There Are No Ghosts

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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Jinn comes from an Arabic root word meaning “hidden”. All spirits are Jinn.

Jinn are split between Moomins (all believing humans and Jinn are called Moomins) and Shayateen (devils, that is the unbelieving Jinn, including absolutely any that talk to people).

All Jinn alive today have descended from Satan, even though many converted to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and were genuinely religious. Jinn don’t have their own religions, they follow human prophets.

The spirits of the dead, as l say, are the deceased’s personal Jinn - we each have one assigned from birth. After death if they are evil (and most Jinn remain evil), they may hang around talking to people, even impersonating the deceased. But the actual deceased human is interred, and there are no more deeds for anybody once deceased, hence the word “deCEASED”. After death, there are no more deeds, just the final judgement.

Tricksters are household Jinn. Some people leave gifts out for them, some fear that if you upset them, they’ll knot your horse’s mane, they’ll mess with your home, etc. The best thing to do would be to expell them from your home, not deal with them in any way. A good Jinn keeps out of people’s way and never deliberately reveals themselves.

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I can see the Jinn. Obviously your ancestors could too. Otherwise you would’t have a word for them as ‘hidden’…

I don’t mind if Islam is irrational.

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And I’ll add to this.

My gift to the jinn is not effigies, but rather my teachings.

Buddhism calls the ghosts hungry ghosts.

I have no problem teaching them.

They need comfort.

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I’ll add to this.

Carleas doesn’t know it yet.

He’ll be blessed for making these boards

Don’t get a big head about it Carleas

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Any Jinn that makes itself known to you, e.g. tarries with you, needs a kick up the rump, even if it fills you with the bittersweet feeling of love and joy both at once. They are known to do that, l’ve experienced the feeling before, and a famous Sufi said he saw a cloud that made him feel that way and offered him some of the best things in the world, but he refused it because he knew it was a Shaytaan, a satan, a demon. A guy l know also mentioned he once saw a very low cloud that made him feel love and sadness and made him feel like crying.

The Scandinavians called their household spirits “tomtenisse” or “nisse”, l think Nixie is a different thing, localised to pools / ponds. At the end of the day, they are all evil if they approach you.

There was once many of them, they were here before us, but they kept making war. Satan, when he was a good guy, was one of them, and he was commanded to lead a host of angels and kill them all after they disobeyed their divinely appointed king too many times.

Afterward, God created Adam and Satan lost his wits, when told to bow to this mere creature made from earth (= Adam, the human race), when he was made of smokeless fire / electricity. He was thus evicted from heaven, and all Jinn alive today are his descendants.

Glad to say, some are Believers but whatever they are: they have to keep away from you. In turn, you have zero business with them.

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That’s interesting.

You believe in creator narratives.

The drama of it all.

People are very dramatic for entertainment value.

Satan actually looks up to me as a hero and role model.

I’m older than satan.

I’m older than god.

I just call myself the old one.

I don’t take positions of power.

That’s only for the young.

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And if you really want to know.

Old people give their power up to everyone.

Jesus was still young. How can you be betrayed if you gave your power away?

What’s the good news if you’re resurrected and others aren’t by the father?

I kind of admire Mohammed. He married over 600 women to give women status and good lives in his cultural context. He didn’t have sex with all of them, he did it to give them better lives.

His teachings were horrible. But he did something good with his life.

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@Carleas, Since you cannot know for sure if ghosts exist not exist, your claim that they do not exist is merely arrogant ignorance.

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Not sure why I stopped replying to this! Sorry @PZR.

I’m not sure this is unique to materialism, and in any case materialism’s relevance is demonstrated by its success in helping us predict and manipulate the world.

This is an important distinction, and there is a sense in which I agree with it. Someone who has never seen a pencil will still be able to describe the wooden stick with its rubber nub on one end and pointed black tip on the other. They won’t call it a ‘pencil’, but they can still offer an objective description that someone who knows what a pencil is will agree with.

That isn’t true for ‘ghost’: without the concept of ‘ghost’, people will not agree on independent and objective descriptions of the phenomenon because there is no such phenomenon; what they will agree on is a cold draft, a tapping sound, a stain that looks like eyes (see again pareidolia).

Do you assume that everyone has experienced fear? Seems that brain damage can destroy the ability to fear, I’d be shocked if no one had been born with a similar condition.

I came to philosophy through skepticism, so I don’t disagree. But I don’t have to act like their existence is a probable as their non-existence. If they existed I would expect the world to look very different from how I observe it to look. I can doubt every step of that, but when I act I am most justified in acting as though they do not exist.

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Sure, you are justified in claiming that based on what you experience and observe about the world, ghosts are less likely to be real than to be real. But that is not what you said. You said ghosts do not exist.

Addressing the idea you bring, a good one, that if ghosts did exist things would look different in the world… I can confront this head-on. I actually created a philosophical hurdles system for attempting to measure the likelihood that, even if things like ghosts were real, most people / the world at large would actually accept this fact. In fact, there are a lot of hurdles in the way of that and each one would need to be surpassed. The statistical likelihood of each of the hurdles being passed is, as it turns out, very low. So the fact that ghosts could be real and yet the world in general appears to reject the notion, at least from the view of science and the mainstream, is actually not surprising at all.

I can share the specific hurdle model I came up with later, once I can locate it again.

Another thing though, you are discounting the countless personal testimonies of people who have experienced what they call ghosts. Many of these experiences happened to more than one person at a time. Yes, certainly some of these can be dismissed as mistakes or lies or mental issues. But you seriously think, according to logic and give the vast, literally unfathomable number of these types of experiences that so, so many people have reported having since the dawn of time and up to including today, that you can dismiss 100% of them as not real? Even if 99% were fake, 1% being real would mean ghosts are still real.

To me it is a supreme arrogance, and ignorance, to claim that ALL of those reported experiences MUST be false. There is simply no way for you to even begin to know that, since you have not studied even a fraction of 1% of these reported experiences. Rather, you are motivated to sustain a certain type of worldview that is secular and does not want to admit the possibility of things like ghosts. Isn’t this your true motivation, not logic, when you said quite clearly that ghosts do not exist?

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I agree that the phenomena need not be 50:50 provable / disprovable on the face of it. However, it’s all in the detail. Ghosts are subjective, not everybody sees them at the same time, they seem to be able to make themselves known at will, perhaps, perhaps not. It’s too much of a hazy subject so take it as a given that “prima facie” there is no starting point of 50:50. There is no objective starting point at all, it’s too hazy, subjective, l can only say what l have seen, and my own religion’s lore, which explains some things e.g. why there are no ghosts older than say 1,000 years, and how they often mimick the dead, and there are too many accounts of a very low cloud following people, often the cloud exudes a feeling of love and sorrow but is completely evil and may make evil suggestions. etc. etc. We can at least say the title is arguable.

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I’d argue that’s the same thing, in the sense that if you are a radical skeptic and scrupulously literal in all your statements you can’t say a damn thing without layering on endless caveats and likelihoods and assuming ceteris paribus etc.

Ghosts do not exist, in the sense that Russel’s Teapot doesn’t exist. I am open to additional evidence, I acknowledge that I am but a small part of a vast universe of which I am unaware, but the non-existence of ghosts is fairly well-established relative to other beliefs. So for practical purposes, “ghosts don’t exist” is roughly accurate.

For communicative purposes, it is probably more effective than it would be to lay out the layers of uncertainty that surround that believe, because the long version would make it seem as though my beliefs about ghosts are in some way unique in the degree of uncertainty I have about them. In fact, there are many other controversial beliefs that I reject but about which I am more uncertain than that ghosts do not exist in anything like their traditional description.

I’m not discounting them, those testimonies demand explanation. But ‘ghosts exist’ is a bad explanation for all the people claiming to see ghosts, given all the evidence that people just get confused a lot.

I can see how that comes off as arrogant, but I’d argue it comes from a place of humility: I’ve observed myself getting confused in the same way that I suspect people who claim to have seen ghosts are confused. I’ve seen things that weren’t there, and lept to explanations that weren’t well supported and turned out to be wrong. Because I’m an unreliable witness, it’s easy to believe that other people are also not reliable.

And that’s particularly true when we consider that:

  1. observations of ghosts aren’t identical, they tend to look like the myths of the culture from which the witness comes (c.f. @BeingMuslim’s claims above); and
  2. my explanation for these observations appeals to patterns in the failures of human perception, e.g. pareidolia, spurious causality, over-attribution of agency, better-to-be-wrong-than-dead, etc. These patterns are widely attested, I can verify them in myself and in those around me in non-ghost contexts, and they fit a more general theory of where we come from and why our minds work the way they work (which, yes, is secular).

I’m not sure what to make of this. Is that to say that they aren’t objective?

I am aware that people claim to see all sorts of things, but those observations are better explained by things like pareidolia. People observe things with great conviction that just don’t exist. Consider table-turning or N-ray, for which people had loads of subjective evidence and which were conclusively disproved by further investigation.

When you say “ghosts are subjective”, that sounds to me like you’re making your hypothesis that ghosts exist untestable. And untestable hypotheses verge on meaningless: if the world with ghosts and the world without ghosts aren’t distinguishable through rigorous investigation, what can it mean that they exist?

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By subjective l mean, they overlap with the world of psyche, rather than the world of the empirical. You can’t get hold of a ghost, measure it, log the data. Compare it with other ghost examples in a cohort, analyse trends etc.

I can see how this would seem a cop out, so the only defence is two-fold: it seems to be subjective personal experience, but also regard the more objective sociological phenomena, many cultures and people have commonalities in spirit lore and spirit experiences.

I think l mentioned above, lost in verbiage: if you stare into the mirror long enough, looking deep into your own eyes, unflinchingly, key is unflinchingly, you’ll eventually see your face radiate darkness, and a blue spark flickers in each eye simultaneously, and then the image of your inner Jinn’s face - at least the face he/she chose - will appear. I construe it to be a premonition of how my corpse will look well into decay, it’s not pretty, it makes my heart skip a beat.

I haven’t tried it in ages, it was a morbid curiosity now satisfied. Try it though.

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Cool story bro. I guess you are right, you know for 100% certainty that everyone who ever encountered a “ghost” is just wrong. Nothing about this life carries over spiritually and leaves a residue here in this realm. Spirits and afterlives and all that, what a proven load of rubbish. Wow, amazing.

You really did it. You have proven secularism beyond any doubt. Not only that but you have disproven, clearly and without doubt, literally every single cause of any person ever having experienced a ghostly encounter.

Cheers. You win. No one can compete with your supreme logical formulation of proof. Considering you have obviously investigated and honestly assessed and analysed objectively a sufficient majority of cases where people reported experiencing these ghostly phenomena, you have explained exactly how and why, in every situation, they were mistaken especially when it came to multiple people having encountered the same paranormal things and reported them the same way. Yes it is such a relief to have the secularist prove beyond any shadow of doubt that 100% of every such case was clearly fabricated.

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:+1:

You win, for sure. Nice work!

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But why not? Do they exist outside the minds of those who claim to see them? Do they interact with the mundane world?

In European folklore there are poultergeists, spirits that move objects around. Do they not exist, or is there some other reason why the the movement of a solid object can’t be measured/logged/analyzed/compared?

Sarcasm is a defense mechanism.
If you have a point, say it plainly; if you can’t, notice that you can’t.

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Hi there, l must pull a Nostromo and say: Insufficient Data. :slight_smile:

Good point about poltergeists but bear in mind that ghosts are Jinn, likely the personal Jinn of a deceased person, we are each assigned one personal Jinn from birth which knows us intimately and probably outlives us by centuries (though schizophrenics may gain even more).

Point being: King Solomon (peace be upon him) had Jinn working for him in hated toil. They moved objects for him e.g. fetching the Queen of Sheba’s throne all the way from Yemen in the twinkling of an eye. They also built the Temple for him. The Qur’an 34:12 indicates that the Jinn may have been devils, not the good ones but evil ones, forced to work for King Solomon, l assume because he wore that ring. (Possible inspiration for LOTR?)

So yes, l feel they can move physical things. I’ve seen them a few times e.g. one that looked like a Sumerian household demon, like a vertical dragonfly, approx. the same size of one too, but l only saw it in silhouette, rushing toward me.

Funny thing: We believe schizophrenia is demonic possession. I was once speaking to a schizophrenic guy at a resource centre for people to do their CVs (“resumes” as you’d call them). I chatted to him facing him for about 20-30 minutes then when l got home there was a dark handprint on my neck. My mother saw it and was mortified, so it wasn’t just a subjective matter.

Good job l didn’t invite him into my home as l was thinking. In fact it transpired his parents had kicked him out for attacking them. Maybe he would have put a hand to my neck.

Oh and once l awoke to find a fine pinhead scratch above my kidney, on my back. Nothing could enter my room. There were no sharp objects around. It wasn’t an impact graze, it was a meandering scratch, i.e. a meandering line. I became very ill that weekend and recall looking at myself in the mirror asking myself what has happened. My abdomen became inflamed. Symptoms subsided by Monday and l didn’t report it to doctors.

Other supernatural things had already occurred in that room that l cannot speak of as they happened during sleep / half-sleep.

Actually l can tell you one more thing about that room: As an adolescent l was under a lot of stress and nearly lost my mind, because people at school were saying bad stuff about me because of my low social status (it was a posh school). It culminated in my making very discordant music on my computer, it was a terrifying song that made no sense. A feeling started to build within me that some great evil will be visiting me “soon”. Note that this is a common theme in later horror movies, where an evil force terrorises the victim telling them they’ll strike them soon. I guess they feed off the fear like food.

One week the feeling waxed and one night it crescendoed, when l couldn’t sleep due to fear. That night, l suddenly heard something scratching at my window very loudly. There were no trees anywhere near my window. I was too scared to draw the curtains. I guess l would have lost my mind if l had seen whatever it was.

Later, l noticed there was indeed a crack or something, in the glass pane on that quarter of the window. Unsure when it appeared but l didn’t notice it before that night. True story!

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How about guardian angel s poltergeists are the supposed to invert the thesis yes poltergeists are of mythic origin. But what says that if anything that along with the death of hystiry God did assume that He died along with all other redeemers only to retire to mount olympus and invalidate every conscious manifested infestation ( along with that of roaches) surviving all transformations to the contrary?

Then he’ll, yes, bring them on in drones because the inverse can be expected, even cybertecnique beings will shriek and get the hell out of the place.

So alien visitors will do likes and depart for greener and more wholesome pastures, another golden wild Wild West.

And then womenfolk of the fair kind can sit holed up in a fair castle by their step mom and weave golf until the morn until remplrsilkskin arrives to collect. Those were the good old days of heroes and legends.

Muslim fold did enjoy though the fruits of such silken beauties of Chinese ware, all they could do is to kick rugs from under such bare headed blonde maidens to carry them of as prize to their harems .

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Well I did make my point. The fact that I added a silly internet colloquialism doesn’t negate that.

Although the fact that you would act as if it does, is …telling.

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And ignored everything else I said.

Hm, interesting.