There Are No Ghosts

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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But the claims themselves establish the pattern.

If the roughly 60 million Americans who claim to have seen ghosts were seeing something capable of being captured on camera, then given that almost all of them have a camera within reach 24 hours a day, we would expect to see a minimum of tens of thousands of compelling photos and videos. That’s the pattern we expect from things that can be captured on camera.

We know a great deal about “literal, objective, measurable-by-anyone-because-they-are-part-of-shared-reality” things work, and we know that they don’t produce the pattern of evidence we see for ghosts.

I’d argue the example of ball lightning is actually strong evidence against ghosts. Ball lightning is rare and fleeting, so while it exists, there’s very little opportunity to observe it. It’s because it’s exceedingly rare that its existence was in dispute for so long. And yet, we have it on video.

As of 2015, nearly a fifth of the US population said they have seen a ghost. We should expect so much more video evidence of ghosts than we have of ball lightning, and we don’t have it.

There really isn’t. My argument doesn’t depend on any particular explanation for the experiences people describe. It only depends on there being multiple possible explanations, and that different explanations produce different patterns of evidence.

The pattern of evidence we have lets us rule out explanations that entail things like “ghosts are the kind of thing that reflects or emits light”. Whatever else they are, they aren’t that.

False beliefs are bad.

Because that’s not my claim. My claim is that the pattern of evidence we do have is incompatible with the existence of ghosts I provide in the OP.

You are using a different meaning of ‘ghost’:

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That’s why I pointed out that, when you take in all accounst, all of that seems to be -at best- some experience supperposed over your usual senses. Not that ‘there is a ghost at X,Y,Z coordinates’.

I am not redefining ghost in any way. I’m a ghost, as far as I’m aware. I very well could remain after I’m dead. In particular, perceivable by other sensation.

Well, your suppositions about ghosts do look much like when people want to say that no god exists because there isn’t someone sitting in a cloud. You seem to be conflating the reality of what ghost (at least) could be with the interpretation of people who tell they have seen them. Two different things

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For someone with an idiosyncratic understanding of ghosts, you are awfully critical of a different, more common definition.

Look: do you or anyone else in this thread concede that, whatever ghosts are, they do not emit or reflect light? If you reject that claim, then our disagreement isn’t that I’m defining ghosts wrong.

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:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

What I say is that the most compelling ghost stuff is quite like Daydream Krueger (I don’t know where did I write that down in here). They do not reflect the light of your lamp, for sure. If they did, anyway… I doubt that would matter at all. In fact, if they traverse walls, they certainly cannot interact with matter - if they traverse walls, they traverse you quite the same, they’d be unable to punch you.

And there you have it:

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I personally think that’s fair. It’s a very narrow, almost childish range, but it is a clearly defined range.

I think his claim that abscence of proof proves abscence in this case is, if not perfect, within an acceptable margin. Maybe ghosts are just smart enough not to get caught, etc. But for all intents, a good enough proof against.

By the way, it doesn’t exclude the possibility of ghosts as existing entities that can be physically seen from several independent observers.

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Possibly the thread should be retitled: “Ghosts Cannot Reflect or Emit Light.”

I guess it’s a little less sexy.

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I bet some people say they “can reflect light” but it’s not “light that you can see”.

In any way, this topic is, in the end, asking about if unmeasurable things can exist

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Fair enough.

How does a ghost control a body?

It’s narrower than the set of all possible meanings of ‘ghost’, but am I wrong to think the average ghost believer would reject the claim that ghosts have never been captured on camera? Because a thing that can’t reflect or emit light can’t be captured on camera.

I’m also not only claiming that it can’t reflect or emit light:

Reflecting or emitting light is useful as an example of the kinds of things we can rule out by appeal to how we should expect the world to look. But we can make a similar case for sound, for touch, for temperature.

That’s still pretty narrow, but it hits at a crux: whatever explanation we ultimately decide on for millions of people claiming to have seen a ghost, it has to include that a significant percentage of them are just wrong: Everyone who thinks they caught a ghost on camera is wrong. Everyone who thinks the ghost opened or closed a door, or knocked something off a shelf, or lowered the temperature in a room, they are all mistaken.

I’ve been criticized repeatedly for “dismissing” experiences of ghosts, but anyone who accepts my argument with respect to a narrow, childish definition would also have to dismiss many (if not most) of them.

We would still need to explain why so many people think they’d experienced ghosts of the sort that’s been rejected, and we’d do it by appeal to human fallibility: perceptual bias, confabulation, hallucination, etc. But those explanations, if true, could also explain all claimed experiences of ghosts, and a parsimonious world model that fits the evidence would be that they do.

Showing that ghosts (in my narrow sense) don’t exist leaves us with less to explain, and perfectly good explanations for it, and a world that looks like we would expect it if ghosts (more broadly defined) just don’t exist and everyone believing they’ve experienced one is just making the same mistakes as the people who believe they’ve caught one on camera.

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II think the “ghost on camera” population is actually fairly small, even as a percentage of ghost sightings.

As for them interacting with the material world, doors opening or closing etc on their behalf. Well. Here I think the light reflection is good enough by itself to make a different point. A light bouncing or emitting object is a specific kind of material. But it is not the only conceivable way that the material world could be altered. To disprove that ghosts can do this, you would have to account for every involved mechanism in the door movement. Physicists today at the cutting edge are sweating fat drops trying to get a firm handle on even a very small portion of them.

This leaves a negligible set of ghost sightings that you have satisfactorily countered.

As for your “next planned rhetorical steps,” you would have to satisfactorily take them for me to include them in any estimation. They really have no bearing here.

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I don’t know - I haven’t seen any of the ghost scientists come with a reasonable hypothesis so far. Something about the hypothalamus being the interface with the body (including the brain)

Yeah, most accounts of ghosts are, at best, misled.

The question is why are people afraid of ghosts… if they go through walls, they go through you too. So, in the case of being in the presence of a ghost, it’d be quite an amazing opportunity for an interview!

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To add to the point about physics:

The approach today is, more and more, to measure a before, an after, and a statistical relationship between them. A quest for “all possible mechanisms” is not seriously pursued anymore because, even conceptually, the quest could be infinite.

So it would even be standard modern scientific practice to simply measure statistical relationships between ghost feelings and ghosty door movements and decide that one affects the other, purely on a statistical basis, without even the quesiton posed as to how or why.

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I can’t find specific numbers, but I don’t think that can be true. The ‘ghost hunter’ wikipedia page gives a history of the practice and lists over a dozen devices used to detect ghosts (including cameras, night vision, motion sensors, thermal imaging, and lasers), and notes the popularity of the ghost hunter genre of reality television (shows like Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, and Most Haunted get reasonably high ratings and viewership).

I would expect that nearly everyone who thinks ghosts exist thinks they can be photographed – though I grant that for most of them that position is not something they have thought about very much, and I’d expect it to be much less common among those who have.

I don’t follow you here. What makes you say this? If cameras failing to detect light emitted or reflected from ghosts suggests they don’t emit or reflect light, why wouldn’t (arguendo) the failure of other ways of detecting physical effects to detect ghosts similarly suggest that they do not have those physical effects.

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Well, reality shows about Alaskan airplane pilots are also popular, but there aren’t really that many. It’s a very US thing, the adoption of hi tech into traditional motifs. I doubt in reality it’s even that big in the US. It’s just attention catching.

Normally the “show me the stats” is a fallacy, and I’m not even asking for them now. I just want to say that my experience suggests the opposite, and I disupte this.

If you see the tide rise and search for a material object directly causing it, you might find nothing. That the Moon through its gravity causes it, along with a host of climactic factors, is not a straightforward “light emitting object did it” answer. Catholics say evolution exists, but is guided by God. That is an extramaterial cause for a material event that you can’t disprove without covering every conceivable avenue of effect on evolution, and that is probably an infinite task.

It’s not so simple as “physical and not physical” even for explaining physical phenomena.

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Don’t confuse popular for true

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But I bet most of the people who watch those shows believe that it’s possible to fly airplanes in Alaska, just as I’d bet most of the people who watch shows about people taking pictures of ghosts believe it’s possible to take pictures of ghosts.

I admit that I’m uncertain as to the percent of ghost believers who believe ghosts can be photographed, I’d just be surprised if it was small.

Do you agree that it matters, though? If most people who believe in ghosts believe that they can be photographed, and my proof that they can’t be photographed is successful, it seems like my narrow proof would have broad implications for belief in ghosts.

OK, I think I follow. I would counter that empirically proving what did cause something is harder than proving what did not. Even if I don’t know what caused the tides, if I think they might be caused by my neighbor leaving and returning to his house each day, I can disprove that theory by seeing if the tides still rise and fall on days when he stays home sick or leaves town.

In its ideal form, scientific proof is rather a persistent failure to disprove.

So even if determining what exactly is moving every single door that appears to move on its own is hard, we can rule out lots of things. It’s not phlogiston; it’s not luminiferous ether. To the extent any explanation suggests a difference between how the world would look if the explanation were correct and how it would look if the explanation were incorrect, we can rule out that explanation by showing that the world looks like the latter.

Catholics’ guided evolution survives because it looks no different from un-guided evolution, which insulates it from disproof. But in a scientific sense, a claim that cannot be disproven is meaningless.

So I’m arguing that despite all that we don’t know, we can significantly narrow the possibilities for what ghosts might be, enough to say that there are no ghosts in the sense I describe in the OP.

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Well, if you want to hang your hat on that, then yes, if most people think of ghosts as photographical entities, your strong case against them would have greater bearing.

Both cases would be communicated by “ghosts don’t bouncor emit light,” for which you have made a strong case, and not by “there are no ghosts,” for which you have not.

You seem to miss that disproving a positive is what I was getting at. You are claiming to have disproven somethkng that cannot be disproven.

If there is some intricate, complex chain of events linking ghosts to physical phenomena, you really have not touched it. And it may well escape a glance as cursory as “did the camera catch anythi g near the door.”

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I would drop the reality show bit. I have watched that and many others, out of simple morbid pleasure.

I think you misunderstand reality tv.

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But that’s not true. Proving that ghosts can’t be things that emit or reflect light increases the complexity required for there to be some objective, external phenomenon that’s the referent of word ghosts.

And again, it doesn’t only apply to light. The argument for sound is essentially the same: the number and quality of microphones has increased dramatically over the past 100 years, and the number of ghostly voices recorded has no increased apace. In a world where ghosts emit sound, we would expect significantly more audio recordings of those sounds than we see, and so we should conclude that ghosts do not emit sound.

Argument along the same pattern applies to changes in temperature, electric fields, pressure. Our world is measured and recorded in much, much finer detail that ever before, and we don’t see a corresponding increase in the quality of ghost recordings of any kind.

So we know that ghosts aren’t things that emit or reflect light (or they would phographed);
they aren’t things that emit sound (or they would be recorded);
they aren’t things that affect temperature (or they would be detected by digital thermometers and thermostats);
they aren’t things that affect electric fields (or they would be detected by EMF meters and most electronics);
they aren’t things that change air pressure (or they’d be detected by barometers).

What’s left?

Poltergeist-like activity (throwing books around, or opening and closing doors, footsteps, bumps in the night) is a kind of second-order lack of evidence, in that we could detect those physical activities even if we can’t directly detect the thing causing them. And yet again, we don’t see the evidence we would expect to see if the claims of those events were true reports of ghost activity.

Specifically, we would expect to see a trend of increasing availability of photographic etc. evidence that follows the increasing prevalence of those devices; we would expect to see an increasing trend in quality of the videos we do see that tracks the increasing trend in the quality of our devices. We don’t. We see many fewer than we would expect, a continued pattern of low quality in what we do see, and lots more security cameras catching the real causes of bumps in the night (pests, pets, humans, etc.).

We can always add epicycles to make an idea fit the data, but the more elaborate and ad hoc the chain needs to be, the less compelling it is as a description of the world. The chain of causation by which ghosts are involved in what we see becomes not just intricate and complex, but tortured.

Especially when we have explanations that fit the data better and do hold up to scrutiny: human perception and cognition are fallible in regular ways, and the set of phenomena we refer to as ‘ghosts’ is expected given the ways in which we are fallible.

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So:

  1. What about ghosts as I have portrayed before?
  2. Do unmeasurable things exist?
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I don’t know that you have shown any of that.

You have made a strong case that a light bouncing or emitting object does not do those things.

Could a light-insensitive ghost affect temperature, objects, etc, through some mechanism you have not discovered?

Well, yes.