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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?
Technically, if he is convinced then it's convincing evidence. The fact that you and I are not convinced is a separate matter.
What is a reasonable person?
A 100% rational person? Probably not. A person who was smart enough to do well in school and keep a well paying job? Yes.
It’s interesting how many people in this thread seem almost angry at the possibility that someone believes in ghosts.
Lmao what evidence? Everybody has a phone nowadays, how come there is no proof?
If ghosts are dead people, with the passing of time there should be more ghosts and be easier to spot.
If ghosts are from people who died violent deaths or whatever, how come nobody sees them in places such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima etc.?
More simply: if ghosts existed there would be many people who have seen them. How come there's a lot of people who believe in ghosts but almost nobody who has seen them (allegedly)? It's the classic "I want to believe"
I'm always surprised to hear people believe in ghosts, not because I consider it particularly ridiculous, but rather because ghosts have no relevance in my life. I don't need them to exist to explain what's happening around me.
Every few years or so, I might hear a noise where I don't have an explanation, but that always feels adequately explained by me not knowing things. I'm constantly surrounded by living beings as well as materials that are subject to gravity, temperature, humidity etc.. Occasionally, they'll make noises quite naturally.
I once saw something I can't explain. Had I been alone, I would've just told myself I was imagining things, but the fact that right after I saw it my friend goes: "Did you fucking see that?!" convinced me there really was something there.
We went back immediately and it was gone - despite this happening in the middle of an open field with nowhere for it to disappear to. Do I think it was a ghost? No, it was most likely a human. But it was an unexplainable, genuinely weird event. Having experienced something like that makes me a lot more sympathetic toward other people who claim to have seen similar things. This wasn't a floorboard creaking and my mind filling in the blanks. I absolutely saw a figure.
imo it's just an aspect of the fear of death, some believe in ghosts because it gives them hope there's any sort of afterlife
IMHO "ghosts" is just an older word vor virus.
People in earlier times knew that some diseases jumped around from person to person and that that could be dangerous, but didn't have a proper explanation for it.
So they assumed that there must be something invisible in the air that creates the kind of spooky effect that people fall ill sometimes without being touched or physically hit in any way. Kinda spooky, if you think about it and only know about mechanics, but not about cellular biology.
I've got some unexplained phenomena that happen from time to time at my lab (workplace). Valves closing for no reason, oddly specific equipment failures, that kind of thing. I don't believe it's ghosts, but also I genuinely can't think of any reason for why those kinds of things could happen. I just say that it's ghosts anyways because it's fun.
In any case, my belief is that out of all supernatural phenomena to possibly believe in, ghosts are the least horrible thing to believe in, so anyone who believes in ghosts gets a pass from me
remind me... was it caltech or MIT that had an infamous light switch that, was hooked up to nothing but could shut down servers?
I'm now a manager, but I work in contract security, and have been in more buildings that were supposedly haunted than I care to count. Including buildings that have numerous stories of freaky shit happening.
Doors closing "randomly" or very-not-randomly. Spaces suddenly getting cold. puddles showing up in bathrooms that someone supposedly drowned in. Stairwells that sound like people walking down them at specific times of night.
odd noises. Freaky noises.
I have never once been in a building where I could not identify a perfectly natural cause. Here's a few incidents off the top of my mind that I remember very specifically. There are some few commonalities to people who see ghosts. or demons, or any other supernatural entity.
Ghost stories are perpetuated by the credulous, who find things that are decidedly weird, and then stop looking any further. or they hear a story- suicides, murders, etc- and attribute every weird little thing to that.
or they're told by straight up liars and ran with by people who would run with scissors and untied shoes. a lot of times, it's started by people who have an inability to admit they don't know something.
Regardless, if ghosts were real. if they were common, and if they interacted with the natural world, then we would have actual, tangible evidence for their existence. You'd be able to point at one and say 'aha! a ghost!' that doesn't happen.
These are just some of the examples of things I've heard about and found to be otherwise.
One example was a guy who claimed ghosts were always going around closing every fire door every night at 23:00. On the dot. Every night.
And yeah. doors were being closed as described. Guess what? All the doors had one thing in common.
They were being held open by magnetic door holders. they're fire doors. Building code here requires that they be self-closing in the event of a fire alarm to prevent the spread of fire. But that's really rather inconvenient in long hallways where people don't want to be opening big heavy doors everytime they're bringing a cart of shit through.
Thus, the electromagnetic door holders that turn off whenever a fire alarm goes off.
Well. if you guessed that the fire system had been programmed to turn off all the door holders at 23:00 each night, just long enough to let any being held open close... you'd be right. All it took to verify that was to send a five minute email to the facility engineer, who spent all of ten minutes checking settings on the fire alarm system and turned it off.
Another example of doorholder mayhem is one in which the doorholders were slowly going bad.
This was when I was a manager, and I was doing a sort of covert investigation where I go in and have them train me on the site. there were problems.
those problems all stemmed from a fundamental lack of curiosity. Which stemmed from a fervent belief in the supernatural. Voices in spaces that are supposed to be empty? they weren't teenagers smoking dope, it was spirits.
One example of spirits that loved to fuck with him? one hallway had firedoors that sectioned off a t-shaped hallway, that was lined with businesses (mostly offices.) he was supposed to go down the hallway, checking and locking all the doors and generally making sure everything was in good order. the firedoor in the middle of the hallway, kept closing on him.
Rather than looking into what the issue was, he wrote it off as demons fucking with him, specifically.
The reality was that the doorhoder was going bad (probably had been for a long time. as that happens their holding power gets weaker. this door holder's holding power was just strong enough to hold the door when it was static, but any kind of touch or slight pressure was enough for it to close.
Including changes in the air pressure as you walked past. When I pointed this out to him. Well. Lets just say he's no some other company's problem.
another example is voices in unusual places
Guess what? walls be thin, yo.
Frequently, office buildings with multiple tenants are remodeled in strange ways. especially if they're older- things get partitioned weierd. spaces get remodeled and lighting and power doesn't be as you'd expect.
In any case, in this particular building, the idiot in question didn't realize that the very short custodial closet didn't go all the way "back" from the hall- she should have, though. She'd also never gone into the space that wrapped around the maintenance closet to run beside the space that she kept hearing voices in "that shouldn't be there!"
Those voices were caused by people working late.
my personal favorite, ghost steps coming down stairs.
this particular building is historic- that is to say, it was a tire warehouse built in the 1890s. It's really quite a lovely building. Giant limestone block foundation, old tan brick. cedar beam construction.
one of two stairwells that hit ever floor has fire sprinkler stand pipes running through each landing. not surprising, considering. the building is old. It's drafty as fuck. And at night, in order to save energy, because it literally predates central air, they turn the system off at night (or run it to a lower set point.)
This results in a fairly consistent rate at which it cools off. the fire stand pipes cool off at a different rate, though, and clunk against the landings the pass through. They do so in a way that sounds like someone walking down the stairs.
Incurious guards just wrote it off as some ghost or something, but all of the long term tenants will tell a story about how there was a guy that died from a tractor tire falling on him. (didn't happen, by the way. Though numerous people did die here. mostly jumpers.)
Radiators make some creepy noises.
I mean. Seriously. gurrgle gurrgle. burble burble. Tickety tick.
still not ghosts.
big cats sound like screaming women.
yeap. okay, need to clarify, I mean, our local lynxes and bobcats, as well as the occasional mountain lion passing through.
If you ever saw Annihilation, with the "help me" bear. yeah. it's like that. Randomly. Out of the dark woods. and not coherent words so much as screams. (that account happened to border a large statepark that had some cats living in it.)
Sudden changes of temperature
So, most office building's HVACs work on positive pressure. This way, when a door gets opened, the hot air goes out rather than the cold air coming in. (or cold air going out, hot air coming in. Depends on where you are and the season.)
for whatever reason, one of the office spaces just had massive open vents (I personally suspect this was a remodel that got left in the wall. the vent just connected the main lobby/entryway to the space (above a plenum ceiling)
Another feature of building HVAC systems are the airlock doors as you come and go. Guess what happens when you open both airlock doors and have a window you're not supposed to have open, open?
All your air rushes out, getting replaced by cold air. ::: spoiler Puddles in Bathrooms Okay. so, water goes from high places to low places, and tends to follow the 'easiest' path, even if its somewhat convoluted. If you have an inexplicable puddle somewhere, you have a water leak somewhere.
what you don't have is some kind of poltergeist taking a bath. Doesn't matter if a person committed suicide in the bathroom, or rather, if you're told that's what happened. (it's not.)
Turns out that the rooftop had a leak, and that was travelling down through 8 floors to show up in a bathroom. because that's where the pipes the water was following kinda sorta came out.
lso, which requirements in terms of species are there for a haunting to commence? Can a horse become a ghost? What about a gorilla? Or a Neanderthal? Seems weird that only homo sapients ge
not sure about your local critters, but red foxes also have vocalizations that scare people sometimes
Many animals do, yes. Even mice whose sole offense is skittering about.
This was fun to read
I have both feet planted firmly in the real world but I have experienced three or four undeniably supernatural things in my life and yeah it does happen sometimes.
It terrifies me sometimes (recently had a dream about ghosts and I was so wondering in the dream if I've lost my mind). My partner was scratched by a misogynistic ghost during a ghost tour and we recorded audio and after they said "I'm scared" you can hear laughter. That and Chris Watts case has kept me scared some nights driving home thinking of the afterlife. https://youtu.be/5To4nn4ZVc4
As a reasonable person, I can admit that it's always "possible" that ghosts exist. Meaning, that I am not 100% positive that they don't.
I can also admit that there could be unicorns on Pluto, because it's nigh impossible to prove a negative.
Science has never in the history of science reliably shown a single interaction between physical entities and any sort of non-physical force. The only way ghosts could be real is if you redefined the term “ghost” to the point of breaking, like saying that the memory of a person is a ghost.
Plus, it fails the smell test in a million ways. What makes a ghost exist? Why aren’t we positively lousy with ghosts? Are there rules? What would they be and what mechanism is there to both quantify and effect them? Why do ghosts follow the rotation and revolution of the earth but otherwise aren’t physically bound? How can one have any sort of cognition? If a ghost does, how can it perceive anything without intercepting photons or other physical phenomena? If there are ghosts and somehow they have cognition and perception, are we obligated to leave Netflix on when we leave for work?
Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.
If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the "physical world" too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.
If a bunch of people were going around saying I got this weird burn on my skin after holding this rock for a while, scientists would have discovered radioactivity a lot sooner.
There are a bunch of people going around claiming to have interacted with ghosts, and we've got bupkis.
That reminds me of this meme:
I found it here after an internet search trying to find it again, but I'm not sure if it is the original source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cryptozoology/comments/1c7btq9/ill_just_leave_this_here/
The indigenous Australians, the Mirarr people, identified an area in Northern Australia as sickness country which was very coincident with a high concentration of uranium.
They just avoided the area instead of poking it
https://d28rz98at9flks.cloudfront.net/145214/145214_00_0.pdf
Aw man. The northern tip of Australia has the cleanest air in the entire world. That data is from pre-y2k
Not sure about that, you might be thinking of the Southern tip. Indonesia often conducts burn offs with a lot of wind blowing smoke over Australia as well as cultural burning conducted by the indigenous in the region. I remember seeing the haze growing up and walking through the burnt country at the start of the dry.
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.
I mean, it sounds like your friend genuinely doesn't understand the scientific method. That doesn't necessarily make them unreasonable. It just means they had a sub-standard science education.
It's not important that you believe in ghosts. It's only important that they believe in themselves.
I knew an athiest who believed in ghosts. no idea how he squared that.
The only evidence is anecdotal, there just happens to be a lot of it.
So no, I'd say it's unreasonable to believe in ghosts. (Though I do love ghost stories and folklore.)