Spirits and other incorporial things

My brother reluctantly concluded that he believed in ghosts because he realized the reason he didn't believe in ghost was so that ghost would leave him alone. Seems to have worked so can ghosts read our minds or what?Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go awayWhen I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at allI've seen several attributions most common to Hugh Mearns.lfen

I'd be interested in knowing how level the floor was and how much vibrating the lighthouse did say by wave action on rocks being transmitted to it? Or the machinery for the light rotating.Professional magicians such as the Amazing Randi are often better at debunking these things than scientist on the basis of set a thief to catch a thief. Stage magicians have great experience with trick and deceptions and methods not ordinarily used. Uri Geller easily fooled scientist who were observing him but he couldn't bring his stuff off when Randi was in charge. This story just lacks too many details to used to establish anything.lfen

Dawg,You haven't made an exhaustive list here. You can't imitate Sherlock Holmes and say that you've eliminated the impossible so the improbable that remains must be true. (I can't remember how Doyle wrote it..sigh).Okay I'll offer at least a third hypothesis. Something was going on that is unexplained to this date. It's like people asking me if I believe in UFOs. Hell Yes I believe in UFOs. That is I believe that people see flying objects that have for one reason or another remained to this date unidentified. I don't believe that to date anyone has seen an extraterrestial spacecraft. But if they did see a flying saucer from outer space it's no longer a UFO cause they went and identified it!So something inexplicable and mysterious happens how would you feel? A little twilight zoney perhaps. You might become more sensitive to sounds, or "atmosphere". How can you explore this? Could be difficult.
Every been alone on a dark and storming night while still young and imaginative? There can be very scary sounds. Or awakened by some odd sound and then laid awake trying to figure it out?I had an odd sound that came and went at night. I wondered if there was a rat or squirrel nesting in the ceiling. It sounded like nuts being rolled around on each other over my head. It turned out the sound was in the wall coming from a cat downstairs playing with venetian blinds. An odd accoustical property of an old house made it sound like it was right over my head.I'm going to assume based on my experience and other accounts that the most likely explanation is something unexpected and unexplained happened in a setting that did trigger imagination. We have to understand that this is a feature of the human brain. It can be perceptually fooled. That is not a moral failing on our part. Our sensory systems were selected by survival not by the accuracy of scientific calibration. People like horses get spooked.Now I have a relative who believes horses and young children see some sort of beings that we don't. They believe their child came home from the county fair accompanied by some invisible being they could see and talk to. After awhile the behaviour stopped and they presumed the "being" went away. You can guess that though I believe children have invisible playmate I think they are firmly imaginary. My explanation goes the child might have seen something that caught their attention at the fair and continued to play with it in their imagination until moving on to other interests. I don't know.But what kinds of significant occurances in the real world can be attributed to supernatural beings. I don't mean feelings we have but events like power failures, something blowing up, fires, wine going bad, blood coming out of the faucet instead of water, dead people climbing out of graves to satisfy a sudden craving for a snack of fresh brains of the living? lfen

Of course and we have more than 5 senses and you are studying science so you know it sometimes takes very high tech expensive equipment including but not limited to electron microscopes and particle accelerators to "perceive" some aspects of reality and we've no reason to think we have exhausted reality i.e. dark matter, dark energy, branes.But you are referring to something else to ghosts, spirits, demons, God, no? The claim is that these were present to the senses either in seeing some external thing, hearing something internally or externally, feeling goosebumps or temperature change, perhaps a smell.
But do you need to posit something external or mental illness, I think not. Particularly around the stress of death of a loved one the brain gets active. I've heard various stories and some include someone at a distance catching a vivid scent characteristic of a loved one perhaps coupled with a strong sense of their presence.I remember when I was in college being intensely in love. I'd be at work and suddenly caught the scent of the perfume my girl friend used. It was like it was there and I'd look around for her, but it was an olfactory hallucination brought on by the age old human mental illness called falling in love.There is an interesting type of brain damage I was reading about where a patient can recognize people but the visual cortex no longer is connect to the part of the brain where we feel our emotional connections to people. Patients with this disease will look at their mother and know it looks just like her but claim she must be an imposter. They say it looks like my mother but it's not. Talking on the phone they can hear her voice and that area still hooks up to the feeling area and they know it's their mother. Wish I could remember where I read this and what it's called.My point is that we are just beginning to unravel the brain's very complex modes of functioning and it's not commonsense stuff. And most of what I hear sounds more like unusual brain functionings rather than evidence of events of a supernatural kind. I say most, at the moment I can't actually recall anything that sounded like a legitmate account that didn't also sound like a confusion of the perceptual systems or misperception or some odd unusual brain functioning.My other objection to these stories is most of them, particularly the most believable of them involve fairly mundane stuff. The spirit world seems rather trivial and boring. They produces sounds, bumps in the night, move stuff, break a mirror perhaps. It's like healing miracles. People who have lost an arm don't suddenly regrow it. The healings are things that the immune system is capable of in extemis. So cancers dissappear in someone given a fatal diagnosis. But the immune system functioning in high gear can eliminate tumors.I also feel like it's your religious background that you are trying to maintain a rational for the Bible being literally true and that relies on their being supernatural evidences.I look forward to the discussion on this topic.lfen

This sounds like a hypothetical based on events told to you by a friend, IIRC? My first thought is I would suspect the memory and the timing. What you describe is a very stressful event and I've mentioned the distorting effect adrenlin can have. Would you like to start a topic on whether seizure are caused by demons or organic causes? I had a friend who was epiletic and perhaps because he got sloppy with his medication he would have grand mal seizure. I never saw any demons. And again why would antiseizure medication or some of the split brain surgeries serve to drive demons out? And what you described was a seizure and the individual should be medically examined and assessed whether anyone saw a demon or not.I don't think seeing is always believing obviously, nor hearing, no smelling, even touch can be fooled. As far as a house goes with walking furniture? I'd really want to have exhausted all possible explanations and that means bringing well trained people to study the problem. Naive observers can get things wrong. I'm not saying they are crazy but that it can take in depth investigation to locate the causes of some phenomena. And memory is not like a photograph that once taken stays the same except for some fading. Memories are dynamic and changed by other memories, beliefs, etc they do a lot more than fade.lfen

Well, it would definately shake me up I'm sure if I experienced something the way you described it. Okay, I would believe they went to the mountains. But let's say they also told me they caught a glimpse of bigfoot, bigfoot is supposed to have been sighted here in the pacific northwest. And lets say I knew them well and knew they tended to get excited by things and have an interest in weird stuff. I'd probably think they mistook a bear for bigfoot. I'd be skeptical about that part of the story even if I believed they were sincere in the telling and not putting me on I'd think it was a misidentificationI'll offer another possiblity that I would consider. There are some Indian and Buddhist practises about intense visualization that can result in seeing things that look real. I was reading the biography of an individual who became awakened by Ramana Maharshi to the non dual. He had been intensely devoted to Krishna and Radha and would chant and do devotions to them for hours. One night they appeared to him and he was deleriously happy and woke his wife to share the good news. She couldn't see them and he said that he could see through them but he prepared a meal for them and was just ecstatic. He was not schziophrenic he was holding a responsible postition at the time and taking care of his family. These kinds of things happen in India, just as Catholics tend to see visitations of the Virgin Mary. I'm totally ruling out mental illness.The highest teachings of Buddhism and Vedanta deny independent reality to these "visions". There value is primarily that they indicate someone has developed concentration or devotion to a high degree.
Those who have such visions are encouraged to NOT cling to them or think of them as something special but to see them as distractions to seeing the deepest truth of the Self. In Ramakrishna's case his devotion to the Divine Mother lead him to see her everywhere until he realized that her form was obscuring his experiencing God as the formless reality, and eventually her form dissolved so he could experience his essential being which is formless. So with my background I'd probably look to an explanation like this.Someone with a fundamentalist Christian background might experience these as independent spirits or demons obviously. I would guess that your friend Micah has a strong devotional nature and is very focused on his religion and so is mind is primed for these experiences. I'll admit my mind is not primed for visions or spirit visitations.My mother realised that I needed glasses in the third grade because I got angry and insisted there was no bird on the lawn that she was showing me. I was so near sighted I couldn't see it. Assuming something not too difficult to see however and both people can see and agree on things like who is in the room, but one sees a person and the other doesn't? Is it being seen with the eyes? That is are photons being emitted from the "visitation" striking one persons retina but not the other? Isn't it more likely that one person's brain's visual areas are creating the image and the other person's isn't?I know you don't think probability applies. A thread on theory of knowledge would be good to discuss all this in. I myself think probability is the basis of much of my view of the world and what I accept as plausible or not. I'll also admit I was more open when I was your age. I think the march of decades without any experiences of supernatural stuff and seeing lots of stuff debunked like psychic surgery and faith healing that I'm more skeptical now than when I was in college.lfen

I suppose I do dismiss the supernatural as a possible explanation for a variety of reason. I suppose in practical terms that means I put it at the bottom of the list, the last thing left after everything else has been eliminated.I am not totally uninterested in non scientific explanations of the world. I am interested in the Chinese medical concept of qi and exercises of qi gong but I'm just not sure there is an energy called qi even though I've experienced what feels like energy flowing in my body. They could have developed healthy practises but mistaken the sensations of relaxation and blood flow in the body for energy flow. I would really look for explanations that could fit with what we know from science.I've not had any overwelming supernatural experience so that is undoubtedly part of my skepticism. I think you have hit on the function of these events. Science and technology effect changes in the world. One of the problems I have with the supernatural is it seems ultimately trivial. I know voodoo claims to be able to kill people but the cases I know of the person knew they had been cursed and I think it was a fear response.Faith healing has a host of frauds however I believe genuine healings have occured but I don't think they are of a miraculous nature. The mind is capable of a lot and is intimately connected to the immune system and positive attitude can effect the immune system.Going bump in the night, seeing a demon, seeing some one convulse in a trance these happen in voodoo for example but I don't see them as making changes in the world but are a passing "spiritual" entertainment without lasting effect except sometimes in the faith of the witness.Mass visions? A reach perhaps but people do influence one another. There are experiments where naive subjects are persuaded to make wrong evaluations because of the group suggestions.For me the most challenging things are those that arise as intuition that result in rescues or the sense of someone dying at the time they were said to have died. I don't know about these apparent actions at a distance but I'm not yet prepared to believe in telepathy either though I've had some hard to explain experiences myself in this area. I don't think of these as supernatural though more like unexplained intuition at a distance.lfen

I think it more accurate if you held "that have thus far been unexplained" or "as of this writing I've found no explanation".Unexplainable seems to presume they can't be explained.You want something difficult to explain? Try qualia, and that is our everday basic common experiences, but why are the firing of nerves experienced as for example "red", or "wet" or "sour" etc.lfen

Well yes it could be. I am holding forth a hope, and nothing more than a hope, there might at some time emerge a scientific explanation of mind that might explain this so that it would be an ununderstood natural phenomena and not an intervention of a power about nature. It could also be some sort of misunderstood coincidence bolstered by bias. I mean we might have feelings from time to time that aren't confirmed to be accurate but we remember the few dramatic times they are confirmed.lfenedit: corrected accidently messed up subtitleThis message has been edited by lfen, 11-21-2004 09:18 PM

So are you positing another unknown force "telekinesis" that is not gravity, electromagnetic, the weak or strong force? And is this "force" supernatural so that it can't be measured by physics? And yet it can interact with natural matter?lfen

First of all I have to state that I've very little knowledge and even less experience with this stuff.I know often the "activity" of ghosts, poltergeists etc. has turned out to be either frauds or misunderstandings so it's tough to weed out. The other thing is most forces are there to study. Tough as it's been to understand gravity it is at least always there when you want to study it.You seem to be citing western phenomena and theories. India and Tibet have there own lore on special abilities and supernatural entities.
It think Tibetan Buddhism has the most sophisticated stance I've come across. It sees deities and demons as creations projected from the mind. This goes beyond halucination, they are held to be a valid energy or thought form. However, the goal of the aspirant is to recognize the basic creative power of the mind and then these created forms are dissolved back into it. Reading about the Indian and Tibetan approach might give you some new perspectives on all this.lfen

What do you mean by "entity"? Does a meme meet your definition? Sort of like software code. The code that results in someone doing something disapproved of would be a demon entity, and a meme that results in someone doing something approved of would be divine entity.This view says these entities are information and hence must be executed by some pre existing structure. This of course is not a supernatural explanation."Susceptible" seems to me an important criterion, but it points to hynotic susceptiblity i.e. active receptive imagination often with good intelligence so I'm not saying "stupid" but rather sensitive and susceptible.lfen

The author of this book undertakes a rational study of a documented event that he believes is likely evidence for spontaneous human combustion hereafter noted as SHC. SHC is not supernatural but is controversial. The author has a strong science background and related the documented circumstances of a woman found burned to ashes in a chair in her apartment in a circle of scorched rug. However the flames did not go on to start an apartment wide fire.I was impressed on reading the event as the author protrayed it and thought well maybe there is something to this stuff. Then an internet search turned up alternative information some of which the author gave. The woman was a smoker who took a sleeping pill before retiring and she was also fat. The documented account clearly support the interpretation that she had taken a sleeping pill, sat in her chair and lit a cigarette. If she nodded off and caught her clothing on fire, or the chair once it was hot enough her body fat would be melted and fuel the flames enough to almost completely incinerate her.Having to choose between this sequence and SHC explanation I choose the former.The point I'm making is that I was almost convinced of the possiblity of an implausible scenario based on incomplete evidence and persuasive presentation. Most of these stories of supernatural things have far less documentation and are presented with a heavier investment in persuassion. It's just not enough to go on for me. I fall back to the more plausible explanation of suggestibility, perceptual error, seizing on a traditional explanation rather than looking at other possibilities. The quantity of data is maybe adequate but it's usually of poor quality. I'm reminded of all the studies on the variability of eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony is not that reliable. That is how stage magician as well as con men do there tricks. The human sensory system has flaws, it can be deceived and is.So I'm sticking with science and skepticism until better data and testing is developed. Or for an adolescent to express their emotional turmoil by breaking dishes and disclaiming responsibility, so on and so on, etc?lfen

You are way over simplifying this. Eyewitness testimony can successfully be impeached on a vartiety of grounds. And I'm not sure it means nothing in science but in and of itself it is not sufficient.I'm not sure what you mean by being "science minded" but you seem to fail to grasp some important foundations of science. Relativity is grounded in the mathmatical formulations that can either be proved or disproved. The proof of a scientific theory is not that the explanation makes sense to me, or to you, but that the theory holds up to the scrutiny of peers. I don't understand the math so I take the consensus of physists who can do the math.Your statements here increase my skepticism about your observations. I think that what you experienced was if not sourced and least heavily modified by your beliefs. Nothing unusual in that it's just how the nervous system works, but it's more likely that it was an artifact of your brain function rather than a source external to your physical organism. Subjectivity then accounts for capricious and highly variable discriptions of these phenomena as ghosts, spirits, telekineses, poltergists, etc.I believe your time would be more productively spent learning how your mind has produced these experiences as there is something known about that. There is very little cause to believe you will ever find an external source as it's most likely it doesn't exist.lfen

People have not traveled at near light velocities, but the observations of particles accelerated to near light velocities appear to have confirmed the predictions. There is wait and see involved in most activities from planting a garden to theoretical physics, so? This is a provional faith subject to confirmation. If it's necessary for me to distinguish this from the sort of faith that leads YEC'ers to cook up wildly distorted theories of science to preserve the bibical account of Genesis let me know and I will try. Not "A" belief system, but I don't think the brain can function with out some biases and beliefs though not necessarily conscious. I am suggesting that you need to investigate your brain function as well.
I suggest an odd but interesting little book that touches on your interests in "supernatural" and "suspending belief": lfen