A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
I’m always surprised to hear people believe in ghosts, not because I consider it particularly ridiculous, but rather because ghosts have no relevance in my life. I don’t need them to exist to explain what’s happening around me.
Every few years or so, I might hear a noise where I don’t have an explanation, but that always feels adequately explained by me not knowing things. I’m constantly surrounded by living beings as well as materials that are subject to gravity, temperature, humidity etc.. Occasionally, they’ll make noises quite naturally.
imo it’s just an aspect of the fear of death, some believe in ghosts because it gives them hope there’s any sort of afterlife
I have both feet planted firmly in the real world but I have experienced three or four undeniably supernatural things in my life and yeah it does happen sometimes.
As a reasonable person, I can admit that it’s always “possible” that ghosts exist. Meaning, that I am not 100% positive that they don’t.
I can also admit that there could be unicorns on Pluto, because it’s nigh impossible to prove a negative.
I’m now a manager, but I work in contract security, and have been in more buildings that were supposedly haunted than I care to count. Including buildings that have numerous stories of freaky shit happening.
Doors closing “randomly” or very-not-randomly. Spaces suddenly getting cold. puddles showing up in bathrooms that someone supposedly drowned in. Stairwells that sound like people walking down them at specific times of night.
odd noises. Freaky noises.
I have never once been in a building where I could not identify a perfectly natural cause. Here’s a few incidents off the top of my mind that I remember very specifically. There are some few commonalities to people who see ghosts. or demons, or any other supernatural entity.
- they’re incurious and don’t care to find out what really happened.
- they’re frequently (usually?) tired or otherwise in an altered state of mind. or incredibly bored.
- They already believe in supernatural things… and what they see generally conforms to their world view.
Ghost stories are perpetuated by the credulous, who find things that are decidedly weird, and then stop looking any further. or they hear a story- suicides, murders, etc- and attribute every weird little thing to that.
or they’re told by straight up liars and ran with by people who would run with scissors and untied shoes. a lot of times, it’s started by people who have an inability to admit they don’t know something.
Regardless, if ghosts were real. if they were common, and if they interacted with the natural world, then we would have actual, tangible evidence for their existence. You’d be able to point at one and say ‘aha! a ghost!’ that doesn’t happen.
These are just some of the examples of things I’ve heard about and found to be otherwise.
One example was a guy who claimed ghosts were always going around closing every fire door every night at 23:00. On the dot. Every night.
And yeah. doors were being closed as described. Guess what? All the doors had one thing in common.
They were being held open by magnetic door holders. they’re fire doors. Building code here requires that they be self-closing in the event of a fire alarm to prevent the spread of fire. But that’s really rather inconvenient in long hallways where people don’t want to be opening big heavy doors everytime they’re bringing a cart of shit through.
Thus, the electromagnetic door holders that turn off whenever a fire alarm goes off.
Well. if you guessed that the fire system had been programmed to turn off all the door holders at 23:00 each night, just long enough to let any being held open close… you’d be right. All it took to verify that was to send a five minute email to the facility engineer, who spent all of ten minutes checking settings on the fire alarm system and turned it off.
Another example of doorholder mayhem is one in which the doorholders were slowly going bad.
This was when I was a manager, and I was doing a sort of covert investigation where I go in and have them train me on the site. there were problems.
those problems all stemmed from a fundamental lack of curiosity. Which stemmed from a fervent belief in the supernatural. Voices in spaces that are supposed to be empty? they weren’t teenagers smoking dope, it was spirits.
One example of spirits that loved to fuck with him? one hallway had firedoors that sectioned off a t-shaped hallway, that was lined with businesses (mostly offices.) he was supposed to go down the hallway, checking and locking all the doors and generally making sure everything was in good order. the firedoor in the middle of the hallway, kept closing on him.
Rather than looking into what the issue was, he wrote it off as demons fucking with him, specifically.
The reality was that the doorhoder was going bad (probably had been for a long time. as that happens their holding power gets weaker. this door holder’s holding power was just strong enough to hold the door when it was static, but any kind of touch or slight pressure was enough for it to close.
Including changes in the air pressure as you walked past. When I pointed this out to him. Well. Lets just say he’s no some other company’s problem.
another example is voices in unusual places
Guess what? walls be thin, yo.
Frequently, office buildings with multiple tenants are remodeled in strange ways. especially if they’re older- things get partitioned weierd. spaces get remodeled and lighting and power doesn’t be as you’d expect.
In any case, in this particular building, the idiot in question didn’t realize that the very short custodial closet didn’t go all the way “back” from the hall- she should have, though. She’d also never gone into the space that wrapped around the maintenance closet to run beside the space that she kept hearing voices in “that shouldn’t be there!”
Those voices were caused by people working late.
my personal favorite, ghost steps coming down stairs.
this particular building is historic- that is to say, it was a tire warehouse built in the 1890s. It’s really quite a lovely building. Giant limestone block foundation, old tan brick. cedar beam construction.
one of two stairwells that hit ever floor has fire sprinkler stand pipes running through each landing. not surprising, considering. the building is old. It’s drafty as fuck. And at night, in order to save energy, because it literally predates central air, they turn the system off at night (or run it to a lower set point.)
This results in a fairly consistent rate at which it cools off. the fire stand pipes cool off at a different rate, though, and clunk against the landings the pass through. They do so in a way that sounds like someone walking down the stairs.
Incurious guards just wrote it off as some ghost or something, but all of the long term tenants will tell a story about how there was a guy that died from a tractor tire falling on him. (didn’t happen, by the way. Though numerous people did die here. mostly jumpers.)
Radiators make some creepy noises.
I mean. Seriously. gurrgle gurrgle. burble burble. Tickety tick.
still not ghosts.
big cats sound like screaming women.
yeap. okay, need to clarify, I mean, our local lynxes and bobcats, as well as the occasional mountain lion passing through.
If you ever saw Annihilation, with the “help me” bear. yeah. it’s like that. Randomly. Out of the dark woods. and not coherent words so much as screams. (that account happened to border a large statepark that had some cats living in it.)
Sudden changes of temperature
So, most office building’s HVACs work on positive pressure. This way, when a door gets opened, the hot air goes out rather than the cold air coming in. (or cold air going out, hot air coming in. Depends on where you are and the season.)
for whatever reason, one of the office spaces just had massive open vents (I personally suspect this was a remodel that got left in the wall. the vent just connected the main lobby/entryway to the space (above a plenum ceiling)
Another feature of building HVAC systems are the airlock doors as you come and go. Guess what happens when you open both airlock doors and have a window you’re not supposed to have open, open?
All your air rushes out, getting replaced by cold air.
Puddles in Bathrooms
Okay. so, water goes from high places to low places, and tends to follow the ‘easiest’ path, even if its somewhat convoluted. If you have an inexplicable puddle somewhere, you have a water leak somewhere.
what you don’t have is some kind of poltergeist taking a bath. Doesn’t matter if a person committed suicide in the bathroom, or rather, if you’re told that’s what happened. (it’s not.)
Turns out that the rooftop had a leak, and that was travelling down through 8 floors to show up in a bathroom. because that’s where the pipes the water was following kinda sorta came out.
lso, which requirements in terms of species are there for a haunting to commence? Can a horse become a ghost? What about a gorilla? Or a Neanderthal? Seems weird that only homo sapients ge
Religion tends to justify itself in the face of absolutely no evidence with “proof denies faith.” It’s a garbage argument, but it’s accepted.
Ghosts don’t have any similar excuse to fall back on when we fail to see any credible evidence whatsoever.
Is the soul a thing? Does consciousness exist as more than the sum of the electrical network of the brain? Who am “I”? These are all interesting and probably unanswerable philosophical questions. “Do ghosts exist” though, is a pretty straightforward no.
Science has never in the history of science reliably shown a single interaction between physical entities and any sort of non-physical force. The only way ghosts could be real is if you redefined the term “ghost” to the point of breaking, like saying that the memory of a person is a ghost.
Plus, it fails the smell test in a million ways. What makes a ghost exist? Why aren’t we positively lousy with ghosts? Are there rules? What would they be and what mechanism is there to both quantify and effect them? Why do ghosts follow the rotation and revolution of the earth but otherwise aren’t physically bound? How can one have any sort of cognition? If a ghost does, how can it perceive anything without intercepting photons or other physical phenomena? If there are ghosts and somehow they have cognition and perception, are we obligated to leave Netflix on when we leave for work?
Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.
If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the “physical world” too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.
If a bunch of people were going around saying I got this weird burn on my skin after holding this rock for a while, scientists would have discovered radioactivity a lot sooner.
There are a bunch of people going around claiming to have interacted with ghosts, and we’ve got bupkis.
That reminds me of this meme:
I found it here after an internet search trying to find it again, but I’m not sure if it is the original source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cryptozoology/comments/1c7btq9/ill_just_leave_this_here/
The indigenous Australians, the Mirarr people, identified an area in Northern Australia as sickness country which was very coincident with a high concentration of uranium.
They just avoided the area instead of poking it
https://d28rz98at9flks.cloudfront.net/145214/145214_00_0.pdf
Aw man. The northern tip of Australia has the cleanest air in the entire world. That data is from pre-y2k
Not sure about that, you might be thinking of the Southern tip. Indonesia often conducts burn offs with a lot of wind blowing smoke over Australia as well as cultural burning conducted by the indigenous in the region. I remember seeing the haze growing up and walking through the burnt country at the start of the dry.
I think you could rationally explore ghosts in the “radically redefining” them arena. Ghosts could rationally exist as an artifact of your mind, and saying that is not the same thing as saying they don’t exist. Hallucinations exist. They aren’t real, but they exist. Ghosts could rationally exist in the exactly same way, as processes in our own heads. It’s when you start saying they interact with the world in a way outside people’s heads that you can’t really reconcile.
Science has never in the history of science reliably shown a single interaction between physical entities and any sort of non-physical force.
Fucking magnets,
How do they work?
Magnetism is a physical force, like gravity. Measurable and consistent.
You keep saying “physical force”…
That’s not a real term in physics.
The only possible explanation, is you mean any force that is already explained by physics, is that what you mean?
Because that would be the same as insisting we know everything, which no one who knows anything about physics would ever try to claim.
So…
What exactly do you mean when you keep saying “physical forces”?
One of the definitions of “physical” in the American Heritage Dictionary is:
Of or relating to matter and energy or the sciences dealing with them, especially physics.
I mean there’s no way to go from immeasurable to measurable except in scale, and anywhere north of quantum scale, physics has been reliably predictable and measurable. Ghosts’ purported impact is on a scale well above that which is unexplained.
I mean, it sounds like your friend genuinely doesn’t understand the scientific method. That doesn’t necessarily make them unreasonable. It just means they had a sub-standard science education.
He’s wishy washy on the scientific method, not because he doesn’t understand it but because he believes it’s wrong (or at least incomplete)
We’ve spoken about this on several occasions and either his arguments make no sense or I’m genuinely too dumb to get them.
Arguments against it typically make no sense.
Hi, I’m the friend. I don’t want to reveal too much about my identity here but my science education was actually very thorough (I know that sounds arrogant but I just wanted to defend my honour here). Let’s not get bogged down with personal detail though like that though because ad hominems like this can often cause a conversation to unravel into personal attacks.
Regarding what my friend said about my views on the scientific method: This is a bit of a mischaracterization. I don’t have anything against the scientific method. I just think that the set of things we have reason to believe is larger than the set of things that we can provide evidence for scientifically. (Broadly speaking I think this is a fairly standard view of things.)
Another way to out this is this. The question is not ‘is xyz scientific’ but ‘do we have reason to believe xyz’? It turns out that if we can demonstrate something scientifically it does give us reason to believe that thing. But there are some things we have reason to believe that we cannot demonstrate scientifically. For example I have good reason to believe solipsism is false, or that chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap, even though I cannot strictly speaking demonstrate these things scientifically (examples like this often have something to do with the subjectivity of the mind, which cannot be directly measured but is nonetheless very apparent to us).
For the ghost stuff, I think you actually could make a reasonable scientific case for the existence of ghosts (very hot take, I know), but that’s not my primary concern. What I’m worried about is do we have good reason to believe in ghosts? As it happens, I believe the answer to that is yes. The details here might be a bit out of scope for a c/nostupidquestions thread but I’m basing my thoughts here on the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane. I used to have a similar view as most people in this thread (that ghosts were irrational and unscientific etc) until I read this book and it forced me to change my mind. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic.
Edit: for grammar and typos
That’s essentially a “god of the gaps” argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong ‘yes’.
Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.
Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it’s energy. There’s no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we’d have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We’d be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv2, and the two sides of the equation balance, always.
More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they’re invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn’t strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they’d by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you’d at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don’t have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we’d have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don’t, and there really just aren’t any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.
As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.
chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap
This is absolutely something you could scientifically test.
The scientific method is building up knowledge by noticing a pattern, coming up with an explanation for that pattern, then thinking what further effects that explanation would imply, and looking for those effects.
So when someone claims something is “outside the realm of science”, how could that be?
Often it’s either because it isn’t reproducible (it’s a miracle that supposedly happened once and never will happen again) or it doesn’t affect anything.
If it isn’t reproducible, it’s hard to believe that it happened that way. Perhaps you are missing some details?
If it doesn’t affect anything, why care?
For the ghost stuff … the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane.
I’ve heard of many, many attempts to scientifically prove supernatural effects and none that showed a result. Most ghost stories I’ve heard have other more reasonable explanations if you think about it. Memory tends to be unreliable so sometimes details may be added or changed to fit the expected explanation, even if the person doesn’t intend to be misleading. Of course, sometimes people do exaggerate or make things up deliberately.
Nevertheless, if you have some decent examples of actual evidence of ghosts, I’m genuinely curious.
I’m not really sure why you chose to reply to me, as opposed to anyone else who replied on this thread. You can believe whatever you want.
There’s no evidence that ghosts exist. Yes, there are many unexplained things. Yes, existence of ghosts is not impossible. But without evidence, it’s impossible to argue for something.
I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t believe in it. I’m just going to tell you that I won’t.
The details here might be a bit out of scope for a c/nostupidquestions thread but I’m basing my thoughts here on the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane.
What was it that convinced you?
It’s not important that you believe in ghosts. It’s only important that they believe in themselves.
I knew an athiest who believed in ghosts. no idea how he squared that.
I am the friend OP is referring to and I am also an atheist
Don’t you just need to believe in a soul? And haven’t philosophers been pondering that in various ways for a long time?
I think this post on another thread nails the core of the issue for me and it’s pretty independent of religion (since I think potential mechanisms could be independent of religion):
If a bunch of people were going around saying I got this weird burn on my skin after holding this rock for a while, scientists would have discovered radioactivity a lot sooner.
There are a bunch of people going around claiming to have interacted with ghosts, and we’ve got bupkis.
https://fedia.io/m/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world/t/3507873/-/comment/14195254
Its wierd to me when someone does not believe in god because of no evidence but will believe in ghosts, spirits, elves, fairies, aliens, magic, etc with no evidence. To me atheism is not believing in the supernatural at all be it god or the philosphers stone.
Ah, I see.
I’d argue we all believe in a thing or two that we don’t have great evidence for when confronted. And I’d argue the size of the collection of things we could believe is mind bogglingly large. So then you end up with combinations like this.
But yeah, agreed from the framing in your comment that believing both is pretty logically inconsistent.
Thinking through this idea a bit more, I think there are a lot of people that would describe themselves as atheists that believe that certain things will improve their health in a way that others would describe as lacking evidence and should be included on that list. If you push on that idea then I think you’d start getting tension and pushback from a lot of atheists. I’m sure there are other categories you could do this with but I’m not thinking of others quickly now.
The only evidence is anecdotal, there just happens to be a lot of it.
So no, I’d say it’s unreasonable to believe in ghosts. (Though I do love ghost stories and folklore.)
If ghosts existed it’d be the biggest fucking news and all research would focus on it. Proof of an afterlife? Another universe beyond this one? We’d go there instead of space. Elon would want to set up a colony.
What type are we talking about? Sexy?
Or scary?
Either way, Dr Beverly Crusher would be aroused.
(yes it was a tough choice between this and the yoga one)
They can be both at the same time.
Reason on its own doesn’t bring enough to the table. Without critical thinking (and even with it) reason can lead to any conclusion.
If the data you reason on is flawed (and it is for everyone) then you’ll end up with wrong conclusions no matter how reasonable you are.
The more you know the less stuff you’re comfortable ruling out.
There’s nothing that disproves ghosts, but there’s nothing that proves them either.
You could have said “souls” instead, because that’s just another word for consciousness. But it doesn’t work for ghosts
There’s nothing to disprove ghosts because there’s no real definition of what a ghost is.
If someone gives me a real unambiguous agreed upon definition of what a ghost is, I’ll explain why we know they don’t exist.
absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
not proof, no. but it is evidence.
Does your friend consider themselves on the left or the right side of the graph?
Any graph like that where it puts their own beliefs as ‘smart’ and others beliefs as ‘dumb’ is inherently a pretty useless graph. Graph says them smart, you dumb. Does the graph not convince you? LOL.
