The Supernatural in SL

White Noise.

Silly plot, movie was sub-par, but a halfway decent treatment of the basic phenomenon.

LOL! Look in the mirror and repeat that line.

-Ghoti

CREEPY.






EQUALLY CREEPY

Every once in a while I am walking around my forest in Sand and I see what looks like the figure of a person in the corner of my eye. When I turn around nothing is there and there are no green dots on the map. It ain't no tree either and I don't do drugs.

We discovered an ancient graveyard on our land and I suspect there is a connection as it appears that the original pioneer family all died at the same time though I have no idea how.

I may need to hire a professional to look into this as it really spooks me.

*giggles* thassa Linden spying on you, silly

If it is possible for very powerful emotions and personalities to, in some manner, emanate some form of actual energy, then why would it not manifest it's self in an electronic medium?

If the residual energy is powerful enough to linger in RL houses and objects as a personality of sorts, then I'd say that it's even more likely to be in an electronic medium like Second Life.

I have not seen enough evidence scientifically to convince me that under no circumstances can "residual personality" exist and I have had some RL experiences that are scientifically unexplainable. Which is what makes such experiences disconcerting.

If someone really loved SL and they died in RL but there AV was still in SL, isn't that an electronic form of their personality already? If some form of their personal energy was strong enough to remain behind and manipulate that AV, then they would be an pixel ghost would'nt they?

I mean, given the opportunity, if I died in RL and could download my personality to Rose Karuna - it'd do it in a "heart beat".

(Oh and I was not kidding about the Ouji board, I really did buy one in SL last night but it was really late and I did not have the time to use it. I'm going to play with it this weekend though.)

.

< thinks she saw the face of jesus on the side of a default prim. Vows never to build in SL.

Weeel since this stuff is really in our heads to begin with, iI would say yes!

I have not one, but two haunted houses - or so a third party claims.

It works like this. Take a script, test it outside either of the houses and it works fine. Install the script in the house and it simply won't work...

A friend tried to trouble-shoot it for me and exited the house after about 20 minutes declaiming 'that damn house is haunted - I give up!'

Otherwise I have friends who claim that AVs have souls... And indeed both I and others have found certain alts very hard to use because they seem to creep out both the user and other residents who meet the alt, even if they KNOW it's an alt and who's behind it.
Which is odd...

Pixel-ghosts? Now that's an interesting concept. Except, how would you know?

Another thing that struck me within a week of entering SL was that there seems to be a strange serendipty at work here. Things, and people, just seem to turn up when you need them...

Is there a difference between the supernatural and the metanatural? I'm not really sure why we could say that the shared perceptions of our virtual world couldn't be affected by otherworldy phenomena as much our shared perceptions of the physical world.

Personally, I would think the involvement of supernatural forces (if they exist) would be more easily involved in the virtual world. This is a world created by the mind...in many ways we show our souls online a bit more than we do anywhere else. If ideas, thoughts, and dreams are so easily accepted in this world, why wouldn't forces beyond our perceptions be able to interact with it?

Heck, for all I know, I've been talking to hundred of ghosts in the machine for years. I find that a powerfully fascinating idea. Heck, maybe Heaven is Second Life.

Sure as heck isn't Iowa.

A SecondLife parcel cant be actually haunted because its just a 3D representation of a chunk of data.

If anything, if a ghost decide to haunt anything in SecondLife, it will be able to do alot more then just haunt the parcel - since everything is equaly a bunch of data and electronic signals.

So i'd be looking for some even more obscure and weird mischief.

I've been taking applications for resident ghost now for ages!

OMG - you should sell that prim on ebay!!!111!

I haven't experienced anything of the kind here but I suppose that it is possible.

Here are a few Assumptions and Observations that might make it so:

Assumption 1 - Ghosts and spirits exist. We might call them non-physical entities (NPE's hehe).

Assumption 2 - Ghosts and spirits are not exactly physical creatures but are composed of some kind of energy.

Assumption 3 - They possess some type of mind or metal pattern.

Assumption 4 - They have the will or need to interact with us.

Assumption 5 - They can enter or effect electronic devices.


Observations:

NPE's have been noted throughout human history. Some of my best friends who are pretty stable have seen them themselves. This could just still all be in one's mind but it does make me think that there might be something to it.

They do supposedly like to use electronic devices to contact the "living". The telephone was a popular device for doing this and still is.

How do they do this? It could have something to do with what is called the "Xenos Effect". In Quantum Physics (yes, physicists roll your eyes. let's bring up quantum physics to justify our crackpot theories once again) experiments have shown that an object can be "changed" by the mere act of observation, such as a radiologic decay of certain items actually changes when someone is watching. However, this does not seem to occur with "larger objects" but maybe if you're a being composed of energy primarily you could effect devices in some manner? How fine your manipulation could be is another matter... SL is a heck of lot more complex than a telephone. Perhaps SL'ers who pass on to the spirit world will have a better chance of manipulatiing the medium.

There are reports of people are shown to have some kind of "ability" to effect electronic devices albeit unconcsiously, in things such as watches and street lights, making them shut down and inoperative when on their person of in the immediate vicinity.

The phenomena of "remote viewing" or the ability to "see" places one hasn't visited before just by targeting them with indirect information implies that parts of the world can be accessed in ways alternate to the conventional physical methods. Who is to say that other beings could not do the same and thus find SL?

The problem lies in the fact that SL itself demonstrates and allows behavior that otherwise could be construed as "supernatuiral" in RL. SL is dreamlike in that anything can happen.

How are we supposed to identify "supernatural" phenom in SL should be the more pertinent question if it does exist?

look at this, then look at large Prim.... $5,000L please

Torrid is haunted.

I mean haunting. Torrid is haunting

The sim Yabune is haunted, or at least the very southern part of it.

I've seen objects move on their own, floors and walls turn phantom on their own, a whole room full of scripted objects just suddenly stop working and never work again.

We joked about the early Perilous Pleasures being haunted, but many strange things did indeed happen there, including all of the above, plus some corner-of-the-eye sightings of what folks took to be other AVs, but when turning their cam to look, saw nothing there.

I myself was building in the basement of the old Perilous Pleasures one night, very late (I think around 2am) and as I was dragging a prim into position, saw what I thought was another AV come down the stairs behind me. It was dark down there, being underwater, and I just caught a quick glimpse. But as soon as I got the prim in place (just took a couple of seconds)I looked at the little map, and no other green dots but myself. I looked around and nothing.

But we did have objects on the walls move, including objects that would suddenly start slowly rotating while we stood and watched. And we did have floor sections and walls turn phantom overnight or right before our eyes. A small room in the build, with some notecard giving scripts, suddenly became script unfriednly one day. We could never get another script to work in that small 10 x 10 x10 area again. Strange things would happen at events from time to time as well. Folks would just shake their heads and say "The ghosts are back".

Haha, that's cool.

I don't know about a ghost manifesting, which is basically what you have referred to. But I've done a number of tarot readings for people that require them to be involved. The way I do it though, I handle all the cards in the real world on my end and ask the person getting the reading for feedback when required in the game world.

I forgot to include tarot cards!

I thought GIANT CUBE was quite the supernatual phenomenon.

I don't know about SL supernatural stuff, but...

One of my SL ex's, I SWEAR may have been possessed. She'd go from sweet, charming, lovable, sexy, delightful woman to a raging sulfer-spewing, wild-eyed bag of hate, loathing, and uncontrollable rage in a matter of seconds! And then, back again!

or, then again.. maybe she just didn't like my after shave....

or, then again.. she was female, so maybe that's normal.....

<grins>

I'm feeling a little possessed myself right about now!

East of the Rockies, you're on the air ...