Are Ghosts Real? (a poll)

[Morrus]

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?

All of the above and more. All except them seeing a ghost.

 

[wicked cool]

Meaning?

Meaning many would have said cloning dinosaurs would be as crazy as ghosts or aliens . What I f the government ever reveals there are then who knows about ghosts

 

[Morrus]

Meaning many would have said cloning dinosaurs would be as crazy as ghosts or aliens . What I f the government ever reveals there are then who knows about ghosts

Whats ifs maybes. I mean, sure, fanciful speculation is fun. What if we really live in a giant fruit cake and we're actually ants suffering a mass hallucination? What if you are actually the immortal robotic form of Cleopatra, posting from a tomb beneath a pyramid built by sentient plants?

I prefer to talk about actual facts when it comes to this stuff. Otherwise, we're just like stoner kids going 'whooooah man!' -- which is pointless.

 

[MGibster]

Whats ifs maybes. I mean, sure, fanciful speculation is fun. What if we really live in a giant fruit cake and we're actually ants suffering a mass hallucination? What if you are actually the immortal robotic form of Cleopatra, posting from a tomb beneath a pyramid built by sentient plants?

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! I can only handle one existential crisis per day! Slow down, cowboy.

 

[CleverNickName]

A big problem I have with most paranormal investigators and reporters, is how little they care about confirmation bias in their data. I'm all for scientific investigation and experimentation, but most of them have already decided they are looking for a ghost, and so everything they observe and record will be weighed against that expectation.

"I heard this place is haunted, so we're gonna go take a look and see for ourselves."

Golly. I wonder what they're gonna find.

 

[MoonSong]

A big problem I have with most paranormal investigators and reporters, is how little they care about confirmation bias in their data. I'm all for scientific investigation and experimentation, but most of them have already decided they are looking for a ghost, and so everything they observe and record will be weighed against that assumption.

"I heard this place is haunted, so we're gonna go take a look and see for ourselves."

Golly. I wonder what they're gonna find.

I've always thought about how one could conduct a double blind test to see which observers are more genuine and which are just highly suggestionable. (Or just prove nobody is a reliable eye witness)

 

[Parmandur]

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 believe people have e experiences, some of real spirits...but if they claim they are material they are mistaken or lying.

 

[gnarlygninja]

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

We're having the conversation right now and I'm not going to say we're bringing back dinosaurs.

 

[MGibster]

A big problem I have with most paranormal investigators and reporters, is how little they care about confirmation bias in their data. I'm all for scientific investigation and experimentation, but most of them have already decided they are looking for a ghost, and so everything they observe and record will be weighed against that expectation.

When I got to hang out with the ghost hunting group at my museum, we went room-to-room where we'd all sit down and someone would ask questions to any spirits that might be listening while using a recording device. Later on, we all listened to these recordings and in the background hisses and static some of them insisted their heard something. That's when I learned about electronic voice phenomenon, where folks interpret noises in recordings as voices from beyond the other dominion. A few of them insisted they heard something whereas I heard nothing but background noise.

 

[Morrus]

A big problem I have with most paranormal investigators and reporters, is how little they care about confirmation bias in their data. I'm all for scientific investigation and experimentation, but most of them have already decided they are looking for a ghost, and so everything they observe and record will be weighed against that expectation.

That's because "paranormal investigator" isn't a real thing. What you need is actual scientists doing actual science. And every time they do... they come up with nothing. Because there's nothing there. And then people try to discredit those results because.... pro-woo/anti-science, I guess?