Submitted 20 hours ago by yizus@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f69075cd-78aa-4428-8964-26309bd6c53c.jpeg
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?
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.
No, they can’t
Your friend is likely to be a bit of a numpty
Either way, Dr Beverly Crusher would be aroused.
They can be both at the same time.
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.
Yes, hi. Heres another comment I made that explains my position better.
As per the graph. Is not meant to be “inherently useful”. Its literally just a meme. Its meant to be funny.
Depends on how you define “reasonable”. Personally I interpret it as “perfectly rational”, and I believe that a perfectly rational person with imperfect knowledge would acknowledge that ghosts cannot be 100% disproven, and as such there is a chance that they exist. And once you’re past that threshold, belief doesn’t have to conflict with rational thinking.
Can a horse become a ghost?
IIRC native americans have some myths of ghostly horses who lived on after death as spiritual beings.
Neolithic ectoplasm
Alright, I’m stealin’ that!
sounds like a good band.
It’s fun to think up thought experiments that explain away the reasons we can’t prove they exist.
Time isn’t linear, we’re just limited to experiencing it that way while we’re alive.
After we die, we experience time differently; in an impossible-to-describe way, but is akin to a book with limitless pages. Your existence is a bookmark in this book, and dying makes you lose your place.
It is possible to re-find your place, but with unfathomable access to unfathomable histories and futures, there is a near-infinite choice of other events and timelines for a ghost to visit and observe and experience.
Coupled with that, there are laws— some sort of physical laws, not arbitrary— to visiting the pages of this book, in that they can only be done in areas that do not cause pages before or after to change dramatically. A ghost is a spec of ink on the page; it cannot write letters, words, or sentences. If anything like this were ever done, we would never know as our minds would simply accept the memory as fact without knowing, or delete the memory of a ghost the way we space out driving on a highway or having to look at our watch a second time.
Lastly, our senses are all on varying spectrums; some of us able to see, hear, smell, experience things others cannot. One of our senses is a sense of time. Some people’s sense of time operates on a scope of a wider caliber than others, experiencing things others cannot, which is why some of us may have experienced ghosts while others haven’t.
You are confusing Thought Experiments with daydreaming.
Yikes
fwiw I don’t believe any of what I just wrote.
It’s just a creative exercise imo/fun worldbuilding
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
absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
not proof, no. but it is evidence.
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.
You could have said “souls” instead, because that’s just another word for consciousness.
I’d refine that a bit. By “soul” most people are referring to a perceived “center” of consciousness where the experiencer is located. Things happen in consciousness, but the “soul” or “self” is what we think those things are happening to.
Are you able to provide specific evidence that ghosts AREN’T real?
Never imaged
Never measured
Never captured
Never seen by people without mental health issues.
yes.
the utter lack of convincing evidence that ghosts are real is evidence that ghosts are not real.
An utter lack of evidence thus far
I haven’t seen compelling enough evidence to believe in the supernatural.
That said, we do seem to be well on our way to engineering ghost-like phenomenon. People will set up LLMs and generative AI systems that imitate dead people, if they haven’t already…
No ghosts IRL? No problem! We’ll make ghosts!
Thanks Humanity. 🙄️
they did that for Christopher Pelkey, so he could testify at his killer’s sentencing. For some travesty of justice, the judge was an idiot and allowed it as a “victim impact statement”.
Like right after Charlie got Kirked Christians started sharing AI videos of him talking about forgiveness and shit.
Glenn Beck is making a “George AI” and Prager U in partnership with the White House are making Founding Father AI systems to lie to children about history and Christianity.
Horrifyingly there’s also HearAfter Ai.
Maybe not genuinely, but i think im a reasonable person and I have a slot in my head for ghosts. I dont truly believe in them but have seen and experienced some weird stuff that I cant explain, and since I cant recreate the weirdness to test out a bunch of different things until they can be explained, “a ghost did it” is a convenient box to put them in.
I have a similar mental box for aliens in the sky.
Real? Who cares? It’s fun!
Well, we care. That’s why I asked. It’s just that some people are certain about they position on this and refuse to back it up.
And of course it’s fun, I’ll happily suspend belief for 90 minutes to allow me to be creeped out by a good ghost movie, but that ends when the credits start rolling.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
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.