Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?
ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafe 13 hours agoit is not irrational, to observe (or experience) something and not being able to explain it.
i do not have any reason to assume my friend is a liar. so she heard her fathers voice. how or why she heard it we will never know, as she was not hooked up to a brainwave scanner or similar.
apparently we have different people from different times having experienced similar things. thanks @Timecircleline@sh.itjust.works for pointing to the Third Man Factor! so i would say it is quite reasonable to believe something can happen to us humans in extreme situations. is it just our imagination? quite possible! especially considering the more extreme stories mentioned in the wikipedia page surely drove those people to or past their individual limits. but that brings me back to my last paragraph: it doesn’t change anything or even matter. those voices, or whatever they where helped those people survive extreme situations and live to tell the tale. whether it was a deceased loved one, a valkyrie from norse mythology, friendly tree spirit, their subconsciousness wanting to survive, … or just hallucination due to thirst/starvation/exhaustion.
the effects didn’t change. so whatever the cause is, shouldn’t change my, your, or anybody else’s life
brad_troika@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I agree, and that’s where I would stop, I can’t explain it, I don’t know what this is.
I think in general it matters what we believe to be true or not, you might think that in a certain situation believing a false thing can result the same (or better) way than not believing but beliefs are not restricted to certain situations and will inform our decisions elsewhere, maybe with more dire consequences. A quick example would be mediums who pray and scam grieving people out of time and money.
ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafe 10 hours ago
mediums are a completely different thing, as they peddle a ‘wonder product’. claiming things without proof and asking for money. but that modus operandi is not restricted to non-science. radioactive underware was a thing…
i am talking about people who did experience something and how they choose to interprete that experience for themselves. if you ask me, it was most likely their body and mind being pushed across certain borders - which made them feel things that where not actually there. if you asked me about my grandfather, i would tell you that he is most likely not here or there and it is just my imagination. but it gives me a little bit of comfort to at least allow the possibility that he is somewhere.
those are all personal choices about personal experiences, which do not affect anybody. but if someone start selling a product or even a religion. they crossed a line and are (trying) to affect other people.
brad_troika@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Can you disprove all mediums? What if someone has an experience with them that they can’t explain but felt powerful and they made a personal choice to believe that they did talk to a dead relative.
ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafe 9 hours ago
why would anyone spend time to disprove mediums (if not for the fun of it)? like anything in science I have to prove MY hypothesis. so if a medium wants to claim what they are doing is actually ghosts, the burden of prove is on them.
i would claim, that a reasonable person would attribute the medium (not a ghost summoned by the medium), if they are seeing things, hearing things, whatever a medium does… while they are in the room with that medium person. again, the medium needs to prove anything happening is not just them messing around. i guess they could put some LSD into my coffee before leaving and make me see things alone. but i am pretty sure the LSD would be detectable and the person responsible for drugging me arrested.
a medium and other trickery cannot be used as explanation for those people who experienced the third man factor. while it is totally OK for you or anybody to say “{…}, and that’s where I would stop, I can’t explain it, I don’t know what this is.”. the scientific approach would be to form a hypothesis, and start doing experiments to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. the problem is, that i cannot think of an ethical way to do such experiments. which is why, i don’t believe we will be able to prove or disprove such a thing. so let’s go with Occam’s razor and prefer the explanation where people hallucinate things, due to body and mind being pushed beyond limits.