Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Do you believe in ghosts and other related phenomena?
Posts
Pretty much. There actually are cultures out there with no concept of ghosts, and as a result they don't see ghosts.
Uh because it would violate or introduce new information that has not been predicted or even remotely expected? There's no way it would be a tiny blip.
steam
Because your argument hinges on "scientists are fallible therefore ghosts," whereas no one is saying "people who have paranormal experiences are delusional therefore no ghosts," but in fact are saying "there are no ghosts, therefore people who think they have paranormal experiences are delusional" as a consequence of our argument that there are no ghosts due to the overwhelming amount of evidence that there are no ghosts.
Oh, that and anecdotal evidence that you insist is our job to dig up.
Really? Who?
As for the cultures who have a concept of ghosts: Which came first, the concept of ghosts, or seeing ghosts? And if it's the former, where did the concept come from?
I'm not being facetious. I'm genuinely curious.
Would you like me to list the ways in which ghosts can't exist based on current scientific understanding? It first depends on what the fuck you mean by "ghosts." What does it even mean? It's almost impossible to define as defining it means putting it into sensible language and that's something no one seems to be able to do. But let's take the standard concept of some sort of spirit that continues on after one dies.
This means there needs to be
A) A supernatural realm
B) dualism, and
C) an afterlife
None of these concepts have any reasonable definition, let alone evidence. They are logically contradictory and generally unsound scientifically.
Evidence for any of them would be an earth-shattering event. It would uproot the entire scientific framework which has enabled us to do everything from cooking bacon in microwaves to playing COD4.
The fact that you don't seem to grasp the importance of such a finding is telling. You really need a better education on the foundations of science.
"There are no ghosts" is not a scientific statement. It's a statement of faith.
And as for my NEED to stop, check the thread title. I'm playing by the same rules as you.
http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/14.html
Most of the people now alive, in fact most of the people who have ever lived, have believed in one or more of your A, B, and C. Granted, anecdotal evidence for the most part. But "anecdotal evidence" is too easy a whipping boy.
Whoop de doo. Hume. "Miracles can't happen because miracles are a priori impossible." Yeah, there's a sound argument. You might want a different philosopher to underpin science. Radical skepticism like Hume's pretty much undermines scientific inquiry because all such skepticism operates from within a framework which must remain immune to the same skepticism, lest it implode when presented with any "paradigm-shifting" information. You might want to try Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
Most of the people who have ever lived died at 30 years old and thought they needed to slaughter innocent creatures to appease a sun god.
Your point?
How many cavemen figured out how to go to the moon?
While not ghosts specifically, you could ask that of most anything people have ever come up with. Where did people come up with witches? Leprechauns? Dragons? Lovecraftian horrors lurking beyond the edges of perception? People have imaginations, see patterns where there are none, and have since the dawn of man. Coming up with an idea in no way suggests that those things actually exist, so even if we can't answer how people came up with ghosts in the first place (and I doubt that we can), that in no way suggests they are real.
but honestly i dont want to see them, fuck that, ill die one day then ill see dead spirits and shit, for now im good.
because she's not lying. she's misinterpreting something, or convincing herself (sound most likely, it's really easy to do), or or exaggerating, or just flat out delusional (which is very rare).
people who are talking about supernatural experiences are very rarely actually flat-out lying. if they are, they often end up convincing themselves.
Most of them have believed in some kind of afterlife, too, what's your - oh, crap, I was going to make a strawman argument here, then I realized that the imagined, easily defeatable argument I was making up to put in your mouth was actually what you're saying.
Let me try again. Just because your argument relies only on the single most inconsequential evidence that exists, just because your supporting evidence is as weak as evidence can possibly be and still be called evidence by any standard, doesn't suggest that it's right. Your argument can not actually be so wrong it has to be right.
I did it again. I'm sorry, your position here is impossible to strawman. I feel like Colbert trying address Rush Limbaugh.
Well said. But I doubt most of those things were either complete fabrications or delusions. A better question would be "What, if anything, is the basis for this belief?" I think that's worthy of investigation. For ghosts or any of the others (Well, maybe not Lovecraftian horrors.)
You're right. Most of the people who have ever lived, in fact, are alive right now, were ignorant, deluded fools. How wonderful it is that you skeptic fundies have arisen to lead us all out of the darkness.
This must be what it's like to argue with a fundamentalist evangelical. Everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.
Me too. Sigh.
i am merely asking that feelings and stories and experiences be substantiated and weighed against logic and scientific knowledge
OH NOES I R TEH ELITIST!?!?!!?!?!?
Which brings us back to the fallibility of perception...
LOL
you "scientists" just dismiss it out of hand with your "logic"!
here's a pro-tip: a bunch of people believing in something does not make it true
steam
The irony is so think I've come to believe he's a troll.
Or maybe a ghost troll.
Oh shit.
Boy, you got that right. Like uniformitarianism, spontaneous generation, absolute frames of reference, theory of the four humours, the geocentric universe .... and all the other infallible scientific theories that it was considered delusional to question.
"Paranormal" is just a word for anything that is currently at the fringe (or beyond) of current understanding. Paradigms will change. Knowledge will expand and change. And "ghosts" and the rest of it will in all likelihood have an explanation someday. But I don't know what it will be. And neither do you.
they already have an explanation
they have a perfectly valid and logical and scientific explanation
you are ignoring this in favor of the one that gives you thrills you haven't felt since you were 5 years old
I'd have to dig up my old Anthropology course book, but in it was a story of a woman who tried telling Macbeth to a group in the African swamps who used stories to pass the time between seasons when the swamp was so flooded they couldn't do anything, but fell into a problem on Act I Scene I because they don't have any idea what a ghost would be.
And I personally don't know for sure where the idea of ghosts would come from, but it would seem that if they were real they would be universal.
The ironic part is that ghosts are more like the beliefs in spontaneous generation and the four humours than their later explanations.
Only if you assume (naively, I think) that ghosts HAVE TO be the spirits of the dead. If you try to look at the evidence objectively --- "What is this phenomenon that so many people experience?" --- then it may (or may not) turn out to be a paradigm buster. Who knows?
The story from Africa is fascinating. One wonders what they would experience if they visited some place that was supposedly "haunted." Or if they watched a horror movie like "The Grudge."
Umm.
If you do approach it that way, you get mundane, natural answers, not anything paranormal. That's the problem. That's why what you're saying is utterly absurd.
One does, but not the other.
Maybe he's right, maybe we're just working off a faulty definition of the word ghost.
Maybe a ghost isn't a fictitious entity at all, but a phenomenon of sensory perception that we fail to explain!
Hmmm...
Maybe it's the disembodied spirit of the definition of the word 'ghost'.