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Do you believe in ghosts and other related phenomena?
Posts
what about alien ghosts
you fuckers never thought of that one, did ya
It's plausible of course, we exist. It's just so very unlikely.
What about celebrity alien ghosts?!
MINDFUCK
I'm doing Movember for Men's Health! Donate if you can - thanks.
she also believes that she is psychic, and that psychic powers are a matrilineal family gift.
i think she's ridiculous.
This is a silly thing to say.
We evolved eyes, neural systems, and brains - you think a wheel is going to be difficult? I mean there's already clearly evolved flagellar motors or whatever they're called, on the microscopic scale.
Who even knows if another form of life, if it were even recognizable, would have something resembling DNA? I think evolution as a concept would broadly apply to any form of life, necesarily, but who knows how their reproduction and selection would function, and what it would produce, especially in alternate environments?
Also, there aren't too many ways for locomotion to take place on the land on earth with our gravity/atmosphere other than some form of appendage locomotion. Why wouldn't these hypothetical intelligent aliens be aquatic, for instance, or adapted to any other environment you could think of?
And for all intents and purposes we are identical to chimps on a universal scale. We're omnivorous primates with opposable thumbs who can use tools, stereoscopic vision, and rely on social groups for survival. Compared to something like a scorpion or a squid, we are almost entirely identical to chimps. And we would by necessity be even closer to a scorpion or a squid than anything that came from another planet.
EDIT: EM Beat me
"Hey man, did I tell you I heard a ghost in camp the other night?"
"You did not hear a ghost, but go ahead and tell me the story, I"ll listen."
"I was in the camp kitchen and I heard a woman's voice and no one was around."
"Was it windy out?"
"Yeah."
"In camp, you said?"
"Yeah."
"And you want me to believe you heard a woman's voice instead of just hearing the wind blowing through some cracks in that musty old kitchen?"
"My mom heard it too earlier!"
"So you think two people are incapable of mistaking the sound of wind for a very low woman's voice?"
Umm.
The universe is not infinite.
And if there are ghosts there are totally alien ghost zombie vampires, somewhere in the universe, who feed on the souls of malevolent plantmen of Alpha Ceti V.
There's still a difference there. Yes, Murphy's Law applies. Over a long enough period of time anything that can happen, will happen. But we're not actually dealing with infinites as far as the universe is concerned. So, maybe, we are it. Maybe we aren't. But we're just talking odds, and functionally, I'm alien-agnostic if we're talking about intelligent life. The odds are low, but they're there, and there's a lot of universe, but we're not talking infinite scale, so it's not a 100% certainty despite the small odds.
Also, I'll just drop my two cents on the actual topic: ghost probably don't exist in any way whatsoever. We can simulate "ghost" experiences by prodding at the brain. It probably just boils down to neurological hiccups, paranoia, and various other entirely natural phenomenons.
I would like to take a moment to express my love for the word brachiate.
Like Ghost Hunters, but without the misuse of basic electronics and evidence tampering.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
They have actually managed to get some cool shit. Like furniture caught on camera moving by itself, sounds that are actually sounds and not EVPs and that seem unexplained, anomalious readings in both EM and thermal, etc.
Unfortunately, the validity of all this rests entirely on their credibility and there are some examples, such that from the Mansion murders thing where they showed tape from a thermal camera showing a cold spot forming but analysis of the shot by people shows that the numbers displayed were photoshopped, call this credibility into question.
Which sucks extra because it means that if anything they capture is real it still isn't good evidence.
EDIT:
Or were you talking about the first part?
Well, enough personal accounts taken together along with shit tons of video and audio recordings of wierd shit.
I was under the impression this was still an open question. The observable universe certainly isn't infinite, but there's more beyond that.
I don't really know anything about physics/astronomy but this has always really puzzled me.
It may be finite but without an edge, much as the surface of the earth is. You can walk around on it forever, but there's only a finite amount of it.
Going off topic here, but as long as others are mentioning it - I was thinking the other day about the idea of infinity and eternity and basically how it's just about the most unsettling thing I can think of. That led me into thinking about the laws of conservation of mass and energy and how neither can be created or destroyed, which means that basically they've always existed and always will. That idea freaks me out more than any supernatural crap ever could.
Which pretty much sums up my feelings.
In the end, you're left with what one person believed happened and the other person who argues it away and neither person has changed their opinion on the matter.
A fun thing to do is take all the names of the equipment they use to "detect ghosts" and look up what they are actually for, and realize almost immediately that they weren't detecting jack shit. Well, except the electromagnetic phenomena modern houses produce that those devices are designed to detect.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
Agreed: that's why i didn't include that equipment in my post
You guys have no idea whether the universe is infinite or not. Nobody does.
As long as you agree that it's a fun game that's fine.
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
haha, I enjoy Ghost Hunters as much as the next man. I do tend to call "utter bullshit" on it every now and again though.
WiiU NNID: BigDookie
You could make an argument for it being countably infinite, but the reality is that it is entirely finite - just because we are not in a position to count it easily does not mean that it is infinite. Numbers never stop going up, there is no number 'before' you hit infinity. It is a concept.
If you had infinite universe, you'd have infinite energy, you'd have infinite mass which would cause the instance collapse and crushing of the universe.
In other words, while it is good to be skeptical, it is not good to be skeptical out of hand simply because you assume something to be not true.
There are some things that are simply too unreliable to be useful. This includes personal experiences and EVPs, the former is more likely to be just people imaginning things and the latter is too easily just matrixing.
There are some things that are of questionable significance. This would be stuff like EM and thermal. You can have strange hot or cold spots on things but it's silly to go from that to "omg ghosts!" in a vacuum. But it you have a number of such things and are able to show that they occur at a statistically improbable rate, you have a basis for saying that there is something that needs to be explained.
Then you have things that are strong enough to stand on their own, but are suspect because of credability. Video of stuff moving on it's own, full body apparitions, etc can all be faked. However, it is incorrect to go "Ghost don't exist, therefore, all such evidence must be faked." On the contrary, you have to deal with each instance by itself and if you have any left that you can be reasonably sure wasn't faked, you have a good reason to suspect something else to be going on.
Infinite mass in a finite universe would certainly collapse into a huge black hole (actually it'd have to start in a black hole; without one infinite mass in finite space would be impossible by definition), but I don't think that would be the case (necessarily) in an infinite universe. Assuming the universe is homogeneous on large scales you'd have infinite mass distributed evenly in every direction, and thus on large scales the gravitational pull would cancel out.
Also, to the best of my knowledge gravitational effects are believed to spread at the speed of light, so once a given chunk of mass exited our light cone during inflation it would no longer influence our piece of the universe anyway.
It would be almost impossible for a wheel to exist as part of a living creature on earth. Seriously, think about it, it wouldn't really work. I have a really strong understanding of evolution, but I'm speaking from an earthly/anthropic perspective, as that's all we have evidence of at this time. I'm sure there's plenty of other ways that things can go to together, but we can assume that the ways certain things work here on earth are likely to happen elsewhere based upon what we know about the universe.
We don't, and all of that's speculation. We do know that what we have here on earth works, and that most of the 'stuff' that went into life on earth is pretty common throughout the universe. I do think it's fair to assume that selection rules will be similar throughout the universe-- things which are best suited for the environment will, all other factors equal, thrive. This is probably a discussion for another thread though. Unless we want to take it the direction of aliens being humanoids from far away that have come here to warn us of our inevitable destruction or something...
I fully welcome the day hard evidence is found, but it hasn't happened yet.
Seriously. I want to believe in magic and superpowers and whatnot, but until I see it or experience it, I just can't take anything reported secondhand seriously.
This makes me think... perhaps our cultural fascination with things like UFOs and ghosts stems from a childhood desire for the awesome to be real. Think about it... I myself remember spending hours pretending there were aliens and dinosaurs roaming my back yard. Maybe some of us just haven't let go of the awesome pretend games of youth.
This almost subconscious desire for The Awesome to be real... no doubt fuels many a UFO hunter.
I agree with you: what manner of skepticism to assume is the best subject of discussion here.
However, I also think that it's important to point out that the degree with which an explanation consisting of "ghosts!" fails to cohere with the entire structure of our modern scientific understanding of the world: not only do ghosts fail to reduce or interact in an understandable way with physical laws, but the very methodology with which we evaluate ghosts is qualitative rather than quantitative, which directly conflicts with the central assumptions and methodologies of the post-medieval scientific tradition.
So I think it's entirely reasonable to exclude ghosts from the realm of reasonable explanation. Of course, as you point out, there may be some other weird things going on, such that they could explain the temperature shifts and whatever it is that shows up on the ghost-o-meter, and those things may be worthy of study. So there could be interesting study to be done in these haunted manors (although I doubt there often is), however, the entire framework of our understanding of the world as it is currently rules out ghosts as a possible explanation. So dismissing them is pretty reasonable.
Of course, our knowledge is always subject to revision: perhaps one day we will uncover something so undeniable that it will fundamentally alter how we view ourselves, the world, and our scientific practice. But my contention here is that it would take something that fundamental before we could legitimately admit ghosts as a reasonable explanation.
Suppose you had the experience Ruzkin describes. How would you interpret it?
I think the bar for completely revising our understanding of the world is much lower than you think. For example, our original understanding of space and time was arguably more fundamental in our system of thought than our current beliefs about scientific laws is today, and yet it took hardly any evidence - just minute deviations from theory in a handful of instances - to completely demolish everything we believed about it.
I don't believe in ghosts. But there are possible experiences that could convince me otherwise. At a certain point, scientific explanations become the light of Venus reflecting off of marsh gas.