Do you believe in ghosts?

Humans are very good at finding patterns, our brains are highly adapted for it, so much so that we often find patterens where there really are none (sort of a better safe than sorry phenomenon). In addition, we are also hardwired to recognise some special patterens more easily, especially faces (give a person a random design and most will be able to find a face soemwhere in the image). Constellations in the starts, bunny shaped clouds, the face on mars, the man in the moon, rock formations that look like people, the coat on the chair that looks like a demon staring at you in the dead of the night. During our evolution, survival often depended on recognising patterns and coming to quick assessments of danger. This lead to two things:

1. Making recogniseable patterns out of everything we see
2. Dislike for "I don't know" answers

Belief in the supernatural allows the brain to say "I know the answer to that" and move on. When we can't do that the brain is not happy and tries to figure out what is going on... usually wasting time and energy that should be spent on more pressing matters.

Couple this with our tendency to see human faces and shapes in everything and its really no shock that people belive in ghosts.


I've had some strange experiences. Often I could figure out what they really were and I have no reason to beilve that the ones I couldn't figure out had "supernatural" causes. On several occasions I have experienced Sleep Paralysis and I can tell you it scared the bejesus out of me, but again, I have no reason to belive that there was anything supernatural going on.

The brain is an extremely complicated thing and we are only just begining to understand how it works. We already know that feelings of a presenece or out of body experiences can be induced by making alterations to the brain, either chemically (as with Chip's LSD experiment), mechanically (blow to the head, surgery, high G forces), electromagneticly and probably some other ways that I'm not thinking of. All these things can be done without the intervetion of supernatural forces.

In addition, people are very good at gathering information selectivly and only seeing what they want to see. That's how cold readings are done, its why most people who gamble regularly insist that they usually come out ahead (when they don't) and why all those "personality" quizzes that have been floating around always seem to give the "right" answer.

I've never seen good evidence that the "souls" of dead people are walking around. I think it would be nice if it were, but I'm afraid that there is simply no support for it.

I must say to all of you, don't ever change These kind of debates are great with no real flaming going on! yay!

Scientific based posts: I agree with them on the level that we are dicovering things about the human mind which could lead to "trickery" of thoughts and memories during tramatic events and due to fear. I need to add that what we think we are reproducing in lab experiments may not be the truth at all as there can be no impartial or unbiased observer there to verify the results as the testing, data collection and data analysis are all done by human minds that are trying to understand other human minds. Also, I tend to beleive that no scientist is impartial or unbiased in these fields anyway, to get to the level of what the community considers as a pro requires years and years of dedicated work studying the past works of others who were set in their ways like Freud. Unless we can actually get a 100% unbiased being to perform all the testing, data colletion and analysis then perhaps their data needs to be viewed as nothing more than faith based when it comes to the field of the human mind/soul. Also, how many of these pros are even taught things that deal with the soul and spirit during their learning time?

Faith/Soul/Spirit based posts: I completely agree and have had un-explainable encounters/events in my life that scientific analysis could not dismiss. Not only first hand encounters but the dreams that predict things with an uncanny accuracy. two of the first hand encounters were while I was in high school, almost made me mess my pants too. (no alchohol or other drugs were part of this)

I don't think that this subject will ever be settled, if ghosts are not real then no one will ever know as we will just vanish without a trace on this planet without being able to tell any one. If ghosts/spirits do exist here on the earth, perhaps it is something the living is forbidden to know.

Wow, so many forum readers believe in ghosts. I'm impressed. Even though several think I'm on crack lol

I've been a big fan of mythology and folklore, especially how it exists and is evolving in modern day life. (for example extraterrestrial mythology has been changing rapidly over the last 50 years and is full of contradictory stories in much the same way that stories of Heracles often contradict one another)

But this thread got me thinking. Why do we associate ghost phenomena with the souls of dead people? Of course this isn't universally true, it is sometimes attributed to demons, extraterrestrial beings or something else. I think that maybe it is related to both taboos regarding the handling of dead bodies as well as the grieving process.

On a purely functional level, fear of the dead coming back to haunt the living if their bodies are not treated properly serves to reduce the risk of spreading disease from dead bodies. For people who don't understand how germs spread, but still know that if you don't bury (or cremate etc) a person properly then people start getting sick. A reasonable assumption is that the dead person is angry and extracting revenge. This works on a functional level, but seems incomplete.

The easy explanation is that we assume ghosts are the souls of the dead because we want to believe in an afterlife. I've had some very vivid dreams where I was with people (and cats) who had died. But it seems overly simplistic to attribute ghosts with the desire to believe that loved ones are carrying on. It seems fairly rare (from what I understand) that hauntings are caused by deceased known to the people experiencing the haunting.

Any other armchair psychologists want to pipe in and try to explain why people associate unexplained, fear inducing experiences with the souls of dead people? I'm not trained enough to come up with an answer that i'm fully happy with. (and yes... I know that saying "because they're real" would work, but I don't find that answer plausible either)

One reason many see ghosts as the departed is.. many have seen ghosts that appear as humans. Also, many of these sighting are of people known to have lived.

One of these sightings was by small child who was able to identify the person who used to live in the house in a photo line-up. She knew his name and very many details of his life. She would come in from playing, and when asked with whom she was playing, she would name the old man.

For that reason many people believe ghosts are people who passed away.

Great point about the handling of dead bodies. I think many taboos and myths have practical origins like that (like the Old Testament god not wanting anyone to eat shellfish, mix wool and linen, and so on).

I think there are concepts that humans naturally have great difficulty comprehending and mortality is one of them. That one day we simply die and rot is pretty difficult for people to accept, for obvious reasons. Life after death is central to mythology as a result, so you have the idea of the soul (or something like it) in pretty much all cultures throughout history. It's a cornerstone to most people's view of the universe and their place in it. It's a salve against what is observable about death (you keel over, rot, the end).

Our myths tend to be incredibly egocentric and revolve around man being the center of all things and eternal (which follows from the above), and they also tend to be extremely anthropomorphic. Gods change the causality of all things from "something caused that to happen" to "someone did that." Natural processes aren't credited to nature but to gods constructed in our own image. Our cultural framework flows out from that central egotism.

So we have thousands of years of cultural history in which we anthroporphize everything and try and convince ourselves that death isn't the end. I think the idea of ghosts follows quite naturally, especially when you combine it with the way the brain works (pattern reconition and so on as you mentioned earlier). There's both a psychological carrot and stick for believing in ghosts, both of which are exploited by religion to great effect. The carrot is that it reinforces the notion that death is negotiable (what is religion but a human hierarchy of people offering to negotiate on your behalf?). The stick is that if you disbelieve, don't work with the right negotiator, or otherwise screw up, you might be pestered by demons, go to purgatory, so on and so forth. Our natural tendencies , our myths that grow out of those tendencies, and our institutions which exploit them all reinforce each other.

Does it seem Chip thinks any idea of ghosts is akin to a myth?

Would this be an effort to debase other's opinions of ghosts, by comparing them to mythology?

Actually. Mythology helps to comprise the history of a time and a people, so to speak. What would the Roman and Greek histories mean to us without their mythologies still intact. I think that calling something myths by no means denigrates it.

Comparing anyone's personal opinion of reality to mytholgy is a way to lower that opinion to an obvious falsehood that the person clings to irrationally. It may not be meant as an insult, but it clearly is one.

I'm stating plainly and unapologetically that in my opinion ghosts are pure mythology. Sorry if that makes you feel debased. Actually, I'm not sorry. If you said you thought American Idol is the best tv show ever and I told you that I think you're completely wrong, would I be debasing your beliefs or just expressing my contrary opinion? The rush to accuse anyone who disagrees with religious concepts of being somehow rude, cruel, tactless, and somehow perpetuating a crime against believers is an irrational learned behavior. It's a social taboo that exists and is reinforced by people like you for no other purpose than to dehumanize and silence dissentors. It's a thoroughly facile tactic to use in a serious respectful debate.

This seems a bit vauge, what urban legend people call "freind of a friend" eveidence. Is this documented? How carefully was this done? I've seen stories like this on TV shows about ghosts and they're usually so full of holes that they just can't be believed. Please give more details.

Email and Snopes have convinced me, against my better wishes for humanity, that people will go to absurd lengths to make sh*t up, at best, for personal gain, and at worst (which seems much more profitable and fun to me), for the wicked pleasure of seeing a meme spread.

If anything, the internet should make people MORE suspicious of hearsay and it makes me confused to see it used for the opposite. It seems like some kind of eSin to use the internet to try to make people more ACCEPTING of hearsay, but I suspect that the majority of bandwidth that isn't used for selling penis enlargers or porn is used for this purpose.

Must. have. blueberries....

Yes!

There have been many posts that suggest ghosts aren't real. They did it without suggesting people who disagree with them do so because they follow myths and legends.

I don't expect you to be sorry for your opinion or the fact some people would be offended by your comments.

You asked why people think of ghosts as people who died. I explained to you why I think so. This poll isn't about proving ghosts exist. Just gathering opinions.

If you are truly interested in ghosts, there is plenty of information on both sides of the debate on google search.

I'm a bad bad man.

Meow =^.^=

I'm sorry for being curious and engaging.

Sorry, didn't mean to sound snappy. I thought you were looking for me to prove ghosts exist.

np, i wouldn't expect you to prove the existance of ghosts when no one has been able to yet.

That's true. We are still discovering new species left and right. We can't cure the common cold.

I doubt we can physically prove a non-physical entity exists. One would need physical feedback.

The problem is that you aren't loud enough. You need to post more messages, louder messages, bigger messages, and not just in Off-Topic.

WWJD?

Mar 15:37 And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.

I'll try to keep up with you, brother Chance. Lead on!

Physical feedback might actually be there. Just that the scientific community tends to ignore or criticize paranormal studies. Current theory is that ghosts are electromagnetic remnants that can be measured with modern instruments. In most documented paranormal research, there has been a correlation between electromagnetic activity and ghosts.

So far there's two kinds of "ghosts" out there. The first, and most common, being an "imprint" or "recording" of events in a particular location playing themselves over and over again. Usually this happens in battlefields, murder sites, or other places that have experianced a lot of emotional intensity.

The second kind are the electromagnetic remnants of a once living intellegence that haunts a place. These are the kind that are recorded saying stuff in EVP and documented to move objects around, ect...

Scientitst are supposed to be critical of their data, if they don't examine their data critically then they aren't being scientific.

What are electromagnetic remnants? I assume you're not talking about magntic remanence since finding a magnet wouldn't be all that hard.

What kind of electromagnetic activity is measured? What instruments are used?

If you are making correlation between electromagnetic activity and ghosts, then there must be some other method you are using to determine when there are ghosts. What is that technique?

Proof Ghosts Exist http://www.wimp.com/proof/ Muhahaha