Are Ghosts Real? (a poll)

[MoonSong]

Faith is a type of belief, according to my professor. "Faith is just belief with extra steps," or something like that.

But there comes a point where all knowledge relies on one or more leaps of faith. We need some faith in order to have knowledge, otherwise we end up on a neverending cycle of requiring proof after proof after proof. We at some point need to have faith in others and take their data and knowledge at face value (or end-up like the terraplanists) We need to have faith on our senses showing us reality and ourselves being real (or go crazy). Even math requires us to start from axioms and to make the jump from pure logic -or go the long way to try to prove 1 plus 1 is two that takes like fifty pages.

Some faith is not bad.

 

[MoonSong]

Also a logical fallacy known as “god of the gaps”. I don’t understand it, therefore it is magic/god/ghosts/aliens etc. it’s actually quite an arrogant mistake—the assumption that if you can’t explain it, that can’t be your ignorance, it can only be magic.

However I find it more honest to just claim something unexplainable to be magic/supernatural or even ghosts or angels than go towards pseudocientific stuff like aliens and then claim it is 'better' somehow because we are just ignorant and we could always find new stuff in the laws of physics that will allow a superior civilization to go beyond the hard limits of the universe (so magic with extra steps).

 

[Scribe]

Yep.

 

[MoonSong]

I would pick an “I don’t know” option. My evaluation of others’ experiences is conflicted enough that I don’t feel comfortable picking either Yes or No.

I would have preferred a "don't know" option. In the end I said "yes" because there's a lot of stuff in the world (and experiences I won't share this time) that tell me something exists. And well, I'm religious myself, so maybe not believing in ghosts as discarnated undead, but something that we call ghosts being a real phenomenon.

 

[MGibster]

I used to work in a building that was 170 years old (at the time) and I had a lot of visitors who thought it was haunted. We used to let ghost hunting groups spend most of the night in the building and I'd babysit on occasion. I thought it was all a bit silly, but they treated the building with respect and it was a very minor source of revenue so that was nice. The first time I babysat for them I went along with them from room-to-room looking for spirits but we never found any.

Visitors would sometimes ask me if the place was haunted or if I'd seen anything "odd." I'd usually tell them they're asking the wrong guy because I didn't believe in ghost. When I was feeling cheeky I'd reply, "No. I don't believe in ghosts, goblins, spooks or fairies." Sometimes when schoolkids would ask if the place was haunted I'd just give them an emphatic no. One of my coworkers bugged the hell out of me when she'd say yes. It remains one of the few occasions I'd contradict her in front of tour groups. (You also didn't need six men to fire a Lewis gun.)

 

[Deset Gled]

Even math requires us to start from axioms and to make the jump from pure logic -or go the long way to try to prove 1 plus 1 is two that takes like fifty pages.

The leap needed to get from "math has axioms" to "therefore, ghosts" is a quite a lot.

I fear this is one of those cases where the rhetoric to justify something makes me trust it less than if nothing was said at all.

 

[CleverNickName]

Faith is trust, such as trusting something.

That's as good of a definition as any, in my book.

But there comes a point where all knowledge relies on one or more leaps of faith. We need some faith in order to have knowledge, otherwise we end up on a neverending cycle of requiring proof after proof after proof. We at some point need to have faith in others and take their data and knowledge at face value (or end-up like the terraplanists) We need to have faith on our senses showing us reality and ourselves being real (or go crazy). Even math requires us to start from axioms and to make the jump from pure logic -or go the long way to try to prove 1 plus 1 is two that takes like fifty pages.

Some faith is not bad.

Knowledge and Belief aren't different in the sense of one being better than the other. Or to put it another way, knowing something isn't "more correct" than believing something. They are just two different ways of arriving at a conclusion. Neither are bad! It is useful to understand, though, that there are things you can know (things you can verify with evidence) and things you believe (convictions and experiences that cannot be proven) when navigating life.

 

[The Firebird]

So do we think the American government has secret files or not on ufos and aliens ?
Now I said no on ghosts but it is funny how almost every culture believes in some kind of spiritual power

There have been direct statements to this effect. The reporting in the last decade, starting in 2017 or so, revealed there were programs whose existence was secretive, in part to avoid public debate. Some of the videos have been released but there is likely more. A number of high ranking officials have made statements to the effect that there is something going on, and it needs to be seriously investigated. (Including former CIA head John Brennan.)

You can find alternative explanations online for, I believe, all of these. Perhaps another angle is that leaking 'UFOs are plausible' will make other countries waste their resources on fruitless UFO programs.

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Elsewhere, Avi Loeb at Harvard has been suggesting aliens should be studied in more detail. He put out a paper recently about another potentially alien object. The text hedges quite a bit more than the reporting might suggest.

It is true that the majority of UFO reports are nonsense. But out of a desire to oppose these, there is also a massive stigma against investigating aliens seriously. Loeb can get away with it because he has a 10x platinum research record. I know personally other scientists, some with quite strong records themselves, who do not think the scientific method can be employed appropriately to this question (also ghosts) given the stigma surrounding it. That seems correct to me.

The astrobiology community is spending billions of dollars searching for current or past life in the Solar System. That was a major influence behind Perseverance, and it is why Jezero crater was chosen as landing site. It is why the Europa Clipper and DAVINCI and Dragonfly were funded. The jury is very much out on the abundance of alien life. If life developed twice in the solar system, it would radically alter our views. Very, very little is known about this subject.

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Ghosts are similar. The majority of claims are probably wrong. It is easy to to conjecture things when nothing is there. At the same time, it is oh so easy to be dismissive on these grounds. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio..."

 

[Jahydin]

My favorite debunking story:

In my philosophy class at university, the professor asked everyone in the room who believed in ghosts to raise their hand, and about a third of the people in the room did so. One student in particular was very adamant about it, and not only raised his hand but called out to the professor, "Oh I don't just believe, I know for a fact that ghosts are real."

The professor asked him to explain, and the student went on to tell a story about how he was home alone, nobody was around, etc. He was in the kitchen making himself lunch, left the room for just a few seconds, and when he came back the mustard was spilled on the floor and there was a small child-sized handprint in mustard on the counter.

"There's no other possible explanation," the student finally said. "It had to be a ghost."

"Are you sure it couldn't have been a Martian or an angel instead?" the professor asked. "Why does it have to be a ghost?"

The student just sat there, speechless....that thought had never occurred to him. He had experienced something that he couldn't explain, and took it as proof of the supernatural...his preferred version of supernatural, too.

The professor then went on to lecture about the differences between Knowledge and Belief. It was one of the best (and most useful) lectures I ever attended in university.

Had a similar experience, but our professor's follow on question was, "How many of you saw it right before, during, or right after sleeping?"

Think he was onto something since only one person lowered their hand...

 

[Jahydin]

I said yes. Story time!

When I was younger (4-5), I woke up to see a strange kid in my living room playing with my blocks. When he saw me, he got up and ran towards our hall closet and went straight through the door! My parents woke up to the horrible racket of me tearing that closet apart looking for him.

Not sure what I saw or if I really saw it, but for the sake of being honest, pretty sure I saw a ghost...