Are Ghosts Real? (a poll)

[MGibster]

I'm not saying your ghost story was real, just like, as a general rule, don't get gaslighted by older people not remembering stuff.

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation. i.e. It's deliberate and most often done for nefarious purposes. Someone who genuinely remembers something differently is not gaslighting anyone. Memory can be a really funny thing. I remember having conversations with some friends of mine about some funny scenes from UHF. But my memories do not align with reality as I remember these conversations with my friends from Colorado when I was actually living in Texas when it was released in 1989. There's no way I had these conversations two years before the movie was released, but I still remember having them. Odds are good my memories just got mixed up and we were talking about Weird Al songs instead of the movie.

 

[Deset Gled]

IMNSHO, one of the biggest problems with the traditional concept of ghosts, UFOs, and similar phenomena is that they are always witnessed at the fringe of our sensory ability. We have well over a hundred years of recording things happening that are barely visible, barely audible, barely detectable. But we also have well over a hundred years of dramatically increasing our ability to detect everything - even things that our human senses can't. And yet all reports of ghosts (etc) are constantly on the edge of what is detectable.

The fact that we all carry around a cell phone with video and audio recording is proof to me that traditional ghosts don't exists. If the ghosts that we could just barely catch on film 80 years ago were in any way real, we'd have 4k video of them now. Same thing with UFOs; if the ones that show up as blips on film and radar 70 years ago were real, so many people would have recordings of them today that the idea of a conspiracy to cover them up is completely laughable. It's the classic Moving the Goalposts fallacy, but the goalposts are our technology.

Of course, this doesn't prove anything about the fundamental concepts of spirits, souls, extraterrestrial life, whatever. But it shows what needs to be said about any report of a person experiencing them. And consequently, any traditional depiction or conceptual framework of them that people take from media, etc.

 

[The Firebird]

It is not arbitrary. UFO claims are essentially supernatural with science fictioney window dressing. Leaving aside that some sightings that truly defy rational explanation -like the above mentioned army list, and in this case there is a chasm between "I can't explain it rationally" and "aliens", ufo claims are magic with extra steps. Abductions are fundamentally the same as sucubus encounters -and it is possible to track the folklore showing the evolution from one figure into the other-. More damning, the most devout followers describe pseudospiritual if not outright religious experiences.

I agree! I think this is what has poisoned the well, so to speak, on scientific inquiry into UFOs. It is hard to research a topic in earnest when so much of what is out there is just a more recent manifestation of these older phenomena.

 

[Ryujin]

It is not arbitrary. UFO claims are essentially supernatural with science fictioney window dressing. Leaving aside that some sightings that truly defy rational explanation -like the above mentioned army list, and in this case there is a chasm between "I can't explain it rationally" and "aliens", ufo claims are magic with extra steps. Abductions are fundamentally the same as sucubus encounters -and it is possible to track the folklore showing the evolution from one figure into the other-. More damning, the most devout followers describe pseudospiritual if not outright religious experiences.

Today it's "aliens." Two hundred years ago it was "Fairies."

 

[Parmandur]

IMNSHO, one of the biggest problems with the traditional concept of ghosts, UFOs, and similar phenomena is that they are always witnessed at the fringe of our sensory ability. We have well over a hundred years of recording things happening that are barely visible, barely audible, barely detectable. But we also have well over a hundred years of dramatically increasing our ability to detect everything - even things that our human senses can't. And yet all reports of ghosts (etc) are constantly on the edge of what is detectable.

The fact that we all carry around a cell phone with video and audio recording is proof to me that traditional ghosts don't exists. If the ghosts that we could just barely catch on film 80 years ago were in any way real, we'd have 4k video of them now. Same thing with UFOs; if the ones that show up as blips on film and radar 70 years ago were real, so many people would have recordings of them today that the idea of a conspiracy to cover them up is completely laughable. It's the classic Moving the Goalposts fallacy, but the goalposts are our technology.

Of course, this doesn't prove anything about the fundamental concepts of spirits, souls, extraterrestrial life, whatever. But it shows what needs to be said about any report of a person experiencing them. And consequently, any traditional depiction or conceptual framework of them that people take from media, etc.

Well, that's a response to grifters talking about ectoplaam or alleged photos of ghosts...but I wouldnexpwct an actual immaterial experience to be recordable, anymore than I would expect 4K video of the number Pi or an audio recording of the color red.

 

[Deset Gled]

Well, that's a response to grifters talking about ectoplaam or alleged photos of ghosts...but I wouldnexpwct an actual immaterial experience to be recordable, anymore than I would expect 4K video of the number Pi or an audio recording of the color red.

I'm not sure I understand. Lots of people report these experiences. Are you saying that those reports are all dishonest, that people who report them didn't actually experience what they are reporting, or something else? In any case, there is certainly a major issue with the fact that these reports have a circular effect. People report that aliens look like this, so people believe aliens look like that, so people report seeing more aliens that look like this.

OTOH, a number is a mathematical concept, not a physical object or phenomenon. But it can easily be represented in video. And an audio recording of red is fairly trivial. Red has a wavelength (640ish nanometers). We can record that wavelength. By converting the EM radiation wavelength to physical oscillation wavelength, we can play it back. It's outside of human auditory range, of course, but if you want you can choose to translate the human visible spectrum to the human audible spectrum pretty easily.

 

[FrogReaver]

I am always reminded of crop circles when considering "fringe beliefs". For a long time people could not explain crop circles. Experts would come out and say it had to be some weird freezing or unfreezing thing, and of course aliens were assumed". All of that lingered for years....until a group of people on tv went out one night with some planks of wood with ropes tied around them and used them to make a perfect crop circle.

Most of the time things we can't explain are often simple explanations that stem from a failure of imagination. That said, we should continue to investigate supernatural sightings, it would be equally foolish to dismiss thousands of years of human history in which spirit sightings have been noted, but whenever people say "the ONLY explanation is a ghost".... I always get skeptical.

Or there were legitimate ones and illegitimate ones. Seems to me they didn’t replicate some of the major details of some crop circles encountered. But what do I know?

 

[Ryujin]

I'm not sure I understand. Lots of people report these experiences. Are you saying that those reports are all dishonest, that people who report them didn't actually experience what they are reporting, or something else? In any case, there is certainly a major issue with the fact that these reports have a circular effect. People report that aliens look like this, so people believe aliens look like that, so people report seeing more aliens that look like this.

OTOH, a number is a mathematical concept, not a physical object or phenomenon. But it can easily be represented in video. And an audio recording of red is fairly trivial. Red has a wavelength (640ish nanometers). We can record that wavelength. By converting the EM radiation wavelength to physical oscillation wavelength, we can play it back. It's outside of human auditory range, of course, but if you want you can choose to translate the human visible spectrum to the human audible spectrum pretty easily.

I wanted to post a GIF of Daniel Jackson demonstrating Pi in Thor's test, in Stargate, but all that I could find was Dom DeLuise saying that he wanted to experience the universe and eat pie.

I keep thinking back to all the pictures of "orbs" that we get from investigators, who neither understand dust, digital photography, nor UV/IR lighting.

 

[wicked cool]

If we had this conversation years ago nobody would say we could clone or even bring back dinosaurs and nobody would have said we might create killer robots and yet we are close to dinosaurs and killer robots

 

[Morrus]

If we had this conversation years ago nobody would say we could clone or even bring back dinosaurs and nobody would have said we might create killer robots and yet we are close to dinosaurs and killer robots

Meaning?