear more from you about it.
It seems like we make this kind of claim all the time, even in philosophical contexts. Some of the ontological arguments you do make imply knowledge of a similar sort, though I note that, unlike ProfessorX, none of your claims assert knowledge of the non-existence of a thing. Is that the relevant distinction? Do you think those examples are as epistemically flawed as my claim? Specifically claims like, ‘there is no luminiferous ether’, or ‘there is no phlogiston’.
These claims are simpler, but they do not seem different in kind: observations do not fit a hypothesis A, and fit a different hypothesis B much better, eventually we have so much evidence of hypothesis B that we ‘know’ that hypothesis A is false.
An important difference is that ghosts are a plural phenomenon: proving that one ghost is a sheet doesn’t prove that all ghosts are sheets.
Maybe a better parallel is a claim like, ‘there are no living plesiosaurs’, because proving that one carcass is a basking shark doesn’t prove that all the carcasses are basking sharks. But that claim doesn’t seem to be unscientific either, and most plesiosaur scientists would seem to agree with it. Better still is a claim like ‘there are no living Tasmanian tigers’ is a better example – my line for what I’m willing to say I ‘know’ is somewhere around that claim (though my reticence stems in large part from my knowledge that they did exist within living memory).
Are either of those claims epistemological overreach?
Another relevant type of claim, also offered by ProfessorX, is claims like ‘there are no 1000 foot tall elephants’, or my earlier example, ‘there are no square circles’. These claims we can know purely by reasoning from other knowledge.
I see a claim like ‘there are no ghosts’ as sharing elements of claims like ‘there is no phlogiston’, ‘there are no living plesiosaurs tigers’, and ‘there are no 1000 foot tall elephants’. Like with phlogiston, knowledge would depend on measurement and testing, and the development of alternative hypotheses. Like with plesiosaurs, knowledge would depend on that alternative explaining some critical mass of observations. And like with the 1000 foot tall elephants, knowledge would depend on what possibilities our other knowledge forecloses.
It seems like all of these ways of establishing knowledge are scientifically and philosophically legitimate, and we use them all the time. It doesn’t seem like combining them violates any epistemological principles – in some cases it may increase uncertainty, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t establish knowledge in principle.
So what makes the claim that “there are no ghosts” different?
I don’t see it, and it’s a big part of why I am rhetorically blunt in this conversation. It seems like special pleading, or an isolated demand for rigor. People regularly claim to know that any number of things don’t exist, but a claim that this particular thing doesn’t exist is not only wrong, it’s a kind of philosophical malpractice. That feels… unfair.
I’m not making a claim of opinion or of faith. I really am as confident as my claim to knowledge suggests. I acknowledge that I am fallible, that expert consensus is fallible, that there is still a lot about the world that we don’t know. But in light of that uncertainty, we regularly make and accept similar knowledge claims, and so it is epistemically sound to make this knowledge claim.
What am I missing?
I can relate to this. These kinds of discussion – particularly on our ontological disagreements – are more important during the development of the neocortex, and become less useful and less interesting as it becomes more fixed, and we settle into patterns of thought and the beliefs that flow from them.
When I engage on the ontological dimension of conversations like this one, I often ask myself what it would take to change my mind, and it’s usually quite a lot. But after several decades of learning about the world and refining a model that accounts for it, in some sense it should be hard to imagine how it could change. And even if I did, it would have less of a downstream effect on who I am and what I do.
Still, it’s a muscle worth exercising, and maybe as I get less from them I need them more.
(I also kinda feel the same way about experiential learning…)
It is almost impossible for me to imagine the arrogance of summarily dismissing something countless millions upon millions of people have reported experiencing and talked about very seriously since the beginning of human civilization, and which even today many scientists and otherwise reasonable and ‘normal’ everyday people take seriously and consider if not only possible but actually very real, especially given how much we already know about 1) science gets things wrong all the time, 2) anything outside the norm tends to be suppressed, ignored or ridiculed, 3) there is extremely powerful institutional pressure against taking it seriously, 4) there is actually no way to know or prove that the claims to experiencing supernatural things such as ghosts are not at least sometimes truthful experiences, 5) the basic assumption that what we experience with our 5 senses plus the bits mainstream science adds in there is ALL THERE IS and we can know that any claims outside of that paradigm are to be disregarded out of hand.
Even if you take all that into account and still claim ghosts are not real, I suppose because you have never experienced one for yourself and you are strongly motivated to “trust the science” (showcase your obedience and closed-minded thinking) and your strong preference for a simple materialistic view of existence, that is just fine and good but then to not even be able to reasonably admit that is the paradigm you are coming from and despite all that it is certainly logically possible that ghosts do represent some sort of real phenomenon, being able to honestly admit that even if you still claim that they are not real to the best of your knowledge… yes, the arrogance of such a closed-minded, condescending approach is very hard for me to grasp.
Let me improve upon your position @Carleas if you don’t mind:
“I do not believe ghosts are real. It makes more sense to me that they are either lies, hallucinations, mental illness, wishful thinking, or other psychological or biological sort of distortions that people sometimes have. I see no evidence that ghosts do exist, and I am comfortable assuming that in 100% of all cases where someone claimed to see a ghost it was one of the aforementioned reasons and not an actual “ghost”. Be that as it may, I am honest enough to acknowledge we do not know the entirety of this reality or how it works, there are certainly many things out there we do not yet know, and science is both known to have a history of making mistakes and also of being pretentious in assuming whatever it currently believes is correct and it is stupid to question it. I also understand there is very strong institutional pressure against things like ghosts, and even if such things were real I bet the government would probably try to cover it up and study it in secret anyway, and I know how most research and control over scientific funding ultimately comes back to government funds. I also understand that most people, myself included, seem naturally wired to resist very unusual experiences and we have a normalcy bias to try and fit things into our comfortable known paradigms of belief and past experiences, so there is probably a natural tendency that even if someone did experience a ghost they might ignore it or want to dismiss it and make excuses for it being something else, and also if a person did experience a ghost and believed it was real they might be very hesitant to tell others about it because of the ridicule and automatic dismissal they will face from others. So in the end, of course I do not know for sure if ghosts are real or not, they could definitely be real and there is no logical or necessary reason why they could not be real, but I still have no direct experience with them myself nor have I seen compelling evidence or testimonies that convince me they are real, so for now and until proven otherwise I will stick to my belief that ghosts are probably not real.”
…does that help at all?
I don’t think it’s fair to characterize what I’m doing as “summarily dismissing” the existence of ghosts. We’re 250 posts and many thousands of words into this conversation, and this is not the first time I’ve discussed it at length. I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of ghost accounts. I’ve also studied psychology and physics. I’m not an expert, but I have done an abnormally deep review of the evidence.
And based on that review, I reject ghosts as a hypothesis to explain the various phenomena attributed to them.
Why is that more arrogant than concluding the hypothesis is correct based on “experienc[ing] one for yourself”?
Not really. We can do a hedged version of every belief we hold: “I do not believe the moon is made of cheese, it makes more sense to me that the people who study the moon are telling the truth about the moon being made of rocks. I see no evidence that the moon is made of cheese…”
But we generally don’t. We just say things like “the moon isn’t made of cheese”, and no one accuses us of being disingenuous or intellectually insulting or hubristic or unscientific or arrogan[t] or closed-minded or condescending.
Whether or not ghosts exist, it’s just a normal knowledge claim to say, “there are no ghosts”. Even if I’m wrong, it’s just not outlandish or epistemically remarkable to claim to know something based on a reasonably thorough review of the evidence.
So though you couch it as a critique of process (“summarily”, “out of hand”), it seems like you’re really criticizing the conclusion itself – like no matter what process, or how deep or broad or holistic a review of evidence, so long as I conclude from it that ghosts don’t exist, you will take that conclusion as proof of failure of process, of arrogance or closed-mindedness or whatever.
Do you disagree?
No, because it is not a normal knowledge claim. We understand that a claim like the moon is not made of cheese is a normal knowledge claim because there is an active logical and real-world contradiction inherent in the idea of a cheese-moon. It is a blatant contradiction. There is no comparable contradiction involved in the idea of ghosts, and furthermore a billion plus people throughout human history did not claim to experience a cheese-moon.
Your claim would be reasonable if you altered it to say “I do not think ghosts exist”. That is fine, you are making a reasonable claim about what you believe. No one can disagree with you about that. And you are free to provide your reasons backing it up. But you are not making an epistemic claim, you are making an ontological one about reality itself, directly and outside of human knowledge limits.
I was criticizing your process too, although perhaps you have really looked into the issue a lot more than I thought. Good for you. But I am skeptical since I too have looked into the issue a lot, for a long time, and heard very many personal accounts of experiences with strange phenomena including what people call ghosts. What I have heard convinces me that it would be foolish to dismiss all of it out of hand, and yes that is what you are doing. Summarily dismissing it out of hand. Even if you’ve heard 100 ghost stories in your life and don’t believe any of them, that is fine. No one cares if you believe in ghosts or not, no one cares if I believe in ghosts or not. This is about philosophy and being accurate in our statements. Simply put you cannot disprove the existence of ghosts, there is no logical contradiction with the idea of ghosts (like there is with the idea of the moon being made of cheese), there is strong institutional and social-cultural pressure to downplay and dismiss the idea, and there are far too many people who have claimed to experience it for you to say they are all wrong.
You may have some degree of hedging involved in your belief, but that does not come across very well. You might personally admit that ghosts might exist, but then you write “there are no ghosts” and leave no room for doubt. My point this entire time has been about being truthful and accurate in our claims. Ghosts might exist. That is a true statement. You cannot deny this. And I do certainly believe that sitting there dismissing a billion peoples’ personal experiences and stories often experienced and corroborated by multiple people, is indeed very arrogant and condescending.
If a billion people had experienced the moon made out of cheese, I would take the issue seriously. I might not believe it at face value but I would not flippantly dismiss it and mock those billion people either. And that is even more unbelievable and silly than is the idea of ghosts.
You are comfortable mocking a billion people calling them low IQ and dismissing their claims out of hand, saying they are just wrong. All of them, all the time. When in fact you cannot possibly know that. And you know that you cannot know it. How is that not arrogant and condescending?
I’m not. I’ve apologized for and retracted my comment about low IQ. I was being a jerk. I don’t think believing in ghosts says anything about the IQ of the believer.
But it’s not inherently mocking to assert that people who believe they have seen ghosts are mistaken. Humans – all humans – are often wrong about what they believe they’ve seen. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable in mundane contexts. Perception is unreliable. Memory is unreliable. We are fallible, and I know that because I have observed in myself the same failures of perception and memory to which I’m appealing to explain ghost sightings.
Despite that, I’m not dismissing those claims “out of hand”: their claims demand explanation. But there are other explanations.
I want to explore this claim, but I’ve confused the conversation by choosing an unnecessarily absurd example. Sorry, let me try again.
Incorrect beliefs about the nature of the moon are the historical norm: that the moon is a person, that it’s embedded in a solid sky or beneath a celestial ocean, that it is the same distance away as the stars, etc. Are these also contradictions?
That’s a surprising claim, and suggests that we mean something very different by ‘ghosts’. This is what I’m talking about:
By hypothesis, they are not “outside of human knowledge limits”. Are such things not disprovable in a similar way that “a living plesiosaur” is disprovable?
If you claim not to understand how “the moon is made of cheese” implies a severe contradiction in a way that “ghost exist” does not, then I think we are probably done with this discussion. Because I know you are smart enough to understand the distinction.
Likewise, you seem to disagree with the statement “you cannot prove that ghosts do not exist”. Using your definition of ghosts there, which I have no reason to disagree with, there is NO WAY for you to prove such things do not exist. Certainly not when countless billions of humans have already said they’ve experienced them and they are part of the lore and stories of every culture today and throughout history. You seem comfortable ignoring all that, I am not. But that comfort level aside, I am sure you understand there is no way for you to LOGICALLY PROVE that ghosts do not exist. That is because there is no logically necessary contradiction implied by the existence of ghosts. They may or may not exist. If they did happen to exist, no necessary contradiction would entail. What about a cheese moon? That implies a contradiction between what cheese is and what the moon is (rocks, dust, ice). We already know what cheese is and we already know what the moon is. Not so with consciousness or notions of the afterlife, there is a lot more gray area and unknowns there. No scientific hard proofs exist that we can hold in our hands to know exactly what consciousness/mind/awareness are, we just have our various assumptions one way or another.
Until science can prove what consciousness/mind/awareness or whatever way you want to conceptualize the underlying mechanisms for human being and what would supposedly also be embodied somehow in ghosts, until this is all able to be clearly derived and explained and understood with no ambiguity, just like we can derive and explain and understand with no ambiguity what cheese is and what moon rocks are, and how they are not the same thing nor is it possible for them to be the same thing, then your claim fails.
But you can keep pretending that it’s all the same. Do thousand foot tall purple elephants exist? Is the moon made of cheese? Is there a flying spaghetti monster at the center of the galaxy? Is Spongebob Squarepants a real living creature down in the ocean somewhere? You can keep pretending like all of those questions have the same epistemic status as “are ghosts real?” all you want, but pretending does not make it so. There are certain claims we can already know a lot about based on the content of the claim itself and what is logically implied by that, are there any blatant contradictions, etc. A claim about ghosts is ambiguous, the only evidence that ghosts do not exist is because you have not personally experienced them in a way that would convince you they are real. That’s it. You cannot use the experiences of others as evidence because LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE already claimed to have experienced them. It is just you and other people who have never experienced it, that is all you can base your claim on. That and your materialist paradigm where anything not fitting into the box of materialism and our five senses must be dismissed out of hand as impossible.
Anyway, it is very stressful for me to interact with you because you are so stubborn and pretend not to know things that you really do know. Rather than try to dig honestly at the truth even when that is difficult due to the language or subtleties of the logic or claims involved, you always hide behind the easy way out of pretending not to know certain things and then trying to force the other person to prove what you already know. That is not an honest way to approach philosophical discussion, despite what you may admire about Socrates. He too was dishonest and irritating to talk to. Maybe you are OK with that, no problem, but until we can both operate on the same level of authentically trying to discover the truth and putting ego aside I don’t want to continue here.
Summary of points you already know but pretend not to know:
You cannot prove that ghosts do not exist (even using the definition of ghosts that you provided)
The claim “ghosts exist” is meaningfully epistemologically different from the claim “the moon is made of cheese”.
You do believe that people who believe in ghosts are stupider when compared to everyone else. You would not have said it otherwise.
Saying you do not think ghosts are real is not the same as saying ghosts are not real. A claim about a thing itself is not the same as a claim about what we believe about that thing. I know you know this too. But you are still hiding behind ambiguity of not acknowledging how this distinction invalidates your entire approach here.
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t see how it implies a severe contradiction either. I don’t think it’s true, but not being true is different from being a contradiction. Can you explain the contradiction you’re seeing?
I mean, if we think of the moon as a ball in the sky, and we don’t take it for granted that this ball is made of rocks… it seems implausible that it’s made of cheese, but not contradictory. Right? Like, a ball of cheese isn’t a contradictory concept. Even if it’s a very big ball.
We are ghosts that have biological human bodies.
Now, people perceive stuff, and sometimes we people tend to give a ‘place’ to something they perceive. Like, when getting up, trying to grab a pencil you had in the dream. Since everything we see with our eyes has a place, we perceive something and we think it is ‘there’. That may be a confusion. Not everything you perceive is sight or sound.
If ghosts exist, and they are in the same 3d space that we inhabit, for sure they can’t do anything to do more than scare you. Because ghosts appear and disappear, go through walls and so. So they are immaterial. If not, ghosts having no mass would have quite a hard time having to follow the Earth spinning and around the sun. Plus, if you were a ghost that ‘haunts’ say, a ship, you’d have to follow that AND the ship - quite tiring
What if I say it all comes from the same source? Only God is capable of wielding such power to communicate with us through His presence, so God may engage in a kind of role‑playing through His power to communicate with humanity. Our ancestors and God may have co-produced legends and myths across different cultures. The content differs, but the method might be the same—through auditory hallucinations, I suppose.
There is no ghosts nothing out of ordinary nothing beyond science or my own 5 senses in this moment yet, nothing at all the world and entire universe of all time and infinite spaced creation of all everything everywhere is exactly as I see and experience it right now. Because I am exctlty that epic narcissistic and ego-obsessed with myself to assume that my own experiences or lack thereof are literally equivalent to the sum total of all existence. And if you say otherwise you are a silly liar stupid low IQ inbred cunt. Yes, I actually do believe that and there is NO ROOM at all for doubt in my mind about it. I know all, I am the best and there is zero doubt about any of the things I know and I can prove it because I dont need to prove anything because I am god. - @Carleas
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Which is exactly what people did to reject phenomena that were both real and correctly interpreted in other instances, such as with rogue waves. There may be people in the thread who are arguing, here, that ghosts exist, but from what I’ve seen it’s more like you can’t rule them out. And, really, there’s no need to. ‘I see no good reason to believe this.’ or take out even ‘good’.
And sometimes they are right, especially when there are paradigmatic issues on the table or it seems so to the skeptics - when technology hasn’t reached the right level, for example.
But we have found large species thought to be extinct in the oceans: Omura’s Whale being one that competes with even excedes some plesiousaurs in size. Moreover we are dealing with a trickier situation with ghosts. Someone saying there have seen a plesiosaur is claiming to have seen something with a biology we generally understand. A large heavy reptile. We know the kind of substance we are dealing with and what kind of phenomenon. So, then one can begin to work on ruling out that kind of thing. If a specific theory of ghosts, what they are made of, is put forward and I am sure some have tried, then it becomes easier to disprove especially specific ongoing events and perhaps even in general.
Presumes we can measure them now. Again with rogue waves, these were physically like other waves in terms of substance, but they were not measurable by anyone until decades past and they were measurable because technology changed. Well, not everyone, but cameras did begin to catch them and finally satellites owned by a few but images accessible by all. But before that they were ruled out based on knowledge at that time of water/oceans, etc. IOW it didn’t fit the paradigm. There however the substance issue, once technology advanced, was not up in the air. Everyone believed and had good reason to believe they were made of salt-water.
And then it actually may well go beyond substance, to ontological categories we don’t currently track. With elephant communication some people could actually head the infrasound (?). Most could not. So, if you had been there, before it was proved, it would have made sense for you to assume it really was something else - water in the ear, tinnitus, mind play tricks with internally produced sounds, etc.
Essentially one of your earlier arguments implies that if I heard that I would be aware that it is more likely to be one of these: list of phenomena you consider both real and often correctly interpreted by people as being present. But you haven’t heard that or perhaps you have but quickly dismissed and categories it in a way that fits your paradigm.
And really, there is no reason to announce, there are no ghosts.
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Well, unlike rogue waves or ball lightning, ghosts may very well not be material but be perceived by people - it may be entirely subjective phenomena. Since ghosts, even by the stereotype, don’t interact with matter (go through walls) and can be visible by, say, one person out of two in the same room… it very well could be that the ‘place’ people say the ghosts are is not such. Same as the people who feel a ‘phantom’ cellphone vibrating ( Phantom vibration syndrome - Wikipedia ) in that regard, but it very well could be that ghosts exist but not situated in the space we regard all things to exist. In that way, there very well could be ghosts but you couldn’t measure them in any way. Same as you cannot measure between two people if one has a subjective consciousness and the other is just a biological human with no awareness
Yes.
That’s the standard skeptic model. Or something in perceived in many instances and this is real but the subjective interpretation is incorrect.
That’s my guess.
Yes. They might be some weird combination of subjective objective, but necessarily ‘here’
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What do you mean?
In the case of the ghost you are seeing light reflecting off some object, let’s say. There is a real phenomenon, but your brain interprets this as a ghost. It forces a particular pattern on a real phenomenon. –note I am not making this argument, just recounting it.
What I mean is that there may be no light reflecting any object. You are just perceiving it tho not by your sense of sight, tho since it looks like so, you suppose you ‘saw it’ with your eyes.
For simplicity, let’s suppose there is a Freddy Krueger of daydreams, insofar as there is an entity that exists only in daydreams. It’s not material, you don’t perceive it with your eyes (same as dreams), but you have that perception alongside your life as usual. So, if you experience both the daydream and the usual life, you ‘see’ Freddy Krueger of the daydreams. Does it make any sense? Probably not the clearest explanation, but whatever I see recounted about ghosts seem to match that