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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:12:19 PM   
Arpig


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quote:

But, I've seen and experienced some shit that's so weird, so out there, so inexplicable that there's nothing else it could be.
Nothing else, eh? Well except for a hallucination. There is always that.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:13:44 PM   
Aileen1968


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Status: offline 		The thing is....someone who has never experienced something paranormal is only going by the shit they see in movies.
Someone who has experienced it knows that it isn't like a movie at all.
My experiences have left me with no doubt. They have occurred throughout my entire life. They have been extremely varied.
They have occurred while I've been alone. They have occurred with other people who all experienced the same thing.
If it was one time in my life, I'd question it. It has been much more than one time.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:14:41 PM   
Iamsemisweet


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Status: offline 		I saw what I saw.  I don't need anyone's affirmation or opinion to convince me.  

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:18:30 PM   
barelynangel


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Status: offline 		Aileen, i agree with you.  I for one am not going to tell you or anyone else what you have experienced is NOT a ghost or spirit.  Until and unless i experience it, then and only then can i personally put a definition to it and say what it was or wasn't by my definition.

That was my point, no one who hasn't experienced what someone else has, can dispute the identification. 

angel

< Message edited by barelynangel -- 11/13/2011 8:19:20 PM >

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:23:00 PM   
HeatherMcLeather


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Arpig

quote:

Why do people who start arguing with Heather, always end up arguing with ArPig?
I suspect that is because, unlike myself, she has better things to do.

That, and also the fact that I have nothing more to add, I said already that I wasn't going to argue about it or try to convince anybody of anything. I don't care if people believe in ghosts, vampires, or the Great Pumpkin, it really doesn't affect me any more than if they believe in God. One of the things I figured out when I was quite young was that people believe all sorts of strange unreasonable things and that there is little profit in trying to convince them they are wrong. I am satisfied knowing I am not. A number of other people, however, seem to actually care rather deeply.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:27:56 PM   
Arpig


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Status: offline 		Now see, a life long pattern like that is only more evidence of the experiences being hallucinatory. It is rather rare for there to be but a single occurrence.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:33:41 PM   
Aileen1968


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Status: offline 		Yeah...what a pattern. In fact, I've got to run and go have a beer with my dead mom.


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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:39:33 PM   
Arpig


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Status: offline 		Say hi to her for me.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:45:58 PM   
BKSir


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Status: offline 		I think I have to agree that, until you experience something like that for yourself, it's really really easy to say "Nope. Not real." But, once one does experience it, there's no doubting it. There's no way to really explain it other than, it's trying to describe what a peach tastes like. You can't really do it, but, when you eat one, you know it.

Certainly I also don't need any validation as to what I've seen. I know what I've experienced, and if someone doesn't want to believe me, then I can't make them and have much better things to do with my time than try.

I still believe that almost all "ghosts" aren't at all, but, I'm also always open for evidence that they exist.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 8:58:57 PM   
Arpig


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quote:

until you experience something like that for yourself
You see, BK, that's just the thing. I experience things like that all the time, its just that I correctly attribute them to brain chemistry, not dead people.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 9:29:57 PM   
LookieNoNookie


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quote:

ORIGINAL: barelynangel

Monark, its not about identifying ghosts or spirits, its about actually experience.

I don't need to prove it or disprove it -- i am speaking of his use of the absolute they do not exist, when people have indicated they have experience with ghosts and spirits.

That in and of itself is why they DO exist.  I can't tell someone who is identfying their experience as being with a ghost or spirit they are misidentifying what it was because i personally haven't experienced what they did. 

His saying "they do not exist" when HE has no ability to experience what people who are identifying ghosts have, means he can't disprove their claim.

angel


I believe there may be/is/are "other than us", whether it's a different dimension, shared time, shared places, new life forms....but did Einsteins theorems prove/disprove/suggest/opine or otherwise produce any lingering question as to ghosts?

Preposterous.

It's as if the efficacy or proof of the existence of cows milk provides the lead in to  T1-11 cement based siding for residential housing.

They are as related as concrete sidewalks are to golf balls.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 10:02:05 PM   
NocturnalStalker


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quote:

Actually no, nobody has ever proven that they exist. Hearing and seeing things does not prove anything other than that you think you saw and heard them. People see and hear all sorts of things that don't exist all the time, just ask David Berkowitz.


And if you did research rather than watch Summer of Sam you'd know that criminal profiler John Douglas had Berkowitz admit that the whole story of his neighbour's dog telling him to kill was all a sham to look insane.  Pick up the book Mindhunter.

Get worked.


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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 10:12:17 PM   
Arpig


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Status: offline 		Thanks for the info. I seem to recall you saying somewhere that serial killers were something of a hobby of yours, so I'll bow to your superior knowledge. It seems Berkowitz wasn't the best example, but I didn't think many people would know who Jeffrey Arenburg was.




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Why do they leave out the letter b on "Garage Sale" signs?

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/13/2011 11:49:43 PM   
Aswad


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quote:

ORIGINAL: HeatherMcLeather

One doesn't have to die to know, one only needs to be reasonable and clear headed and base their deductions on common sense and science.


This is where you diverge from factuality: 'common sense'.

In including common sense, your assertion of knowledge becomes identical to an assertion of certainty, a rather absurd position to be in, and one that lends itself to a kind of conflict that is usually unproductive: that in which two parties are certain of their respective beliefs, and hold mutually exclusive beliefs.

Science itself simply leaves the question in the realm of "presently not decidable", meaning there is insufficient evidence on which to base either conclusion. Indeed, the term itself is so poorly defined as to be meaningless in a scientific sense, much as the question of whether we even exist is undecidable, as the relevant data to test a hypothesis about it are simply not available (e.g. we could easily be the Computer Science project of some university student, in a vastly more complex external reality, set up to demonstrate that life can arise in less complex universes by way of simulation; we will do such things ourselves in the near future).

If you simply stick with "the absence of adequate evidence leads me to believe there are no ghosts", you avoid falling into a common trap wherein the absence of proof is taken as proof of absence, which is as erroneous as the conflation of correlation with causality, another common trap. Both are viable in 'common sense', which is a world reduction based on human experiences interpreted with the limitations of human intuitive perceptions, but that constitutes reasonable belief (in the sense of 'understandable', not necessarily in the sense of 'rational'), not knowledge of fact.

Insisting on knowing the unknowable doesn't serve any purpose beyond whatever comfort you derive from the feeling of certainty, and is likely to be constructed as arrogance or worse. Not that I mind arrogance, but the disingenuity I do mind, and the willful ignorance thing is quite distasteful. You've shown a capacity for clearer reasoning. Why limit yourself to anything less than what you're capable of?

Health,
al-Aswad.



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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/14/2011 3:44:45 AM   
HeatherMcLeather


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quote:

Insisting on knowing the unknowable
Its not unknowable.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/14/2011 3:56:22 AM   
stellauk


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Status: offline 		Kind of amazing that a thread on ghosts has reached six pages and nobody seems to have mentioned being psychic or having psychic abilities, but that's the nature of the boards here.

This is why some people pick up on or can see ghosts but others can't. It's got little to do with what you see, hear, etc because these are natural senses designed for seeing things like trees, buildings, concrete material objects.

I guess all of us have items of sentimental value. We project onto them emotions and feelings and that what makes such things sentimental are their ability to enable us to recall experiences and people from memory. This is a bit like the 'vibes' you pick up from someone through non-verbal communication and projection.

Some call this karma.. you could even go through threads here and examine individual posts and 'pick up' on those vibes that a poster has projected outwards when communicating. It's the exact same thing when a character actor is reading the text of a script and picking up a 'feel' from the dialogue which they use when developing the character. You see it projected out towards you through the screen, but it's the same vibes the actor has picked up from the script.

The issue isn't whether or not ghosts exist, but whether or not you have the ability to perceive them. Dogs and cats don't have this issue, both are generally much more psychic than humans.

Let's take another example. 'All you need is love' by the Beatles. A song. You probably know the words. But if you don't you can probably recall what you were doing or who you were with when you last beard the song, and even when you first heard the song. Compare this with the fact that you probably struggle to remember what you were doing on the last Tuesday in July 2008. The difference is psychic memory. We all have it.

Okay, another example, something I guess everyone can relate to. You go to sleep all tired, maybe even exhausted at night. Yet you wake up in the morning, and you're full of energy and (with or without coffee) you're alert again. Where do you think that energy comes from?

There's that part of us which is spiritual. Some victims of a violent crime or major accident may not be able to move on emotionally until they revisit the scene. Think of vets returning to the battlefield where they lost comrades and see the powerful emotions they experience. Some need this experience to move on, others don't. When I was working at the day centre for the homeless we would get people who were rehoused who would still come and behave the same as if they were homeless. They just can't get over the trauma.

This is often how ghosts behave. They haunt places. Some of them are trapped. Some aren't. Some perhaps are coming back just to relive a happy experience.

I see the connection, and it's pretty logical to me and consistent enough not to be dismissed as being something else. When someone tells me that they've seen a ghost I believe them. I don't have their perception to know for sure, but I'm open-minded enough to accept what they say and their experiences.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/14/2011 4:14:02 AM   
HeatherMcLeather


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Status: offline 		Ghosts behave however the person imagining them behave.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/14/2011 9:51:54 AM   
BKSir


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quote:

ORIGINAL: stellauk
I see the connection, and it's pretty logical to me and consistent enough not to be dismissed as being something else. When someone tells me that they've seen a ghost I believe them. I don't have their perception to know for sure, but I'm open-minded enough to accept what they say and their experiences.


This is where I diverge. I tend to be very very skeptical about things.

If someone tells me that they've had an experience, I tend to believe that it is possible, but, immediately want to know more as I sincerely doubt they did. It also depends on the individual. If it's someone I know is flighty, flaky or somehow otherwise kind of not quite all there, I have a LOT more doubt about their claims.

Myself, if I hadn't experienced things personally, I would probably be arguing as obnoxiously and closed mindedly as other people on this thread, without any intention of letting there be a possibility that there might be something more out there than this piddly amount we see in every day life.

I believe in science, in evidence, in details, in the tangible. I don't believe that anything is unknowable. I believe that there are a LOT of things we don't YET know though.

3000 years ago we KNEW that lightning was caused by angry gods. 2000 years ago we KNEW the sun rotated around the earth. 1000 years ago, we KNEW the world was flat. 500 years ago photographs would have been witchcraft and a pure impossibility. 100 years ago, the moon was a spooky place, covered in cheese and made of monsters. Now it's a pretty boring, dry rock, with a hell of a view. Hell, 20 years ago being able to fit a half of a terabyte of data storage in your computer was next to impossible, now I can get about 10 of them on a keychain and into my pocket easily (albeit a little pricey at the moment). Shit, we STILL don't know what's at the bottom of our own oceans. And that's plenty tangible. We just haven't developed or perfected the technology to discover it, YET.

Today's "impossible" is tomorrow's boring and commonplace. Again, I don't know what these supernatural things are, by any means, but "ghost" is as good of a word as any until we know more. Spirits of the dead? Wandering souls? Residual energy? Misplaced electrical synapses? Messy time travel? Dimensional rifts? Sure! Why the hell not? Is it magic? For the moment, sure. Just as much magic as an incendiary propelled projectile weapon was sorcery 1500 years ago. Now, anyone with an even rudimentary understanding of it can make a firearm and bullet in an afternoon.

There has just been too many encounters, too many stories, over far too long of a time, in every city, every town, every region in the world, since the beginning of any sort of spoken and written history to just completely dismiss the possibility, in my opinion.

I'm willing to say that they may not be anything at all related to the living dead, but I'm also willing to say that they may be just that. I believe that there is something there, but, I need a lot more information to form a solid opinion of what it is.

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I am the voices in your head.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/14/2011 10:26:29 AM   
HeatherMcLeather


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quote:

Myself, if I hadn't experienced things personally, I would probably be arguing as obnoxiously and closed mindedly as other people on this thread, without any intention of letting there be a possibility that there might be something more out there than this piddly amount we see in every day life.
Actually, its the ghosties who are being obnoxious, by insisting that scientific fact isn't, and that I must be ignorant or ill educated for not accepting their view that black is white.

Nobody has disputed the experiences, only that they are due to the influence of dead people. Dead people are by definition dead, that means they are gone, they are in the past and exist only in your memory now. The desire for them to continue to interact with the living is only due to incomplete or flawed grieving process. People who believe in ghosts need to, so they can continue in the comforting fiction that their dead parents/siblings/etc. are still part of their daily life. Its a case of not being able to finally let go and accept that they are truly gone.

Well they are gone, gone for good with no possibility of return. You will never see or interact with your dead loved ones again, and all this ghost stuff is just a desperate grasping at straws to avoid facing that fact.

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RE: Do ghosts exist? - 11/14/2011 10:54:32 AM   
GreedyTop


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Status: offline 		yes, they do.

and nobody can convince me otherwise... not after the (non hallucinogenic) experiences I have had.

Heather., while I respect your opinion on this issue, I disagree.

Please do the same: respectfully disagree. to essentially dismiss and call shite on others perfectly valid experiences/perceptions is highly disrespectful.

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