Is this distinguishable from a purely endogenous phenomenon? How would we expect a world in which this happens to look different from a world in which errors in human perception and cognition cause people to see things that aren’t there?
Interesting question, I’m not sure. Seems to depend on what we mean by ‘measurable’ and ‘exist’.
For present purposes, we should use ‘measurable’ to mean measurable-in-principle as opposed to measurable-in-practice. There are trivial cases of things that exist that aren’t measurable-in-practice, because they’re too big or small or fast or slow or far away, but I would still call them measureable-in-principle.
It seems like anything that has an effect on something measurable is itself measurable, since we could measure the first thing by measuring the effect it has on the second thing.
Similarly, it seems like something that has an effect on something that exists must also exist in some way.
So an unmeasurable thing could have an effect on other unmeasurable things, but couldn’t have an effect on anything measurable without itself becoming measurable (again, in principle).
I guess I lean towards no: something that is unmeasurable-in-principle does not exist, though I haven’t thought about the question enough.
This may break down in things like multiverse theories, where two universes share causal histories but are in principle inaccessible from each other. There, it seems like we still want to say they both still ‘exist’, but in practice they’re indistinguishable from a mathematical shorthand.
It shouldn’t matter here, though: if ghosts interact with people, they should be measurable-in-principle.
That’s the wrong question. The right question is, if ghosts of the sort I describe were affecting temperature, objects, etc, via any mechanism at all, what would we expect to see? and how would our expectations be different if they didn’t exist?
We don’t need a mechanism to explain phenomena we can’t detect.
Let’s assume for a second ghosts exist. Someone feels a ghost. A door snaps shut. They have a strong feeling it was a ghost. It was, in fact, a ghost. The mechanism is convoluted and unintuitive.
In that world, the feeling of ghost and the door shutting indicate eachother, but you have no idea how. Yet you are right.
This happens in physics all the time. They know state A, they know state B, they know A leads to B, but they don’t really know how. They don’t even know what they are looking for. They start spitballing until some idea starts to hold mathematically and experimentally without throwing up a bunch of infinite values.
Physicists don’t just spitball math on one observation, they conduct thousands of observations. They develop a models that fits what they’ve observed, identify predictions about what else we should see if that model were true, and then conduct and/or analyze thousands of other observations to see if the predictions hold. And they refine their models as the predictions hold or fail.
In your hypothetical, we have one observation in which the feeling of ghost and feeling of the door shutting come together. How many other people have similar connected experiences? Does it depend on population? Culture? Do they all reliably feel the ghost and see the door shut at the same time? Do they ever report feeling a ghost and connecting it to a door closing when the door is actually closed by some other mechanism (of which they are ignorant, e.g. the wind, or misaligned hinges, or a hidden spring)?
Whatever the answers are, what happens when we introduce a change in the world that changes the rate at which we record observations? If over time, the quality and quantity of recording devices of all kinds gradually increases, then over time we have a varying amount of information about how often doors close without explanation, how often people report having felt a ghost, how often people don’t see the mundane cause of a closing door. How does the rate of vindicating recordings change over time in a world with ghosts vs. one without?
I would argue that in a world where some significant percent of ghost sightings (or feelings or knowings or whatever) are true ghosts sightings, increasing recordings will cause an increase in reports supported by some kind of recording, and an increase in the average quality of the supporting evidence as the average quality of recordings increases.
And that’s true for any kind of recording device that could in principle support a claimed ghost experience – video, audio, temperature, vibration, heartbeat, EMF, pressure, whatever. As the quality and quantity of those recordings increases, to the extent they are capable of capturing anything about ghosts, they should capture them more often and in more detail.
You could set up a thousand cameras, laser pointers, infrawhatchamahaveyous in front of a beach, and never catch the moon’s gravity.
I am talkimg about cutting edge theoretical physics. The things they measure are so minute, unknown, and just weird, that they often reinvent entire models. Sometimes a thing that was optimal before contradicts new results. They do spitball, I think you would be shocked at just how much.
This is why I used the word childish. The range of phenomena you could spontaneously discover by placing cameras and mics is so minute, it wouldn’t even capture most known physical phenomena.
All your questions about data refining are fair enough. And there you are already doing what I said you would have to: ruling out every possible alternative. It’s not actually feasable to disprove. The best you can hope is to make a good case for a positive. Refine data, build a model, test against it, until it’s good enough for now. Good enough to suggest a positive may be the case, not to disprove it. To disprove it you need the falsifiable moment, and best you’ve done with that is light and sound in the immediate vicinity. Not much.
As an expert on this subject I am going to jump in here. As I need to derail some things before you all go off into left field.
A ghost is a metaphysical entity, they are not always human nor always come from a human.
Your comparison with a blind person is irrelevant. Because ghost’s and their effects on the environment can only be experienced or perceived by those with specific aberrations in their psychology and mental neurological structure. This Aberration only happen at a rate of about 1 in 100,000,000. Although Near death experiences and trauma can force it to occur. It primarily manifest’s in those who are prone to schizophrenia. Generally in those who are prone to such but in fact do not develop it. It is a mutation.
Your mind interprets reality to be something it will understand. If it see’s something it can;t it automatically makes it something it can via your perception. This has been proven over and over by taking technology into Amazonian tribal areas where they have never seen nor heard of anything other then what a cave man would. In example if you show them a cell phone, they do not see a cellphone glass plastic etc etc. They see a literal polished rock which glows. There are many other tests which have been done to confirm this.
Your perception denotes the reality in which you live and what you experience beyond the Universal Truths which apply to everything, reality other then those is exceedingly flexible. It’s why when you begin studies in magic or esoteric arts, the first lessons are always about opening yourself up to possibility that things you do not understand and can not explain with normal science, may exist. Because if you can’t do that simple step, you can not learn magic or any other form of esoteric knowledge. You also conversely… Can’t understand anything in quantum physics. Make of that what you will.
Both of your all’s arguments are completely off the point. You are trying to discuss and debate metaphysical entities using methodologies which can not even remotely begin explain such. You are essentially trying to explain how a car engine works, by reading the manual for how to assemble an office chair, and then arguing about why it doesn’t make sense while not understanding that your argument is pointless because you do not even have the right manual or information.
There is proof. Plenty of it. Mountains of it. Much of it obvious. However governments and the scientific community world wide make vast efforts to ensure the general populace is ignorant of such. But you can find it if you actually go digging for it. Eventually you have to admit that random anomalies and patterns and coincidence stop being such after enough of it occurs. Peoples refusal to believe in such is also a factor. As is the majority of the population and those in authority calling people crazy and alienating them to the fringes for such belief’s. This is called Social engineering and control, and is specifically designed to enforce the narrative in a population that certain beliefs are taboo. Even if in fact they are true. People will refuse to believe what they see, just to fit in.
On top of that you have the actual crazy people. Who do not help and no favors to the subject.
Couple of points concerning those able to see the metaphysical world.
The first is related to the natural frequency, about one in a hundred million, you said, with trauma linked spikes. According to google, world population hit 100 million roughly around the time of Christ, and only hit 500 million around 1650. Being very literal, there was one guy seeing ghosts 2000 years ago, and only 5 a couple of centuries ago.
The trauma factor, by which I’m guessing we mean either brain injury, given human history’s colourful nature, sounds more promising.
However, given historical population densities and the very low frequency of occurence, it would seem very unlikely to have even 2 people in the same vicinity with the same ability. For an idea like ‘there is such a thing as a ghost’ to flourish the way it has simply from a consistence of cognitive experience in individuals surely there would have had to have been some kind of critical mass of people able to share this experience. Which seems like a vanishingly small probability.
To quote from some AI bot…
schizophrenia affects brain regions involved in discerning reality, particularly those responsible for reality monitoring—the ability to distinguish between internally generated thoughts and external sensory input.
Key brain areas implicated include:
Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC): Involved in self-referential thinking and source memory. Reduced activity here is linked to difficulty distinguishing self-generated thoughts from external stimuli, contributing to hallucinations and delusions.
It continued in a simular vein. As you said with the tribesmen and the cellphone, I suppose someone attempting to make sense of a sequence of hallucinations will fall back on the concurrent cultural archetypes from story.
Either way though, arguing reality from a special ability which allows the experience of individualized, inconsistent and unrepeatable phenomena seems a stretch.
I guess my point is that people like scary stories, ghosts, vampires and werewolves. That simple quirk of human nature almost guarrentees a story culture with recognizable tropes. But actual reality in any way beyond ‘Father Christmas is real because he has noticable effect on social behaviour patterns in a predictable fashion’ is dubious.
At first glance, it’s not, for sure. That’s the point - you are having a subjective experience. In a way, the same as everyone having the subjective experience of “Someone is conscious” (to each one, oneself is conscious). Now, the particulars of Daydream Krueger could lead you to conclude it’s not endogenous. For example, giving information that you could in no other way know, having the same experience as other people and such.
You can take all meanings you can think of, and see which combinations make sense and which combinations do not.
You seem to need a cause-effect definitive relationship to see if something is measurable. Since we cannot mostly know for sure, that gives in to doubts about if something is or isn’t measurable. Say, someone says that Mercury is bad because they see the effect that Mercury being retrograde makes along their group of friends.
On the other hand, I’d say that only the effect is measurable, since the cause-effect relationship is not sure-fire.
In your view, ghosts could be measurable in principle, but not objectively.
Why would something unmeasurable in principle not exist?
You are just stating the same with higher numbers and more precission but not something so radically different that the cause-effect relationship would be indeed known
Picture this: could something unmeasurable in practice exist? Say, something by which nature makes the act of measuring it fail
This isn’t true, but I understand the point you’re making. I don’t think it’s responsive to the point I’m trying to make: We don’t need to know what is the cause in order to show that something is not the cause.
We don’t need to detect the moon’s gravity to know that the tides aren’t caused by the x,y coordinates of a given shell on the beach. We can do local experiments and rule out a causal relationship between those observations.
These claims seem inconsistent: ‘ruling out alternatives’ is disproving them.
Also, I see my argument as ruling out alternatives like ‘ghosts are things that emit or reflect light’ or ‘ghosts throw books across the room’. Is that not how you see it?
Not sure what you mean by this. My argument is statistical: that the trend of observations isn’t what we’d expect assuming ghosts possess some trait. That’s the argument as applied to emitting or reflecting light, which you seem to accept. What is the falsifiable moment in that?
What is your expertise?
Does it have physical effects? There is some disagreement among proponents in this thread.
But they see the glow, right? Two amazonian people could independently verify facts about the phone, even though they’d call it a polished rock.
You can prove to an amazonian that the phone is special, that it does things they can’t understand. You can prove quantum effects with a laser and two thin slits.
I’m just saying there’s no equivalent for ghosts. They don’t produce effects in the physical world that can only be explained by reference to some metaphysical reality.
Sure. I don’t think there’s any good evidence of that either, but proving what people could-have-known is hard (c.f. Mandela effect).
That seems … unproductive. What meaning did you have in mind when you asked the question?
Sure. We can’t measure the height of the 25th tree ever, or average diameter of the oldest comet at this moment, those are unmeasurable-in-practice but measurable-in-principle.
Let me try to cut through the haze here and zero in on what the issue is:
There is a statistical relation between believed ghost encounters and a range of phenomena. This correlation exists, thus there is no question of whether ghosts exist and are related to phenomena, but what they are, and how they are related.
You are claiming to be disproving ghosts. When asked how you are doing this, you lay out some long term plan for showing, out of all possible alternatives, how, in each, a ghost is not possibly related. The plan remains unfulfilled.
If what you are saying is that for this or that reason, you think it unlikely, that is not disproof. That is an opinion.
Even if you propose a bunch of statistically supported cases where ghosts are only real as spontaneous myths supporting confirmation biases, this is still not disproof. It is a suggestion of an alternate possitive, not a disproving of the original positive. This is because you falsified nothing. The falsifiable moment is, for example, “if it a blue dog doesn’t appear on top of the Eiffel tower when the sun sets in Paris, it isn’t true.” Then you check the top of the Eiffel tower at sunset for the dog and, if it is not there, it is disproven. This is falsifiability, and it is considered a standard obligatory feature of any scientific theory.
But ghosts are not a scientific theory. They are a tradition. Therefore it is curious to me and others that you would even propose that you have falsified them.
This would be bad science. Maybe that kind of shell is related to a geological phenomenon that causes tides to have certain behaviours (faster, steeper, etc.)
If there is correlation, there is relation. As for causation, you are behind the times. Pick up a random quantum physics paper from the last 20 years. Show me where causation is even discussed.
And yes it is true. A million cameras would not apture the gravity. What you seemed to have missed here is that if you multiply endlessly a measure that cannot detect an existing phenomenon, that is not disproof but pointless money wasting.
My family is one of the few families (Besides the Catholic Church) who Privately own and retain books and information from the library of Alexandria. There are things in this collection which I am literally forbidden to mention or talk about. Not by my family but by literal law passed by the US and other governments.
I have also studied the subject in depth and are (while it is merely a hobby or personal interest) what you would term as a Master Artificer. I have used the wealth and ability through my chosen career I guess you could say, to go to places to find things other people can’t or wont. I have also seen things myself. And Artificing requires a unique understanding of esoteric minutia to accomplish.
While this is anecdotal at best, and therefore subject to ones personal choice to believe me or not. You’ll find the evidence in science you seek based on it’s limited principals, while existent, is as I said kept out of the public eye.
Yes and no. it depends on what type it is and whether it is actual corporeal or astral. Ghost’s as most people refer to them are astral in nature, IE they exist slightly out of dimensional phase with the rest of this dimension. This barrier is not to be confused with what is known as the Veil. So only certain people with that aberration, can see them. It should also be noted that it is also not the only thing visible to these individual’s. They usually also perceive the world slightly differently then everyone else.
It is essentially best explained by the example of someone who can see color and someone who only sees black and white. The ones who can see ghost’s in this example are those that see color, while the rest of the humans only see black and white.
Most people attribute their reality to what they can see and interpret. A person who only see’s black and white wont believe a person who see’s color even if shown evidence because that person literally has absolutely no mental reference for color and showing the evidence for color would be “color” which the person can’t see. So they would call the evidence bullshit. And while true a specialist might know that the rods in your eyes are different and signify a mutation, they still would have no idea what that mutation is because again the vast majority of people can’t see it or know it, or understand it, because it is something you have to experience to comprehend.
Both individuals also will experience the world and reality VERY differently.
You misunderstand the example. You focus on identifiable concepts you can perceive and miss the context of the unknowable.
No they can’t independently verify it because they do not have technology. Some of these tribes live exactly the same way they did 3000 years ago. They either believe you and call you a wizard harry, or kill you for witchcraft. (Even in more technological parts of Africa you run into this weirdly enough and you can find you tube videos of some tribal Africans literally burning tourists to death for using technology). Same is true for many or the Amazonian tribes who literally still eat humans if they can find and kill them. Cannibalism is alive and well in some of these parts, as is the belief that technology is witchcraft.
Ghost’s produce effects int he physical world for those that are sensitive to them. And on that No these throwback tribals sometimes literally can’t see the technology at all depending on what it is. They see something but always misinterpret it for something they are familiar with. You may see weird shit every day, but ignore it because to you it does not look weird because you can’t actually see what’s there, only what you think is supposed to be there.
In example I could bring you an actual artifact. But to you it wont look like it does to me, because you have no understanding of what it is, and no reference for it. If you even see it. They used to make science fiction movies about this stuff specifically when it was all the fad to play with it, then it suddenly went out of style, and I mean suddenly. One day it was in every movie, and the next week nothing. Like someone turned off a switch. Watch some of the older sci-fi black and white movies from like the twilight zone or Alfred Hitchcock. There is a reason they stopped making movies and tv series that introduced this concept to people. They were afraid you the everyday person would learn reality isn’t the 2d picture you think it is. If you are looking for physical proof it exists as I said before. But do not be surprised when you find it and start talking about it, if suddenly everyone around you starts treating you like your nuts, and refuses to believe you.
Earlier, you seemed to accept that I had falsified the hypothesis that ghosts are things that emit or reflect light:
In my argument there, the ‘blue dog’ was the statistical pattern that should appear as cameras proliferate and improve.
The blue dog for other hypothetical aspects of ghosts’ interaction with the physical world are parallel: if ghosts emit sound, then as audio recording proliferates we should get more and better examples of ghost audio; if ghosts create temperature anomalies, then as thermometers and thermal imaging proliferate and improve, we should get more and better examples of ghost-caused temperature anomalies. Since poltergeist activity is just physical effects of ghosts, we should get more and better evidence of whatever kind as the means to record that evidence proliferates and improves.
We don’t see what we would expect to see. That falsifies these hypotheses.
Have you changed your position on light? Is light somehow different from these other physical effects? Does the evidence of these other physical effects follow the expected trend?
My argument isn’t a “long-term plan”. I used light as a particularly clear example, but I’m arguing that the same failure of the expected statistical trend in light applies to every physical effect ghosts are claimed to produce.
I concede that this argument does not address fully-internal phenomena not capable of being captured or recorded by any technology we have for capturing objecting physical phenomena. It is not intended to. But it falsifies the set of hypotheses it aims to falsify.
We can conclusively falsify endless hypotheses for the relationship between the x,y coordinates of the shell and the tides, like “the x coordinate is equal to the current phase of the tide”. That hypothesis can be falsified without leaving the beach, without explaining the tides.
It’s true we can also generate endless hypotheses for what the relationship could be.
My mistake. I interpreted “cameras, laser pointers, infrawhatchamahaveyous” as intending to encompass all physical measurements we could take on a beach (which would involve lasers, though not laser pointers).
I don’t know what to do with this. US law is extremely protective of the ability to share true information, so you’re claiming that your family is in possession of 2000-year-old texts containing information on par with nuclear secrets? The US has gone to war multiple times to prevent the spread of nuclear secrets, why would the US government permit the private ownership of information like that?
And then here you are, on a random website, just saying it. If you had nuclear secrets, the US government would definitely care if you were posting on random forums that you have nuclear secrets. If they’re suppressing scientific findings, why wouldn’t they suppress you engaging in an argument like this?
And the end result is… that there is evidence that ghosts exist but its secret so you can’t share it? “Internet rando says he has seen evidence but it’s secret” is perhaps the weakest evidence one can offer for the existence of ghosts.
That just isn’t true. Color blind people absolutely believe that other people can see colors they can’t. Blind people believe that others can see, even if they don’t know what that means. I believe that bees can see colors I can’t.
Everyone already knows I argue about ghosts as a hobby, so I’m not worried about people finding out I’m weird.
I’ll probably have to take this as the best we are going to get, because you approximated to some extent what I was talking about, and my knowledge of human beings prevents me from hoping for more.
Which is this:
You agree that only falsifiable theories can be falsified. So “Ghosts are entities that reflect light and are present at X times” is, I agree, as good as disproven. As good as science gets with these things, which I agree is pretty good.
In agreeing with these very concrete constraints, you have opened the door for understanding, which I do not believe will be opened, that even when discussing purely physical and main stream phenomena, often the relations are so indirect and unintuitive that, even there existing a physical chain, few instruments would catch them. And even using these instruments, unless you already have a theory you are disproving in a specific way, might be useless to you for just “spontaneously” catching something. If you, by chance, because you bought everything at the super science store, set up the correct gravity capturing instrument at the beach, if you did not know about the Moon gravity theory, you just might never even notice anything. It might just be garbage data.
This is the gap I don’t expect us to close. But its very existence comforts me, I can walk home with that win. A win win, win for humanity type win.
As maybe a closing remark, the way I myself would pursue a scientific study of the ghost phenomenon is a more modern one. I would collect all possible data on the knowns (all levels of ghost suspision, all attributed effects), make statistical correlations, measure them against cases where either of the elements manifest without the other. If the statistics suggest something meaningful that does not simply indicate the myth-confirmation theory, I would then proceed to mock up theories and mathematical formulas to test against the figures, with experiments suggested. I would consider not only falsified moments, but also mathematical models that give too many infinite values as failures of a theory.
None of this would disprove ghosts though. Maybe a statistical study that shows no statistically meaningful relationship between ghosts and events outside of myth-confirmation bias would be as good as one could get with that.
But it’s not really science, it’s more logical positivism. logical positivism (if we can’t measure it or fit it into current laws, it doesn’t exist or even ‘if we haven’t so far done this, it doesn’t exist) and scientific realism (our current maps of reality are incomplete and constantly revised). It’s a good argument, but try to publish it in Nature. It has also, as I think you are pointing out a limited scope. If ghosts are X, then it is very likely they don’t exist. It presumes the nature of the phenomenon, then argues that if it has this nature then it can’t exist. A type of argument which has ruled out later discovered to be real phenomena. There is a presumption that we can measure all real things. So, a technological assumption. Then also paradigmatic assumptions.
It is a very reasonable argument and one that uses science, but it isn’t really science. It lacks the humility of scientific induction.
All true. I also want to point out another thing I said which I think is very important: even if you do have the technology to measure it, you will not get valuable data unless you have a specific hypothesis you are measuring against.
This “discovery” concept is a myth. All theories are first proposed without proof, and then tested against. Nobody ever “ran into” a scientific theory by spontaneously measuring some previously unknown thing. They only find what they seek.
And there are people who believe others can see ghosts, even though they themselves can’t/haven’t. It wasn’t your line of argument, it was the watchers, and your answer was fair enough but I thought I’d complete the circle.