There Are No Ghosts

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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Honestly, that’s being too charitable. It’s more like a post-hoc rationalization for a character flaw.

I hope I don’t give the impression that I’m anti-intuition. Intuition is good and useful and often reliable. But it’s not magic, it’s often wrong too, and there are patterns in where and how it fails.

Hang on now. I started this thread in response to someone correcting me when I mentioned ghosts in a different context (delusions in the context of borderline personality disorders). The title is combative out of context, but it’s directly responsive to the post linked in the OP:

I just think the “ghosts exist”/“there are no ghosts” disagreement is worth debating.

The explanation for how this particular belief is bad is speculative, but the motivation is more presumptive than speculative: “false beliefs are bad” is a reasonable presumption. I can think of hypothetical cases where believing falsehoods is better than believing the truth, but they are the exception.

This is an interesting (but speculative!) claim. If true, I agree it would weigh against making skeptical arguments like those made against ball lightning and rogue waves.

What’s the general statement of the claim? Something like: “Strong skeptical arguments against extremely rare phenomena will slow the discovery of those phenomena.”

There are definitely contexts in which I would phrase it that way – I’m pretty blunt, but I’m not entirely without social graces, especially IRL. But in this context, stating it that way feels disingenuous. My actual claim really is stronger than that.

Humility cuts both ways. I have my conclusions and other people have theirs, and to the extent those conclusions are incompatible, someone is right and someone else is wrong. We should all have the humility to acknowledge it could be us. But that’s a general acknowledgement and not specific to any claim. It would be misleading to include it selectively, and cumbersome to repeat it each time we make any knowledge claim.

As strong as my claim is, this overstates it. I’m not dismissing claimed experiences, because they are important and they have to be explained. And I’m not mind-reading because I’m not able to say in any specific case which of the handful of quirks of human cognition is at work in your experience. Rather, in general, experience is not infallible, our perceptions are not infallible, and the ways our cognition is fallible sufficiently explain ghost experiences.

It’s no more dismissal and mind-reading than it is to explain how a street magician does a trick, or that lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion are actually the same size. In those cases, I’m also saying that what someone sees is not an objectively correct description of the world. It’s false nuance to say “I don’t have enough reason to believe that the street magician pulled a pen out of his nose”: he didn’t, but we can explain why it looked like he did.

I’m not opposed to a middle ground of uncertainty in general, I just don’t think it’s warranted here. Pluralism demands tolerance for differences in values or opinions or tastes, but liberalism depends on a shared reality. Where, as here, there is actually a truth of the matter, where we know someone is actually mistaken, pluralism is the wrong approach.

So why do you accept this for “Y description of light-emitting or reflecting object” and not “Y description of sound-emitting or reflecting object” or “Y description of EMF-emitting or distorting object” or “Y description of heat-emitting or absorbing object” or “Y description of kinetic force-exerting object”?

It works in science too. The Michelson-Morley experiment really did disprove the existence of luminiferous ether. From the thing claimed to exist, they derived an expectation of what we should see if the thing exists, and then looked where we should expect to see it. They did not see what we should expect to see if the thing exists, and concluded it does not exist.

We can re-run the experiment. We can use improved mechanisms to increase precision and tighten confidence. We can come up with other things that have some of the properties of the luminiferous ether. But that experiment disproves enough of the claim that, whatever is left, it isn’t the thing claimed. Falsifying enough of the claim is effectively falsifying the claim.

I understand both of these sentiments. It’s covering a lot of ground, but I don’t think there’s a way to isolate any of the threads. And I like how they all work together.

I think it might be the same, but I’m not sure I’ve understood you.

I will say that I am open to the possibility that there are multiple descriptions of the world that appear to be distinct and contradictory, but which capture how the world works equally well. However, in that case I would expect the contradictions to be illusory, and the descriptions to be isomorphic to one another in the limit (though now that I write that out I worry that it’s just a tautology).

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Well, the contradictions are not illusory. The contradictions are at the theoretical level. Science doesn’t deal with reality more than with measurements. If things are exactly as depicted by the theory or not is unfalsifiable, out of scope for science. So, the models don’t depict reality, they depict the measurements. The theoretical part could all be false, and all is fine and dandy for science.

Picture this: I come up with a model of the universe whole which is exactly how the universe is, but it takes you no less than 80 years to apply to relate some measurements between themselves (you can’t simplify it). My model being precisely how things are would be of mostly no interest to science. So, what we do know is that science relates past measurements in a useful way. That’s as far as it goes.

If that is true, that is outside the scope of science: that’s metaphysics

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Ah my apologies. He seems to have taken his texts out of that thread. Unless I have him on ignore or something. I got very confused landing in a thread on Borderline personality disorder, a thread I participated in. Fair enough then. I have no idea what he said about ghosts there, but what I can see quoted by others on other topics…..wow. That said, a conversation about God knows what had a tangent about ghosts. I don’t know if ecmandu simply claimed they existed or mounted an argument to demonstrate it, and I think there is a difference. But we have a tangent in a thread where someone said ghosts are real and here we have a thread aimed in general at the forum with the assertion they do not exist. If Ecmandu was trying to convince people, I feel a bit better about this thread, though frankly I can’t see how Ghosts: real or not? isn’t a better way to start a discussion.

false beliefs are bad” is a reasonable presumption. I can think of hypothetical cases where believing falsehoods is better than believing the truth, but they are the exception.

I would come at this a couple of ways. From a cognitive science in an evolutionary perspective false and fit are not mutually exclusive, in fact it is very common for false beliefs to lead to fitness, especially given we are social animals. I do not think it is rare. The other way I would come at this is that things like ghosts and ball lightening (intentionally choose one confirmed in science and one not) are low hanging fruit. People like to focus on nouns when it comes to beliefs. But if I follow even very rational skeptics, generally I find they have a lot of beliefs about heuristics, morals, what works interpersonally, psychological and other beliefs that at the very least have none of the rigorous evidence they expect for nouns. And often these beliefs impact themselves and other people very much. This is very abstract, but it’s part of why I focus on saying the harm argument is speculative. A kind of speculative deduction. Which is very, very different from the rigor you are looking for at least in the discussions of ghosts. I’m not anti-intuition. I don’t know what I was calling intuition and you responded that that was charitable, but I assume my point was here you are saying something based on intuition and this has effects on other people. Does it meet the rigor expected when believing in nouns? I think people cut themselves a lot of slack when it’s not about the ontology of nouns, skeptics included.

Skepticism is fine. But you rarely need to tell people what is really happening psychologically.

But are there people here or elsewhere arguing that you are irrational and mounting arguements to convince you ghosts are real? Even the posts in the thread… aren’t they mainly aimed at undermining your claiming to have demonstrated they don’t exist, for the most part? And this in a thread focused on the topic. Have you met people here or IRL who think you should believe in ghosts and explain why and then in that discussion make statements about your psychology? or the psychology of non-believers in general?

If you have let me know, but this seems like a very different situation from dealing with Christians influencing schooling or something.

It’s not the conclusion, it’s the process I am reacting to.

I know you are not telling if they believe X that they have this or that specific psychological pattern. But it doesn’t need to be specific to be a kind of mindreading. What’s really going on in your mind is one of the following. What’s really going on in the mind of ghost believers is one of the following. It doesn’t really matter if it’s not aimed at a specific individual, it includes those.

Those examples are not the same situation. One you have the agent doing the trick and can find another agent (if the magician doesn’t want to reveal) to do the same trick. In the other situation you can measure. We can go to the phenomenon, say ‘is this the phenomenon?’ then measure it in front of them.

That’s not my sense of liberalism and enlightenment values at all. In fact I would say that is demonstrably false (in terms of the historical values of liberalism). I don’t see delegations of liberals thinking they need to correct the Amish religious beliefs and heading out to Pennylvania with a delegation of philosophers. Yes, we need many things where we share reality, but there is a lot of room for divergence, and it seems to me liberalism has always assumed that as long as the beliefs are not leading to law breaking and violence they are accepted as part of the diversity of society. And that includes beliefs that I think vastly better cases can be made indicating they lead to harm or can. And this includes the beliefs that are not particularly well justified that I mentioned earlier: heuristics about what leads to a better life or success, folk psychology (and professional psychology for that matter), and many other process-focused beliefs.

Where conflict occurs some of these come up for discussion and that makes sense. If you think praise is dangerous for children and you are a teacher, well you may end up in discussions with parents who believe otherwise. But ghosts…..? I see actually the enlightenment liberalism as pulling back when possible from the goal of correcting. If one wants to convince others, espect rational debate. If you don’t, I think there is a strong ethic of live and let live.

Should the Europeans have made it a goal to correct the Native Americans spiritual beliefs? Let’s assume for a moment that they never wanted to use violence in relation to those cultures. Even so, I think that’s a bad goal.

You don’t know I am mistaken. You’re certain. You have a good argument and one that most but not all non-experiencers would tend to agree with.

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Because that ain’t how science works.

I will give you a type of argument a lawyer might understand: no professional scientist has ever professionally declared to have disproven ghosts.

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Professional scientists have disproven ghosts… in a lawyer fashion (?) Just kidding.

I wonder what Newton and Kepler would think about these things… wait a minute

…not just because a scientists says something, not even while saying it in a scientific context… makes that a scientific statement

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I don’t think he realizes that even “Y description of light emitting X” does not eliminate all light emitting X.

That’s the problem often when a person becomes proficient in one field, suddenly they are Leonardo Da Vinci. But lawyer skills are not transferrable to science. To see that, you would have to take off the lawyer ears and listen to philosophical arguments.

Which we can all understand will not happen. Hey, that’s life.

But maybe this is relevant:

Well, I can’t find where you wrote it. But you wrote that you think belief in ghosts is harmful and should, if possible, be erradicated. Being there no scientific reasoning for this, the only conclusion is that it is a moralistic endeavour. Those are notoriousy selective to listening to reason.

When a person is “Right,” subtle things like scientific rigour are almost offensive to them. Ergo the world as it is.

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Sorry for the delay; wrote a reply on an airplane thinking it would save when I landed :frowning:
Take two:

Starting here because from your response, I’m concerned that I came across as claiming that you were mistaken, and that was not my intent. Rather, I intended to say that, since we disagree, and our beliefs are incompatible, we know that (at least) one of us is mistaken, even if we don’t agree about who it is. And that would be true even if neither of us were making a knowledge claim about our beliefs: I believe X, you believe Y, if we know it can’t be both X and Y, then we know one of us is mistaken.

My initial reaction was to say that I had never claimed to know that you are mistaken, but it does seem to follow from my claim to know X (rather than just believe X): If I know X, then I know you mistaken if you believe ~X. It’s interesting how different those claims feel.

This still feels like special pleading. Sure, if I were moderating a debate about this topic, I would absolutely name it something like “Ghosts: real or not?” But elsewhere, lots of thread titles are a short version of the thesis expressed in the OP. As I said above, it’s a bit clickbaity – on a quick review, it looks like it’s more common in political threads, and from my own history it looks like I do it more often on spicier topics (though not exclusively).

I dunno, maybe it is good general practice to avoid statements as titles. Related to how ‘I know X’ and ‘You are mistaken in your believe that ~X’ feel different, assertive titles probably work as clickbait because they feel enough like the latter to offend.

I don’t think we need to be as rigorous in choosing our questions, or in determining what hinges on the answers, as we should be in finding the answer. It seems OK to pick up a question because it tickles your fancy and then use the most rigorous possible means to answer it.

And I don’t think it’s possible to demand as much rigor from our heuristics as we demand from our higher-order beliefs. Out beliefs have to be bootstrapped, so at bottom they’re always going to be founded on instinct and raw experience that are often inconsistent, and so must be unreliable. Further, it’s why we need more deliberate rigor for our higher-order beliefs: because they’re based on layers and layers of shaky foundation.

In this thread, Ecmandu most directly:

I won’t claim Ecmandu is representative of people who believe in ghosts, but these sentiments are familiar.

I don’t think there’s any escaping the psychological implications of the disagreement: either there are no ghosts, in which case anyone who believes they’ve experienced a ghost is wrong about the nature of their own experience; or there are ghosts, and people who haven’t experienced ghosts is something like spiritually colorblind.

There’s no version of the process that avoids that. And yet, someone is mistaken.

Humility cuts both ways.

Maybe a better example would be cold reading, where one person (the ‘Reader’) uses a handful of techniques to convince another (the ‘Subject’) that the Reader can read the Subjects mind. It relies on common cognitive failure-modes that you can point to, but no measure. And while you can recreate the trick on a different person as a demonstration, you can’t really recreate it on the same Subject a second time.

It doesn’t seem like ‘mind-reading’ to explain cold reading to the Subject after the fact, and it doesn’t seem wrong or insulting (even if it makes the Subject feel bad).

As a human, learning about human psychology can be unflattering.

Liberalism has the individual as the ultimate arbiter of truth, and that leaves room for divergence etc. But that’s undergirded by the free exchange of ideas, such that while everyone gets to decide for themselves, everyone else can try to change their mind. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is presumed to generate and maintain a shared reality on relevant questions of objective fact (which questions are ‘relevant’ is similarly left to the marketplace of ideas).

I mean, where they did try, they actually ended up learning a lot, and there’s good evidence that parts of the enlightenment project came out of those interactions – including ideas about a federation of states and deliberative democracy.

Europeans should have done less of the other bad stuff and adopted the good stuff more fully, but where those discussions took place they seem to have been really really good.

I don’t think that’s true, but in any case they definitely regular-declare that there are no ghosts. For almost all scientists, the existence of ghosts has been disproven for all practical purposes. The fact that they don’t generally take a professional position on it is evidence that it’s no longer an open question so far as professional scientists are concerned.

You act like disproving ‘Y description of light emitting X’ is tantamount to disproving nothing at all, but if Y description is one a lot of people accept for X, it’s quite significant to have disproved that. 118k people visit r/ghosts in a given week. Many of them are going to be very surprised to learn that the capable-of-being-filmed-or-photographed description of ghosts has been disproven.

You overestimate my skill as a lawyer.

I never suggested that people shouldn’t believe in ghosts because it’s harmful. People shouldn’t believe in ghosts because ghosts don’t exist.

Moralistically, if ghosts exist people should believe in them even if it is harmful – I value truth more than I value harm.

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Well, I was tossing out an option. Ghosts have not been demonstrated. The evidence for ghosts is weak and anecdotal. – Honestly if the thread was started by someone else I wouldn’t be so fussy. We do see things like this and I think provocative can be fine. But then it seemed not to be provocative, but the point of the thread. —As far as special pleading, I don’t think I’ve started any threads with the title Ghosts are real. OK, perhaps someone who believes in Ghosts has. I guess I see those people as having less sway in society, Western society, than those who would say ghosts don’t exist. Also the Ghosts exist person is going to face a massive uphill battle. You have certainly met a lot of resistance, but I think that is something else. Very subjective all this.

I don’t think most people are aware of this. And the heuristic lead to how people vote, treat others, prioritize problems, categorize people and so on. These have direct effects on other people. I know you consider the belief in ghosts to be harmful. I think that will take some work to demonstrate. But heuristics lead to things that are very easy to demonstrate affect other people directly, for good and for ill.

I have Ecmandu on ignore, so I will have to change that. One moment :grinning_face:.

I think you are right that he is dealing with your psychology (positively in the second post, though implicitly condescending, I think) though it is really hard to tell, for me, quite what he is saying.

So, the context for me is posts inside a thread not on ghosts (I think) made by someone who I find hard to find intelligible. And a thread started by someone who is very articulate and is a moderator (or more?). Those hit me in different ways.

I think one can have a discussion without going there. It may or may not be implicit. One can just focus on the evidence.

Agreed.

Sure. But there is a big difference between. We know it is one of these phenomena and not the sighting of a ghost AND at this point I don’t have a good reason to think it isn’t other kinds of phenomena.

I don’t see a need to frame it as I know what is going on rather than framing it from where you are epistemologically. If the ghost experiencer/believer can’t handle that, then they don’t understand what it’s like when they themselves are non-experiencers and are not convinced. We are all in that boat. No one believes in everything - could be something like what it is like for a woman to walk down a city street as a opposed to a man. Some men might think they know the difference or that there isn’t one. We all have different experiences. Other people make claims about what they experience and what it was they experienced and we are all on some issue or other skeptical or unconvinced.

I think, yes, both groups need to understand the difference. And by the way I am not assumed that non-experiencers are always wrong or lack capabilities. Obviously people do misinterpret their experiences and have other biases in relation to them.

I think it would be better in general if people came at this more cautiously. If Ecmandu starts a thread with the Title Ghosts are Real, he will meed strong resistance. Unless his writing improves over those quotes, he’s also going to meet outright dismissal or his posts will anyway. If he was a better proponent, I’d probably caution him not to mindread. We can all see lynxes. Those who haven’t haven’t for reasons other than spiritual or sensory shortcomings, at least often.

But I am more sensitive to the power position’s approach.

So far you have only mentioned Ecmandu. I cannot imagine his proselytizing is going to affect anyone. And it seemed like a tangent.

I wouldn’t throw the person who tries to change people’s minds in prison, but in many instances I would consider them rude. Just as I would any delegation heading towards the amish intending to teach them critical thinking. Where a natural disagreement arises, fine. Where the beliefs affect others and there is tension, fine. But I think liberalism tends, unlike its predecessors, to see much of this as live and let live.

yes, this did happen, but we also had forced schooling for children with punishment for language use, disruption of beliefs via the way they were allowed to related to the land, banning of rituals….I know it wasn’t a binary interaction.
And while they learned from native practices they also eroded the very power of those practices.

But your reaction is not really to the issue. You’re saying the European way of interacting was better than my question seemed to indicate. But my point was not ‘bad Europeans, never had a good interaction or respect’ but precisely the value you seem to be highlighting: difference can be respected and where one has no interest in adoption, it can be left alone unless it is specifically causing problems.
A European has no good moral reason, I think, for trying to convince the Navaho that coyotes are just canine mammals not tricksters. It would be rude at the least. If the Navaho come off reservation and start telling kids on the playground something about Coyote and what those kids should believe, then we have a situation for discussion and argument.

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Is this the same type of thing as “I’m pretty sure they don’t” = disproven?

Well, there you go, recognizing it is step 1.

This is a moralistic, rather than scientific, pursuit.

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I think you meant opinion, not truth, there. Because if that is so, then it is true that there are no ghosts and the contrary. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ doesn’t have a a shared consensus (not to confuse that for reality, same as with truth), that’s why it’s a marketplace.

Ghosts are out of the scope of science, since you can´t measure that. But nevertheless, if there is suddenly money given to academia to research it, you are sure to hear people in academia talk about it.

You are talking about consensus there, not proof or lack thereof. They are entirely different.

Did you mean “I value lack of harm”?

I’m a ghost that interacts with a body. Have I been demonstrated not to exist? If you say I’m not a ghost - what is a ghost?

If that happens, I bet someone will say “real” is what each person thinks reality is like and that will devolve into an impossible argumentation about subjectivities

In the same way, it is rude to not criticize others’ ideas and tell them such criticism (without going offtopic as insult and such, for sure). Since you criticize your own ideas, you’d be putting yourself in a higher eschelon by your own standards.

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That was me offering Carleas other ways of presenting his topic.

It’s good you can find problems before they happen.

I don’t know what any of that means or how it relates to what you quoted.

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I have not seen any threads with that title, but the special pleading I’m referring to is broader: not this specific title, but that ghosts as a subject matter warrant different treatment, e.g. different thread-titling conventions.

In epistemic terms, whether or not ghosts exist seems a similar question to whether or not a living thylacine exists (or ball lightning or rogue waves or elephant communication): it’s an empirical question, there’s an objective fact of the matter, what we believe or claim to know should depend on the evidence available.

But it isn’t treated the way we treat epistemically similar questions. No one would bat an eye at a claim like “the thylacine is extinct” – the Wikipedia page says as much in the first sentence. Despite there having been unconfirmed sightings as late as 2018, the scientific community seems perfectly comfortable saying that it is extinct.

Rather, belief in ghosts isn’t treated as an empirical question, but more like a question of faith. People saying they don’t believe in ghosts the way they don’t believe in God, or an immaterial soul, or an afterlife. That’s why it seems provocative to say “there are no ghosts”, and to title a thread that way: saying “I know there are no ghosts” feels sacrilegious or insensitive.

But given the evidence we have, we can be at least as confident in that claim as we are in the claim that “there are no living thylacines”. It should be OK to say so.

And it should be OK to say so even if we’re ultimately mistaken. If we find a living thylacine, there might be some I-told-you-so’s from the diehards, but it doesn’t seem wrong or unphilosophical for the scientific community to take the position they’re taking today.

So when you say this:

I would say, I am framing it where we are epistemologically. Saying that in this case we need to frame it differently from how we would frame other similar existence claims, that feels like special pleading.

But the evidence in favor of ghosts is that people keep saying they saw a ghost. There’s no way to evaluate that evidence and integrate it into an explanatory framework without discussing the reliability of eye-witness testimony.

Of course. I wouldn’t accost someone in the street about it. I wouldn’t put a sign in my yard or where a t-shirt about it.

But it doesn’t feel rude on an internet philosophy forum. If this kind of claim were inappropriate here, much of philosophy would also be off limits.

I think we don’t disagree very much in practice here, but I would replace ‘specifically causing problems’ with ‘likely to cause problems’.

I also really do think of pushing back on other people’s beliefs as a way of improving my own beliefs. Correcting others invites correction, and I don’t think it’s ever rude to correct someone back.

And a European Catholic could have learned a lot from trying to explain in the same breath why a coyote is just an animal but this wine is the blood of a dead god.

I mean that each individual decides for themself. There’s no common arbiter of shared reality.

I’m reminded of the scene in 1984, in which Winston is tortured until he believes O’Brien is holding up five fingers. That’s the type of common arbiter liberalism is reacting against.

I’m fine with this, but I do see it as a significant concession. The scope of science is quite a lot.

Consensus and proof seem orthogonal; we have very good proofs that there are as many positive integers as there are positive even integers, but I doubt that is the popular consensus.

What I meant was, if person A accepts that we have disproved Y description of X, and lots of people accept that Y is the correct description of X, then that disproof should not be minimized or treated as irrelevant.

I mean that whether or not a claim is true is more important than whether or not believing the claim is harmful.

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OK, that’s peachy. However, I see a difference between at least some experiencers and the situation for non-experiencers.
Let’s go to ball lightning. The experiencers hear about the explanations the scientists have. They are in one position. The scientists and other non-experiencers are in a different position. So, I would say they are not pushed to the same conclusions, given the different empirical situations they are in. I think that ‘we’ is confused.

Now this doesn’t mean that one should always assume one’s interpretation of an event is correct. Perhaps an experiencer of X, reads a scientific account and decides, yes, I misinterpreted. I’m not making a rule for every person in each group. I am just saying they are in different situations.

Another way to put this. It can be rational to decide that x doesn’t exist or is very likely to not exist for one person while it is rational for another person to decide it does.

I think this is something often overlooked. It is a kind of assumption that reason will lead everyone to the same conclusion. And I mean good reasoning. But I don’t believe this is the case.

And they’ve been wrong about such things. The thylacine observer, might reach a different conclusion.

But to the reason you brought this up. This is a known entity and classification as extinct may make sense, but empirically it is open to revision. Ghosts are a not at all clearly defined entity.

And here’s the real irony. You went to Wikipedia for thylacine but not for ghosts. Under ghosts it says that there is consensus in science that there is no proof for the existence of ghosts. Notice how it is framed there. So, if you think going to Wikipedia and seeing how the position of science is framed for thylacine’s is evidence, here we have evidence that you are overreaching with the title of the thread.

Well, not in my case. I base it on experience. Faith, a very Abrahamic idea, at least in most Euroamerican forums seems to be this idea that one believes regardless of what one experiences.

Maybe someone argued it was sacrireligious, but I missed that. I think most people were arguing that you were overreaching on epistemological grounds.

Yes, I think some of your ideas about correcting and how you see your role and how you frame liberalism are rude.

It should be ok to say it is rude and epistemologically problematic.

I’m not against you having a position.

We are not in the same boat. Please don’t include me in your ‘we’.

I don’t think most people in this thread or in this forum expect you to believe there are ghosts because they saw them. Maybe someone argued that the amount of sightings is evidence. I’m not in that camp, but I think what you framed is a strawman. I found two other threads with ghosts as the topic. One was incredibly insulting, something like no thinking person believes in Ghosts. Another that asked if anyone believed in ghosts.

I’m not saying it is off limits. Is it off limits for me to argue it is rude? You are disagreeing with me, does that mean you think what I am doing is off limits? Can you see how you are framing this? Can one believe in free speech and also criticize the way someone addressed someone else in a town meeting?

So far I haven’t seen any evidence for this.

Pushing back? I saw Ecmandu asserting in a tangent in a thread. Who are you pushing back against? Again, I think you’re framing is off.

Sure, but a modern physicalist could maybe just respect the Navaho and their beliefs.

The special pleading has to do not just with ghosts but whenever I feel like dominant paradigms want to correct believers in things that do not fit with their paradigms. Did you know that in general in Christianity it is frowned upon to talk about seeing ghosts and thinking of them as dead people? They are considered to be more likely demons (or even just confused observations). The church (taking that as a broad term, not any particular church) wants transcendence and spirituality to be through them, through their processes. I mention this because it might seem like believing in ghosts sort of fits with Christianity. But there’s actually a long tag team effort on the part of the more identified-as- physicalist portions of society and the church when it comes to people having their own spiritual/supernatural experiences. If we go back in time there is a kind of seesawing of the church’s relation to people seeing ghosts, but often it was not a good idea to talk about it - could lead to accusations (even deadly ones of witchcraft or necromancy or consorting with demons.

In the modern academic world and the world of philosophy belief in ghosts tends to be condescended to. I don’t see believing in ghosts affecting policy, schooling, legislation, or as part of some proselytizing movement. I don’t see people who believe in ghosts as often seeing they need to correct non-believers. I don’t see a need to ‘push back’ the phrase you use later. I think we can allow the 18% of people who think they’ve seen ghosts to be uncorrected.

Now I don’t see believers in ghosts as particularly victims - certainly not in the way the tag team of Christianity and the more pragmatist ‘doesn’t really care about spiritual issues technocrat-ish’ portion of society related to Native Americans. Not at all on that level. But there is still this urge to correct a belief. And yes, I feel a kind of protective reaction to minority opinions that I do not consider harmful. That there’s no need for epistemological overreach and what ends up being collective mindreading. I do understand that it can be part of the case - we have these other interpretations for what is going on that we consider more likely - but there’s really no need to even mount that case or have those. One can give the onus were it belongs in the interaction between non-experiencers and experiencers.

Other beliefs fall into this areas. Many dealing with the supernatural, but not limited to that. Here are some where finally there is a shift: Alternative medicine, the somatic therapies (and still now), neurodiversity long seen as pathology period, alternative pedagogies.

So for me, yes, some urges to debate and correct are different from others, dependent on the attitudes and relative power of the paradigms involved.

Does this mean I think one should not be allowed to approach things as you have? No.

and of course I think I am free to point out that I think there is a problem with the urge to correct in some dynamics.

Here you have framed it as you are pushing back. Ecmandu - hardly I think a harmful proponent should he every mount a case - asserted there were ghosts. He mounted no case. At least not in the post I found when I followed the link. Another approach could have been to quote Ecmandu and ask him if he thinks he can demonstrate to you that they exist.

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Yeah, people can think or believe whatever, for sure. That doesn’t make what they think or believe truth. Truth is something you research upon, not something you define or get just out of opinion or consensus.

I didn’t understand what you meant about proofs or disproof.

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I think it is supposed to mean something like, “scientific consensus good, not-scientific consensus bad”.

The fallacy of appeal to authority is strong with that one.

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The appeal to authority has been proven logically sound by the authorities

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I agree, and it’s worth repeating. This has weird implications for ‘knowledge’, as I mentioned above: it’s possible for people who disagree to each be justified in their respective belief, and so it’s legitimate for each of them to claim to ‘know’ what they believe.

It also goes to the ways this discussion implicates ‘psychology’: one person’s knowledge claim doesn’t entail that the other person is being irrational, provided they are reasoning from different evidence.

I agree. And they could be wrong here. And I could be wrong about my claims in this thread. I don’t think there’s a conflict between conceding that and saying that the thylacine is extinct and there are no ghosts.

Skeptical arguments are always possible, so there is always some uncertainty about any claim, but it’s not useful to reject all knowledge claims; there’s a meaningful difference between “I know” and “I believe”.

One way to describe that difference is in terms of confidence: if I’m 85% sure that X, I ‘believe’ X; if I’m 99.999% sure that X, then I ‘know’ X. I think this is how it works in practice, but it’s not rigorous and it’s unsatisfying.

Another is to try to find something in the evidence and reasoning supporting a belief that distinguishes knowledge from mere belief. I don’t know exactly what that would be, but it’s why I invoke the extinct thylacine: it looks a lot like we know thylacines are extinct for the same reason I’m saying we know that ghosts don’t exist, and if that’s so, then we should either know both or not know both.

This is a decent rebuttal to that line of argument:

But… I’m not sure if it works. I agree that ghosts aren’t as clearly defined as thylacines, but the word ‘ghost’ still means something. As long as whatever definition we do have entails observable features of the world, we can prove that the thing so-defined does not exist to the same extent we can prove the thylacine does not exist.

The counterargument seems to be that ‘ghost’ doesn’t actually mean anything, and saying “ghosts don’t exist” is like saying “[null pointer]s don’t exist”.

But that’s my point: Why is it framed that way? We could say “there is no proof that thylacines are still extant”, but we don’t because if they were we’d expect the world to look different.

Framing it that way makes it seem like the existence of ghosts is not a scientific question at all. I suggested “question of faith”, but I agree that’s not quite right. But it’s mostly not a question about the external world.

And as I said to @pseudoai, that seems like a significant concession, and not at all what people who claim to have experienced ghosts mean.

Earlier you said “it’s not the conclusion, it’s the process”. Is there a process that concludes in the claim “there are no ghosts” such that it is not rude and epistemologically problematic?

Based on your comments on dominant paradigms and condescension, I think I misunderstood what you meant by ‘process’. I thought you meant the process of forming my belief that ‘there are no ghosts’, but now I think you were referring to the process like starting this thread with that title. Is that right (or at least in the right direction)?

ProfessorX made that argument in this thread. That and personal anecdotes are the only evidence that’s been offered here.

So, what is the evidence for the existence of ghosts?

I didn’t mean to say otherwise.

The confusion here is because the conversation is spanning domains of 1) describing objective reality, and 2) handling disagreements about objective reality. Individuals are the ‘arbiters of truth’ in the second sense, but not the first.

Let me try to unwind this. Earlier, Mary-Poppins and I agree that the evidence we have disproves the existence of ghosts of a type that can be captured on camera. I think that goes a long way to disproving the broader category of ghosts, because I think that many people who believe that ghosts exist also believe that ghosts can be captured on camera. Mary-Poppins seems to think that is no significance at all.

This gets back to the running issue with defining what we’re even talking about when we say ‘there are/aren’t ghosts’. I take the approach that, to evaluate those claims, we need to offer a definition of what we’re talking about sufficient to enable us to make inferences. For example, if ghosts are things that emit or reflect light, we can infer that they can be captured on camera.

The counterargument is that when we do that, we’re just disproving that definition, and not other definitions. And that’s true. But if the definition is good, if it captures what a significant number of people have in mind when they talk about ghosts, then disproving that thing is disproving ghosts for those people. People that use ‘ghost’ to refer to birds or bad dreams aren’t going to be convinced, and that’s OK.

Is this because I linked to Wikipedia to support the proposition that people seem comfortable making knowledge claims about thylacines?

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I don’t think it’s comparable at all. Scientists understand what thylacines were made of, what they ate and did so they can draw conclusions in ways quite differently from skeptics about ghosts.

But in general we do not have a definition of what they are made of and how they interact with other parts of reality. You just said whatever definition. With thylacine we have one. We don’t with ghosts. That very clear and not contested sense of what we were dealing with: a marsupial carnivore, etc., puts this in a different category.

You can define ghosts without making it’s physical characteristics clear. The stuff that might get measured could still be unclear.

It’s a scientific question, but there isn’t evidence that convinces (most) scientists. Why would a purported entity not be a science issue? Bringing in faith is a category error. Every single experiencer will talk about what they experienced, not that they have faith without any evidence. It’s now circular. You ‘know’ they don’t exist, so if you think they exist it is a faith issue, and since they don’t exist it isn’t a science issue. Paranormal researchers have found anomolies that they think can’t be explained by other phenomena. The consensus of mainstream scientists is that these are better explained in other ways. The moment I was to go into giving details of the anomalies it becomes as if I am trying to demonstrate ghosts exist. I don’t think that can be done with the evidence they have. Not close. But there is nothing unscientific about the project of seeing if there is something that can be measured, an analyzing results to see if there is enough for further research, etc. I don’t think you get to decide by fiat that this is not something that will be a mainstream science issue.

If the paranormal researchers found enough anomalous data - which is what happened over time with rogue waves but via amateurs - then mainstream science might eventually look into this if only to debunk. I don’t see how this all is not the realm of science and couldn’t lead to confirmation because really it’s only a faith issue??? There’s something circular here.

Elephant communication might be another good example. I don’t know if I raised it in this thread. Believers, mainly natives, and finally a female scientist, thought that elephants behaved as if they had a way of communicating over long distances. I don’t know if they could hear anything, but they at the very least inferred. The woman scientist, who figured it all out, could hear the elephant communications.

We could have said: the natives have confirmation bias. The woman has tinnitus or auditory hallucinations and some other biases, and according to your logic concluded that it was not a scientific issue. But you really can’t do that in advance and no one was arguing from faith, so framing it is as faith-based is making something up. Something convenient. And again so far I see a framing of the issue as pushing back. I don’t see proselytizing here or in general. I am not sure what you are pushing back against. Now you want to pre-emptively say it isn’t a science issue. Saying below it isn’t about the outside world.

Of course it is. Just as rogue waves and ball lightening were. Though ball lightening is a better comparison since it was unclear what it was at all. Rogue waves for experiencers would be large waves made of sea water. Or elephant com. might be an ever better example. One could by fiat say: this isn’t about the outside world. But why? I still don’t see harm and I am unclear what you are pushing back against.

I’ve given many examples, some are below as you will have seen.

Yes.

I followed the link to Professor X’s post. I see nothing remotely like an attempt to demonstrate ghosts exist. Could you show me what in that post is an argument that ghosts exist?

Now I have read through your interaction with Professor X. He seemed to finish here:

Notice that I never claimed ghosts exist, nor did I claim to know either way if they exist or not. I am only pointing out your claim to know for sure that ghosts do not exist is unscientific and unjustified.

You are free to claim that to the best of your knowledge and based on the evidence and lack thereof which you have seen, you do not believe ghosts exist. Great, you will get no argument from me. But that is not what you are claiming, is it? You are claiming certain and infallible knowledge. Which tell me you are not as much of a scientifically-minded person as you seem to think you are.

And I think that’s a fair assessment. He was arguing that you could not rule them out. And, in fact, during the interchange, in response to the number of sightings you said something about that matching people with low IQ. I believe you have apologized for this, but seriously….Are you sure that your motivations are based on liberal values or could one perhaps make a case that it is anti-liberal motivations? I realize that liberalism is a complicated phenomenon. You want to focus on the debate side and I want to focus on the diversity of positions and live and let live aspects, since these for me were the key ones (again, for me) when the church got knocked off it’s control of belief.

You framed this as pushing back on something harmful. You’ve said that Professor X mounted an argument that ghosts are real. He didn’t. In your supposed pushing back you insulted experiencers. I think a case can be made that your behavior was harmful. You’ve apologized, I believe, as I mentioned above, so I am pointing this out not to chastize, but as part of a come on what is really going on here reaction on my part.

You know, this will seem tangential, and it is. But I just heard about the pistol shrimp that can create bubble under water obviously and this process is so explosive that it vaporizes a small amount of water causing a bubble that briefly is nearly as hot as the surface of the Sun. 8,000 degrees F. That sounded so ridiculous I had to triple check. Why I bring this up? Real phenomena can be exceptionally strange and easily rule-outable.

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You cannot decide that something does or does not exist. You can decide to have some concept or so to ‘live’ in your idea of the universe, maybe. Quite different.

It does, at some point, look as a no true scotsghost, I give you that, but how can we know if it is that case?

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There is definitely some kind of agenda going on here. Because I refuse to believe they are actually that irrational. Anyone with even the most rudimentary logical understanding knows you can’t “disprove the existence of ghosts”. How would you even do that?

“I saw a ghost.” Ok, I don’t believe you.

“So what, I saw it, it is real”. Ok, well you cannot prove it to me, therefore I have disproved that ghosts exist. :distorted_face:

I refuse to believe they are really that stupid.

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