Definitely open-minded about ghosts, as I've had a few encounters I guess you can say.

First one was when I was living in North Dakota in 2004. I had just rented a one-bedroom apartment in Fargo after a relationship I was in went South, and one night as I was sleeping I felt this heavy physical pressure on my stomach, like someone was sitting on me. It was the weirdest feeling ever. I woke up and nobody was there but I still felt the pressure and could see this indentation of weight on my nylon sleeping bag (did not have a bed yet as I had just moved in). Then it just disappeared. I'm a deep sleeper, so it's not easy to wake me up which made it all the more stranger.

The recent incident was when we bought this house I currently live in a few years ago. The first day after we moved in I had the day off to unpack. My wife and daughter went to work and school, so I decided to sleep in a bit. I awoke to the sound of a woman humming in the kitchen, which I thought was my wife...but no one was there. It was very strange because it really sounded like a woman cleaning or doing something in the kitchen and humming while she worked. I went back to bed, but not long before that there was this very loud bang in the wall right where my head was at that made me jolt up violently. Scared the living daylights out of me!

I searched all around the house, wondering if someone was inside but found nothing. The loud bang occurred in a common wall between our room and the hallway, and I have never heard that sound from it again since that first day. This is an old house, built in the 60's, and sometimes I hear creaks in the attic/roof areas which I believe to be normal, but that's it.

Since they both happened shortly after I moved in, my belief is that these could have been spirits that were occupying the homes, which had been empty up until we moved in. They were unhappy that we now lived there, and showed their frustration as they began to look for new dwellings? I don't know.

On the flip side it's been said that with all the technology we have today, thousands of cameras and whatnot, shouldn't we have more concrete evidence of ghosts by now? I know there have been a few but they are few and far between. Or maybe ghosts are just smarter than we think...

Then again, just to play devil's advocate-why people expect something that is paranormal (i.e. outside the normal) or supernatural (i.e. beyond nature) to follow the rules of nature as established by science sometimes escape me. By the very nature of the concept, they are outside such rules...

I always found that insistence by skeptics to be paradoxical at best. Things that are beyond nature can't exist because the rules of nature don't allow for it...

Furthered by the fact that the rules of nature as expounded by science are ever-changing and expanding as our understanding of what is possible in nature expands. For crying out loud, one of the hard and fast rules of early science was that objects cannot affect each other at a distance that was the definition of magic and science didn't allow for magic, until Newton came along and explained the concept of gravity and that objects do indeed affect each other at a distance, and suddenly the hard and fast rules that nature operates on as defined by science <gasp> changed.

That's not to say these things are True or even true, or that in the future evidence will be found, just an observation by me that those who use science as a hard and fast line to deny things sometimes forget that the very nature of science is that those tenets will change as new evidence, new ways of understanding how the "natural" world functions, and new methodologies for exploring, finding data, and interpreting it are developed.

I respect those who say, our understanding of the phenomenon based on current science is that these things do not exist, I do not however respect the view that states-science disproves these things so they are untrue and impossible...

One is science, the other is personal dogma using science as their scripture to rationalize their own tenets of faith (i.e. science as a dogmatic religious belief system).

-M

On the flip side, just after I posted, I went to Warren Ellis' daily blog and found this...



from Morning Computer

And a frank reminder that some people will go out of their way to find truth in things that really are just stories, and that may be the case with these phenomenon as well.

-M

Mephisto playing devil's advocate??? The very thought!!!

Being outside natural laws is not, by itself, an inconceivable thing. I can perfectly imagine a deity that could reverse time, travel faster than light or defy gravity. That's not why skeptics don't put much credence in paranormal activity reports.

On the other hand, for something to exist, it has to interact in some way with the real world; otherwise, we'd just never know. Something invisible, totally silent, with no odor, no mass, would be pretty damn hard to see, to hear, to feel or to acknowledge in any way.

Some real-world particles like that do exist: they're called neutrinos. These ghostly particles usually go clean through the earth (and all of us) with no one realizing. But still, they interact: by losing some energy as they speed through solid matter, they can occasionally cause a photon to form, and we can measure that. Because physics had predicted that something like a neutrino must exist, we built huge detectors that could possibly register the presence of these photons, and lo and behold, we manage to detect neutrinos. So science is pretty good at finding subtle things that are there even if they don't seem to be. But ghosts? Nope, nothing. Just people saying, from time to time, "I have seen something strange". However, this forces us to accept some natural constraint: if someone sees something, that something must be visible. Granted, it might not actually be visible in the classical sense but might be perceived by a direct stimulation of the witness's optical nerves, without actual photons being involved. However, that's exactly the same thing as saying "it's in your head", which is usually taken as a derogatory comment. It's not a matter of obeying natural laws or not; it's just a matter of not having other choices than "something is visible" or "something is not visible". And if something is visible, it interacts with the real world, and can be measured. (All the more so if that something also exerts force on something!)



Actually, that would be an unenlightened skeptical view. We can't say that something doesn'te xist because the rules of nature don't allow for it, because despite our scientific achievements, we probably do not understand all the rules of nature. It would be perfectly fine, from a skeptical point of view, to determine that something "paranormal" actually exist, and to refine our understanding of the rules of nature accordingly. That's exactly what we did with quantum physics, which flies in the face of Newtonian mechanics in several instances.

What we can say is that the rules of nature as we understand them do not demand the existence of ghosts, leprechauns or reincarnation the way they demanded the existence of the Higgs boson or special relativity. In such a context, the burden of proof is on the ghosts. For our understanding of nature to be altered to accommodate their existence, we need some evidence.

As you point out, science keeps enriching our understanding of the universe, and we often have to refine or reject certain important ideas. This is never performed in a spirit of "anything goes", but rather in a spirit of acute skepticism. That's why science is fine with the idea of neutrinos, viruses, prions, black holes, time not being a constant, and is not fine with unicorns, sasquatch and telekinesis. Even before science can consider whether some phenomenon is what we think it is or not, it must have a phenomenon to study! It's like the monster that used to hide under my bed and would eat my hand I let my arm hang out: I was sure it was there, I felt it, and I could easily have been convinced that it just happened to be a special kind of monster that vanished into the phantom zone whenever I lit the lamp or my parents got into my room. Who's to prove otherwise? (Or maybe, since no such monster has ever actually been captured on camera or analyzed in any way despite thousands of reports, it just doesn't exist and there is another explanation to my very genuine impression).



I agree with you on the nature of science, and every scientist does as well! Keeping an open mind is what science is about! Unlike every other system used by mankind to relate to the universe, science accepts to take reality as it is and to change its rules and statements when new data comes in. When facts contradict a beautiful theory, it is the theory that has to change to accommodate the facts; not the other way around. That's why science is such a trusted tool of discovery: it has a built-in correction feature. Science also has another great feature: it is coherent. Chemistry can not ignore physics, and biology can not flout chemistry. That's why when someone says, for example, "there is a race of giant hairy primates living in the wild parts of America, but because it's shy and very good at hiding no scientist have ever been able to catch one", our natural response might be "well, yeah, that makes sense, and science does discover rare new animals from time to time". But then scientists can add "where are the bones?" After all, we find T-rex bones in America, and they're way more rare than would be the bones of any reclusive race of giant American primates living today. But we've never found bigfoot bones. Oh, sure, we've found things that were claimed to be bigfoot remains: scat and hair, mostly, perfectly valid evidence. Only when they were tested (there was a cool paper on it last year), they turned out to be dog hair, yak hair, cow hair, wolf hair, and even human hair. Skepticism does not mean never to believe anything outlandish; it means refusing to systematically accept something just because "it might be true". Sure, it might be. Now let's have some evidence.

RR pretty much captures my feelings on this. I used to be a believer in a lot of paranormal stuff, but with all of the study--scientific or otherwise--that's gone on on ghosts, etc. it doesn't seem that there's been any real progress to say that these phenomena can't be explained more conventionally.

Fascinating debate.

I haven't kept up with every post, but I hope someone's brought up those spectral cameras that were developed in the 1990s which could photograph an amputee, even years after the amputation had been performed, and the missing appendage would still show in the image.

Last I heard, there was no explanation that could be offered for WHY this happened, but it did. Proof that there are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. The Scientific Method, the assumption that anything that cannot be seen or demonstrated is likely not there, is itself a faith that, by its very nature, lacks empirical evidence to substantiate itself.