why we need ghosts

As I thought.

You don't know what a spin network is. You don't know anything about the quantum vacuum. And the words "emotive imprint" are just cover for bullshit.

A great example of pseudoscience.

 

Magical Realist:

No. You were serious in posting that rubbish. Then, when I called you on the bullshit you decided to back off and claim you were making some kind of joke. Better that than admit you had no idea what you were talking about.

This is what pseudoscientists do: they dress things up in fancy language (often culled from real science) but which doesn't actually mean anything when you drill down just a little.

If something is said to be an imprint on something else, don't you think it's important to decide what is actually being imprinted and what it is being imprinted on? "Some underlying substrate" is meaningless waffle that serves only to bamboozle the unwary.

Can't you see that what you've written is meaningless? It's like: "Ghosts are an imprint on something ... but I'm not sure what. Or maybe they aren't really an imprint at all ... more like a sort of place memory of some kind ... How can a place have a memory? Well, I don't know. Somehow... I can't explain what I mean. How would such a memory be stored in the place? ... I don't know. Maybe in the ... er ... quantum vacuum? What's a quantum vacuum? ... er... I'm not really sure about that, but it sounds impressive, doesn't it? ... So, to summarise, maybe ghosts are some kind of ... imprint ... in something I don't know anything about. Or maybe not. Yeah, that's it."

Look at that.

Residual hauntings are "a remnant ... of a past ... event". What kind of remnant? How is the remnant "stored" in the place? Magic?

Residual hauntings are "records of energy that have been imprinted in the area...". Really? What is a "record of energy", exactly? Exactly what kind of "energy" are we dealing with here? (The Power of Bullshit, perhaps?) How is the record made and where is it stored? What is the process? Magic again?

 

No. Just telling it like it is. I understand that you'd rather not get a reality check.

You think that idea is news to me?

You can probably safely assume that I'm aware of all the standard "theories" about ghosts, MR. After all, there's been nothing really new in that field for the past 100 years.

Not rage. It's more a kind of amused exasperation. I can understand why you interpret it as rage.

You mean you'll try to cobble together an explanation using the impressive-sounding scientific terms you learn?

You should appreciate that I don't have the time or inclination to teach you quantum physics from scratch, Magical Realist. And even if I were to attempt that, I'm confident that it wouldn't help you to explaining ghosts. The same can be said for attempting to explain modern cosmology to you.

If you have specific questions about modern physics, we have a subforum dedicated precisely to that kind of thing. Start a thread. People will help.

My complaint is not that you don't understand ghosts. It is that you pretend that you do understand them. Not just you, but all the pseudoscientists who have "theories" about what ghosts are and why they exist.

Of course, when you claim to be "studying" a phenomenon that doesn't actually exist, I guess it's easy to just make stuff up.

To be fair, I'm sure there are some honest paranormal investigators out there who don't go in for any old rubbish about "imprints on the quantum vacuum" the like. Those people are just honestly trying to work out whether there's anything scientific worth studying when it comes to ghosts.

Do you see that establishing the reason for a phenomenon is secondary to establishing that it exists? There's no point in theorising about what ball lightning unless there's at least some evidence that ball lightning exists. (Of course, sometimes theoretical work might predict the existence of ball lightning, in which case the next step is to go out and look for it. But we're not in that situation when it comes to ghosts, are we?)

We know consciousness exists, and we can investigate it scientifically. We know something about it. There's still a lot we don't know about how it works, exactly. But everybody agrees it is a real phenomenon (obviously). Ghosts are a whole different thing. With ghosts, we don't even have agreement that there's anything to study. (Having said that, there is an interesting study in human psychology and sociology, which focuses on the study of why some people believe in ghosts, etc.)

 

birch:

I agree with you.

It's fine to speculate, but if you're going to speculate about the quantum vacuum, for example, don't you think it would be a good idea to first learn something about what the quantum vacuum is? Speculation isn't just a matter of throwing fancy words around and imagining stuff. You have to start with a level of knowledge, and connect your speculations to the real world. Otherwise, what you're doing is not speculating, but fantasising.

It is important that you understand that I'm not accusing people of lying, necessarily. I have not said that I believe that everybody who claims to have seen a ghost is a liar. Some of them undoubtedly are (and in some cases that has been proven). Some are honest but mistaken. Some are actually delusional.

It comes back to this: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

Ghosts don't "fit" with everything else we know about our world. They are claimed to have features and abilities that make no sense in the light of what we know about the natural world. It is, of course, claimed that ghosts are supernatural - they literally operate without the constraints of natural laws (laws of physics, for example).

If ghosts are real, then we need to radically revise our understanding of how the universe operates. The problem is, there's no compelling reason to believe that ghosts actually exist. The extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary thing just doesn't seem to be there. Instead, we have a whole lot of fuzzy (and often faked) photographs, plus some bad audio and video recordings (the best of which also usually turn out to be fakes), plus some tall stories told by various people who were usually on their own when they say they saw a ghost.

There are plenty of stories in science where people came up with crazy ideas that turned out to be right. For example, the idea that all the continents drift around over millions of years, splitting apart and coming together and colliding and moving away again. Sounds like nonsense, and most people didn't believe it for a long time. It was an extraordinary idea, and the evidence just wasn't there. But then, a funny thing happened. People started to compare rocks from Antarctica and Australia, and - hey! - they were the same. And what else is this that we found in Antarctic rocks? Plant fossils? So, Antarctica wasn't always an icy wasteland. And look! Certain animals from Africa are similar to certain animals from South America - too similar unless there was some contact in the past between those groups of animals. And so it went, until after a while the various lines of evidence from lots of different fields of science all turned out to be best explained by the theory of continental drift. So now that's part of accepted science. Extraordinary evidence (lots of it!) showed that the extraordinary claim was actually true.

Could this kind of thing happen with ghosts? Yes, it could, in principle. But as things stand we have no extraordinary evidence for ghosts - just a collection of claimed evidence that can be more plausibly be explained by other ideas (e.g. that people's perceptions aren't always accurate, that some people are fakers, etc.)

I think the idea of ghosts being "residual imprints" on something is putting the cart before the horse. Before we need to explain what a ghost could be, we need to establish that there are actually ghosts out there.

Or maybe the "residual imprint" theory predicts ghosts. But in that case, what else, other than a ghost, can leave a "residual imprint" on a place? Can a normal person do it? How can we reliably detect these imprints? What form do they take? How are they imprinted? We need more than a vague buzzword to make this into anything approaching a useful hypothesis.

 

Or we can let science explain it with research.

Ghostly apparitions and hauntings have pervaded folklore and legend for thousands of years, but now scientists have shown that they are just a figment of the imagination.

Artificial ‘spectres’ were conjured up by an experiment which proved so disconcerting for participants that two begged for it to stop.

Scientists have long suspected that ghosts are an illusion created by the mind. Patients who suffer from neurological or psychiatric conditions often report ‘strange presences.’

And people experiencing extreme physical or emotional pain often claim to have seen ghostly outlines or felt that departed loved ones were back in the room with them.

Now, however, scientists in Switzerland have shown that ghosts are probably just an illusion created by the mind when it momentarily loses track of the body’s location because of illness, exertion or stress.

Volunteers took part in an experiment which mixed up their movements and brain signals.

They saw up to four phantoms positioned around them and believed that ghosts were touching their backs with invisible fingers.

Professor Olaf Blanke, from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said: "Our experiment induced the sensation of a foreign presence in the laboratory for the first time.

“It shows that it can arise under normal conditions, simply through conflicting sensory-motor signals.

"This confirms that it is caused by an altered perception of their own bodies in the brain."

To manifest their ghosts, the scientists set up a robot device that allowed volunteers to control the movements of a jointed mechanical arm with their index fingers.

The movements were relayed to another robot arm behind them which touched their backs.

When both the finger-pushing and back-touching occurred at the same time, it created the illusion that the volunteers were caressing their own backs.

That felt weird enough to the blindfolded participants. But something a lot stranger happened when the back-touching was delayed and about 500 milliseconds out of sync with the finger movements.

Suddenly the volunteers felt as if they were being watched, and touched, by one or more ghostly presences.

At the same time, they had the disconcerting sensation of drifting backwards, towards the unseen hand.

When questioned, several reported a strong feeling of invisible people being close to them. On average, they counted two, with up to four being reported.

Two of the 12 healthy participants were so disturbed by the experience that they asked the scientists to halt the experiment.

Co-author Dr Giulio Rognini, also from the EPFL, said: "Our brain possesses several representations of our body in space.

“Under normal conditions, it is able to assemble a unified self-perception of the self from these representations.

“But when the system malfunctions because of disease - or, in this case, a robot - this can sometimes create a second representation of one's own body, which is no longer perceived as 'me' but as someone else, a 'presence'."

The experiment suggests that "feelings of presence" (FOPs), often interpreted as spirits, angels or demons, are really all in the mind, say the researchers.

Such experiences are frequently reported by people in extreme physical or emotional situations, such as mountaineers and explorers, or those grieving for a lost loved one.

They are also associated with medical conditions that affect the brain, including epilepsy, stroke, migraine and cancer.​

And the kicker..

Before conducting the experiment, the researchers carried out brain scans of 12 patients with neurological disorders who had encountered FOPs in the past.

They identified disturbances in three specific brain regions, the insular cortex, parietal-frontal cortex, and temporo-parietal cortex. All were involved in self-awareness, movement, and sense of position in space.

The research was published in the journal Current Biology.​

In other words, it's all in your head.

 

Creationists haven't changed since Darwin published his theory. They are still stuck back in the 1860s.

What's interesting is how scientists reacted to Darwin, as well as what Darwin did. For a start, Darwin has no idea about how traits got propagated - that wouldn't be known until the mid 20th century. So Darwin didn't set out to "theorise" about how traits were propagated, or to attempt a bullshit explanation that he made up on the spot. Instead, he just carefully set out to show that evolution occurs. And he did that in a way that was irrefutable. Most scientists immediately accepted Darwin's ideas. How could they not, when his evidences for evolution were so convincing? It was clear that more work was needed - for example to find the elusive mechanism by which traits are inherited. But step one had been achieved - showing that there was a valid phenomenon to be investigated: evolution by natural selection.

Ghost hunters haven't got to step 1 yet. They haven't managed to convince scientists that ghosts are real.