Why do ghosts wear human clothes?

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Magical Realist said:
Regardless, we do a damn good job at seeing and interpreting what is right in front of us. The instances of us correctly seeing what is there outnumbers by far any errors we make. Think for example how driving your car has depended for so long on your ability to scrutinize and accurately access what is always 100 feet or so ahead of you. If vision was as flawed as you claim, none of us would get past our first day of driver's ed.

I see. So we don't see reality as it is at all.
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I can describe several ways your brain is lying to you, MR, about what you are seeing right this very moment, as well as every moment since you woke up, until you went to bed, every day since the day you were born, and will continue to do - yes even during every second of your driver's test - and until the day you pass on.
 
DaveC426913 said:
I can describe several ways your brain is lying to you, MR, about what you are seeing right this very moment, as well as every moment since you woke up, until you went to bed, every day since the day you were born, and will continue to do - yes even during every second of your driver's test - and until the day you pass on.
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I see my laptop before me. I read the words you have typed. I type my response on my keyboard. I see my words appear on the lit up screen. Then I click on the "Post Reply" icon. How is my brain lying to me?
 
I want to be clear about something. First, I want to demonstrate that your mind and perception are lying to you all the time.
After that, we can address the issue of seeing apparitions and whether we can trust what we think we see.

Your mind is lying to you right now about what you are seeing.

1] There are parts of your laptop screen you cannot see, but think you see.

Your blind spot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)

Every moment your eyes are open, there are parts of your field of view you cannot see. You mind actively fills that spot in. It doesn't leave the area empty, it actually fills it in with whatever else is around. If you are looking at a spot on a piece of paper, and you move till that spot is obscured by your blind spot, your mind fills in that gap with the colour of the paper. Look at a white page, your mind will fill it in with white. Look at a blue page, your mind fill it in with blue.

Try the experiments. Prove to yourself that, except under highly contrived circumstances (2 small dots on an empty background, the right distance apart, with your eyes at the right distance from the page ) it is impossible for you to see something that is right there in front of you. Your mind has deliberately and painstakingly fooled you into thinking your field of vision is uninterrupted.


2] The colours you see are not the colours you think you see.

Where are you sitting right now? Let's say it's in a closed room lit with light bulbs. It might be lit with fluorescent lights, it might actually be outdoors under the sun. Whatever.
You look at a white piece of paper next to you and it looks white. It isn't. Take a photo of the room to get an accurate idea of the actual colour. It is deeply yellow, or deeply green, or deeply blue.
Your mind will always interpret it as white. Your mind actively filters out the prevailing colour cast, making you think you're lit by white light.


3] Persistence of vision. (An example for that first day of driving school.)

LED brake lights on cars. They look persistently lit. They're not. Whip your eyes back and forth and you will see the flicker. Your mind blurs the flickers together so you are not distracted.


4] The gorilla.

Never have I ever imagined a 3D human form walking before me that was so real I could mistake it for a ghost.
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But you have had a very real 3D human form walk before you, stop, wave, and walk away -without you having seen it at all.

Your mind deliberately hid the gorilla from you so that you could concentrate on your goal, which was counting ball passes. It was trying to help you by removing distractions.


There isn't room to list a hundred more ways. I could write book. Wait. Jay Ingram already did.



The fact is, in a hundred ways every second, your mind is actively trying to "'help" you make sense of the world around you. That is not at all the same thing as trying to give you an accurate picture of what is in front of you.


Again, to be clear, I'm not trying to apply this directly to seeing moving apparitions. I am simply trying to make it clear that the tool we use to observe the world (the very tool you claim sees ghosts wearing clothes) is a notoriously unreliable source of accurate information about things that are outside its expectations.

It is a humbling thing to learn.
 
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The fact is, in a hundred ways every second, your mind is actively trying to "'help" you make sense of the world around you. That is not at all the same thing as trying to give you an accurate picture of what is in front of you.
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All this is given. Ofcourse there are blind spots. Ofcourse we generalize. Ofcourse we infer things not seen. And it all works extremely well. There is nothing I am seeing on my laptop that isn't there. There are no colors I am imagining that are there when they really aren't. This is the issue we are discussing. Whether a person can actually see a full figure person walking in front of them with detailed clothing because their brain is projecting it. It doesn't happen.

Again, to be clear, I'm not trying to apply this directly to seeing moving apparitions. I am simply trying to make it clear that the tool we use to observe the world (the very tool you claim sees ghosts wearing clothes) is a notoriously unreliable source of accurate information about things that are outside its expectations.
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I totally disagree and have shown you that sight is incredibly reliable in spite of it's filtering of irrelevant details. When we see a person walking in front of us, there is a person walking in front of us. Every time. Never do we imagine such things happening unless we are on drugs or have a brain disorder. None of your examples establish this hallucinating going on in normal people. It just doesn't happen.




 
Magical Realist said:
There is nothing I am seeing on my laptop that isn't there. There are no colors I am imagining that are there when they really aren't.
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Yes there is. I just proved it to you. You see no empty spot on your screen. You interpolate screen where your eye cannot see it.

Magical Realist said:
Whether a person can actually see a full figure person walking in front of them with detailed clothing because their brain is projecting it. It doesn't happen.
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There was a full figure person walking right in front of you wearing a gorilla suit and waving and you didn't see it.

Magical Realist said:
When we see a person walking in front of us, there is a person walking in front of us. Every time. Never do we imagine such things happening unless we are on drugs or have a brain disorder. None of your examples establish this hallucinating going on in normal people. It just doesn't happen.
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False. You proved it to yourself when you watched the video.

I've demonstrated that you see things that are not there, and don't see things that are there. There's a hundred more examples. It's what our mind does best.
 
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Yes there is. I just proved it to you. You see no empty spot on your screen. You interpolate screen where your eye cannot see it.
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You don't "see" a blank spot. You don't see some imagery in your field of vision. There are things I'm not seeing all the time in my field of vision due to attention and focus and oversight. That doesn't mean I see something that isn't there.

There was a full figure person right in front of you wearing a gorilla suit and waving and you didn't see it.
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LOL! Yes..we ignore many things when concentrating our attention on one thing. I am ignoring my TV right now as I type this. So what? It doesn't mean we spontaneously hallucinate full bodies walking around in front of us. Have you ever done this? When?
 
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Magical Realist said:
LOL! Yes..we ignore many things when concentrating our attention on one thing. I am ignoring my TV right now as I type this. So what? It doesn't mean we spontaneously hallucinate full bodies walking around in front of us. Have you ever done this? When?
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You didn't ignore it. You did not see it at all, even though it passed right through your vision.

You don't see your bind spot. You can't see it. Try not ignoring a missing spot in your vision.
You see solid brake lights. Try not ignoring the flicker.
You see white where there is no white.

Acknowledge that your perception is not an accurate account of what is in your field of view.
 
I can go on with examples.

You recall cars on the road that were never there. They are inserted into your memory as you process the scene and later recount it. This as been exhaustively demonstrated.

We are getting into examples that are more directly related to seeing details about apparitions that we think we see, but do not actually see.
 
DaveC426913 said:
You didn't ignore it. You did not see it at all, even though it passed right through your vision.

You don't see your bind spot. You can't see it. Try not ignoring a missing spot in your vision.
You see solid brake lights. Try not ignoring the flicker.
You see white where there is no white.

Acknowledge that your perception is not an accurate account of what is in your field of view.
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Things are filtered out. So what? But never does one hallucinate a full bodied person in detailed clothing walking in front of them. It just doesn't happen.
 
DaveC426913 said:
I can go on with examples.

You recall cars on the road that were never there. They are inserted into your memory as you process the scene. This as been exhaustively demonstrated.
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You've hallucinated cars while driving? You should check yourself in the mental ward.
 
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