Day 176
I hear ghost stories all the time; anecdotes from people who insist, or who know people who insist to have seen inexplicably strange happenings in so-called haunted houses, or wherever. People claim to see paintings moved, lights turned off and on, drawers opened and closed, sounds of footsteps, even furniture re-arranged, all without any living humans involved.
Allegedly.
And when I say I don't believe in ghosts, I get these "well how do you explain this..." stories. And I can't: I can't individually explain how furniture moves itself, or how footprints get made without people involved.
What I can do, however, is note that it is a much smaller stretch of the imagination to use human dishonesty as an explanation rather than the existence of re-animated dead people with no discernable physical composition and (somehow) with causal powers over the world. In short, my answer is always that people lie. They lie to others, and they lie to themselves. I don't have any doubt people really do believe their dead father was the one who moved his own photo across the room when nobody was home, or whatever. I don't necessarily question the honesty of the stories.
What I believe is that people want things to be true, so in periodic cases they simply convince themselves of something, then repeat it over and over until it becomes indistinguishable from an 'honest' belief. Telling lots of people a ghost story is, in my bet, a person's way of solidifying a belief that was originally made up, and a way of repressing memory of the original creative process.
And let's call things what they are for a moment. To say a ghost exists and has powers to move things around, or even be seen, is to make a massive claim that should be verifiable empirically (generally speaking, anything that has physical causal powers can be incorporated into an empirical framework). If a person comes up to you and claims to have seen gravity defied, you automatically look for an explanation that incorporates the statement into the existing law of gravity (for example, airplanes "defy" the law but still operate within it, and in fact rely heavily on gravity for their structure and function). But, if the statement is irreconcilable, you dismiss it as either a lie, or a faulty/incomplete observation of some sort.
This is precisely why science does not rely on anecdotal evidence, and presicely why it doesn't rely on evidence that cannot be either reproduced or observed multiple times in consistent circumstances.
But when it comes to ghosts, people jump at the opportunity to believe on account of these admittedly slightly creepy anecdotes. Why do they do this, when normally that kind of shoddy evidence wouldn't be anywhere close to sufficient for a radical restructing of our knowledge?
The reason is that we want to believe in our own immortality. Nay, we do in some sense have to believe in it, for there is no imaginable alternative. We see the alternative, in the death of others, but we can't imagine it, so we combine the two into notions like ghosts, or immortal souls, or other sorts of consciousness that continues after the body expires.
And wouldn't that be something eh? Last night I took a walk through the ross bay cemetary on my own (on the way to a friend's place). I would love few things more than to have my whole world shaken apart by seeing a real ghost. The way people speak of it is so uncomfortably casual; my life would be thrown for a loop, and would invariably change in dramatic ways.
I strolled through in the pitch black, fumbling along and staring about into the dark distances. Stones protruded, and dim light from far-off street lamps flickered off the ground and the crosses in shapes that you'd swear were human. And such is (in part) the nature of perception: we see what we look for, as well as what comes at us. I became increasingly scared, and as I did, the more and more any object even remotely shaped as a body gained form, even movement. The sound of every shaken tree, every cracked stick, became a clue.
I had a dream last night that I was sick, diagnosed as terminal, and no more than 24 hours from death. Fear and desparate sadness took over every action, every step, thought, and word. I woke up shaken this morning.
Allegedly.
And when I say I don't believe in ghosts, I get these "well how do you explain this..." stories. And I can't: I can't individually explain how furniture moves itself, or how footprints get made without people involved.
What I can do, however, is note that it is a much smaller stretch of the imagination to use human dishonesty as an explanation rather than the existence of re-animated dead people with no discernable physical composition and (somehow) with causal powers over the world. In short, my answer is always that people lie. They lie to others, and they lie to themselves. I don't have any doubt people really do believe their dead father was the one who moved his own photo across the room when nobody was home, or whatever. I don't necessarily question the honesty of the stories.
What I believe is that people want things to be true, so in periodic cases they simply convince themselves of something, then repeat it over and over until it becomes indistinguishable from an 'honest' belief. Telling lots of people a ghost story is, in my bet, a person's way of solidifying a belief that was originally made up, and a way of repressing memory of the original creative process.
And let's call things what they are for a moment. To say a ghost exists and has powers to move things around, or even be seen, is to make a massive claim that should be verifiable empirically (generally speaking, anything that has physical causal powers can be incorporated into an empirical framework). If a person comes up to you and claims to have seen gravity defied, you automatically look for an explanation that incorporates the statement into the existing law of gravity (for example, airplanes "defy" the law but still operate within it, and in fact rely heavily on gravity for their structure and function). But, if the statement is irreconcilable, you dismiss it as either a lie, or a faulty/incomplete observation of some sort.
This is precisely why science does not rely on anecdotal evidence, and presicely why it doesn't rely on evidence that cannot be either reproduced or observed multiple times in consistent circumstances.
But when it comes to ghosts, people jump at the opportunity to believe on account of these admittedly slightly creepy anecdotes. Why do they do this, when normally that kind of shoddy evidence wouldn't be anywhere close to sufficient for a radical restructing of our knowledge?
The reason is that we want to believe in our own immortality. Nay, we do in some sense have to believe in it, for there is no imaginable alternative. We see the alternative, in the death of others, but we can't imagine it, so we combine the two into notions like ghosts, or immortal souls, or other sorts of consciousness that continues after the body expires.
And wouldn't that be something eh? Last night I took a walk through the ross bay cemetary on my own (on the way to a friend's place). I would love few things more than to have my whole world shaken apart by seeing a real ghost. The way people speak of it is so uncomfortably casual; my life would be thrown for a loop, and would invariably change in dramatic ways.
I strolled through in the pitch black, fumbling along and staring about into the dark distances. Stones protruded, and dim light from far-off street lamps flickered off the ground and the crosses in shapes that you'd swear were human. And such is (in part) the nature of perception: we see what we look for, as well as what comes at us. I became increasingly scared, and as I did, the more and more any object even remotely shaped as a body gained form, even movement. The sound of every shaken tree, every cracked stick, became a clue.
I had a dream last night that I was sick, diagnosed as terminal, and no more than 24 hours from death. Fear and desparate sadness took over every action, every step, thought, and word. I woke up shaken this morning.
Comments
What didn't make sense was the incline of reported sightings without evidence. People are still claiming to come into contact with ghosts, aliens and supernatural forces.
I then realized that a lot of these people are probably under the influence of drugs. If you compare the geographic instances of sightings, you'd find that in towns and areas where there is a very high drug use, there is also a high supernatural sightings count.