Poltergeists!

Tone it down, CS. There are other ways of displaying your displeasure.

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Thou shalt not have any other Mods before Me

Right, that's why I used the qualifier 'simple'. Refer back to my earlier post for the kind of video that I would not write off so quickly. I've seen ghosts in real life. I've seen and been involved in some really 'spooky shit'. However - it turns out that I wasn't. It was a mixture of primal fears, superstitiousness, group hysteria, false memory and wilful delusion. At the time I was convinced it was real. Then I realized it wasn't. Needs repeating since it is classic confirmation bias. Just because you believe a certain phenomenon is real, it doesn't mean it is wise to believe that a given video is evidence of that real thing. I don't. It is not scientifically verified that my cat is hungry right now, but I don't write the hypothesis off. However, that there is a bogeyman under my bed - that I do write off as crap. At the same time - I accept it is possible there is a bogeyman under my bed, but I'm not going to live my life in a permanent state of chronic open mindedness about any philosophically possible state of affairs, otherwise I'd be justified in screaming for tech support and leaping off tall buildings.

hee.Somebody's got a bee in their bonnet. Have you read those "fake moon landing" sites? Yikes.In answer to your question, that footage couldn't have been faked (not with 1960s technology).But any of these spookable.com "poltergeist" videos could have been faked.Easily.The video I linked to, in a nutshell:A door knob turns {15 second pause} THEN THE DOOR FLIES OPEN!Oh noes!Then a chair moves {the legs being conveniently out of frame}.Then the camera falls over.I mean, come on.It's like they weren't even trying.

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Am I wanting to throw out all we know about biology, physics, etc? No LOL, I am not a creationist.

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Most people are Creationists about something. By that I mean that, for example, people can be entirely rational and rigorous and have a great bullshit detector when it comes to things like marketing and advertizing, perhaps because they work in that field and they know the secrets and the tricks. Those same people, though, can also simultaneously be utterly credulous when it comes to, say, cryptozoology, dowsing, or conspiracy theories. It is the relatively rare person who is quite rigorous with every single belief they hold. Even then, people are not perfect and irrationality and bias are ever present.That's why scientific experiments are designed to correct for something called experimenter effect, which is when a scientist unconsciously influences the outcome of a study.

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You would perhaps like me to be a hardcore skeptic and say if it hasn't been empirically proved, I don't want to know, it's meaningless to me.

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That's not what a skeptic, hardcore or otherwise would say.A skeptic would conclude that, based upon the sparse and poor quality evidence presented so far, there is no reason to conclude the presence of poltergeists. If more, better evidence is brought forth, a skeptic would be open to examining it, but if nothing conclusive could be drawn from it, she would have to conclude "We don't know".

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The only way I can see of dismissing this is by saying my husband was lying or hallucinating. He is a truthful person with no reason to lie about this to me, he wasn't ill at the time, and he wasn't on drugs.

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Could he have simply been mistaken?

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I think some of the phenomena that are reported must be genuine.

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But why? Ah, you give the answer in the next sentence...

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These things make life interesting.

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You hold these beliefs because you want them to be true, or at least possible, becasue they add intrest to your life.

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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my impression that many scientific discoveries were made by people who didn't believe that we know all there is to know,

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No scientist think that they know all there is to know.In fact, all of the professional scientists, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows I have ever known are some of the most humble people I've ever interacted with when it comes to that sort of thing.They understand far, far better than most people how excruciatingly difficult it is to really discover something of what really happens in nature, since they are the only people who ever truly do.

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and that some things are there waiting to be discovered by forward-thinking people willing to entertain some unusual ideas.

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What, do you think that the idea of ghosts and poltergeists is fresh and new and nobody has ever thought of studying it before?Believe me, they have been studied. Just as free energy machines, cold fusion, and the canals on Mars have been studied. All such ideas have been rejected because they were not fruitful lines of research. Nobody ever got anywhere. Nearly all of such cases were found to be fraudulent or based in people's delusion or mental illness.Why should we spend precious time and resources researching stuff that has never, ever yeilded anything useful, or even interesting?

LindaLou writes:

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If this is the case, there may be no consciousness that wants to either prove its existence, or hide itself.

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But that leaves us with the problem that every time we try to put the ghost/poltergeist under the microscope, it always seems to vanish. If something always goes away whenever we scrutinize it using controlled conditions, that's a pretty good sign that it doesn't exist.The only other explanation is that whatever it is you are looking for knows that you're looking for it and decides to go away when you do. But that leaves us with the problem of having to claim that every single ghost/poltergeist is playing us for fools and can always, in all contexts, manage to avoid detection.

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I feel I'm left with just one question. Why and how do these things happen?

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Well, since we know that there are plenty of human-based reasons for the how and why, is there a particular reason for us to conclude that it can't be any of those reasons? Especially since every time we put the ghost/poltergeist under the microscope, it vanishes?I don't have a problem with "We don't know." I have a problem with people thinking that jumping to magic is a better answer than any of the myriad mundane reasons that we know have been responsible.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

It's good to have an open mind......but not so open that your brain falls out.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

A case of misapplied skepticism.Husband: The grass needs cutting dear. Would you mind doing that this afternoon?Wife: OK, let's see some proof for your assertion that the grass needs cutting.H: I saw it just now. It's getting pretty long.W: Your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. Give me empirical proof.H: Why don't you go outside and see for yourself?W: Because you initiated the topic, so the burden of proof is on you. You must prove to me that the grass needs cutting.H: What will the neighbours think if we don't keep our grass cut?W: Their anecdotal evidence is also irrelevant. Just because they say something does not make it so.H: Our garden looks terrible! I can hardly walk out there!W: This is just an ad hominem attack on the grass and it proves nothing.H: What do I have to do, take a photo for you?W: Photos can be faked and misinterpreted.H: How about this then. Cut the goddamn grass today or I'm filing for divorce.W: Ultimatums prove nothing either . . . however, despite your logical fallacies, I will get out there whether the grass is long or not, just to make you happy. OK dear?H: Thank Christ.

Rrhain and Nator:I hope you take my post above in the lighthearted spirit in which it was intended. I can see your point of view here. So I have some questions for you.You claim that people have tried, and failed, to get concrete evidence that ghosts and poltergeists exist. You won't accept personal testimony and I can see why; the person may be telling the truth about what they think they saw, but may be misinterpreting the event. Or they could have been half asleep and dreaming, or hallucinating, or on drugs, or participating in group hysteria, etc. Sometimes the desire to "believe" is so great that logical explanations fly out the window and Occam's razor ends up in the toilet. I've met people on ghost watches who claim to get "results" on their digital cameras every time, because they think "orbs" (specks of dust reflecting the flash) and "vortices" (camera straps) and "mists" (nothing paranormal about that) are proof of ghosts.So if ghosts, poltergeists or whatever, really did exist -- we'll say hypothetically here -- what kind of proof would be acceptable to you?Ghosts seem to haunt particular places. How do you get one into a lab? If you go to the scene of the haunting, and are able to make it a controlled environment to your satisfaction, how do you know that anything is going to turn up? If the activity is only reported to happen maybe once a month, what chance do you stand of being lucky enough to witness something?What would you do in a poltergeist case? A poltergeist is often centered around a person, called the focus. What I would like to see, myself, is more rigorous testing being done on the focus. If you're a scientist you might laugh at my ignorance here, but I wish someone would have been able to hook Janet up to some sort of machine that could measure her brain activity before, during, and after events. Often people in poltergeist cases say they feel a headache or some other physical symptom before an event occurs, as if energy is being drained from them in some way. In the Enfield case Janet, her sister and her mother all reported this. If it's physical then there ought to be a way to measure it.The problem is that poltergeists just aren't very common, often they go unreported, and not every case is as "active" as the Enfield one. Sometimes events might be reported once a week or once a month.Also, what do you make of the pattern that poltergeist cases show? Could we not learn from studying many different ones and looking at the similarities? I gave a list of "core phenomena" at the beginning of this thread. How is it that people from different periods in time, different walks of life, different countries, all report similar things? Stone-throwing is very common. The stones seem to appear from nowhere, though often they show signs of having originated in the locality. Sometimes they follow a strange trajectory, or they move more slowly than they ought to, or they make odd "zipping" noises as they travel through the air. Often people report, upon picking the stones up straight away, that they are warm or even hot to the touch. If it were obvious or even possible that someone could be hiding and throwing the stones, these phenomena would not be reported again and again. There are reports of stones falling on roofs in full view of witnesses, and of several stones coming from different directions simultaneously.It isn't always stones. In one case, people found that if they threw marked sticks into a field, the same marked sticks would be tossed back at them. In another case, in a garage, marked nuts and bolts would be thrown into a corner and be tossed back. In the Enfield case, there were many reports of Lego bricks appearing out of nowhere and being thrown. A photographer was hit on the head by one in view of several witnesses, and he was injured so badly that he had to go to hospital.You could say that the logical explanation has to be that someone was throwing these things, in every single case. Or that the people who gave the facts in the cases were mistaken or lying. I am not willing to dismiss 100% of the events quite so easily. Would anyone like me to give more details from the "Poltergeist Phenomenon" book? It documents probably a hundred or more cases and gives examples of each of the "core phenomena". I'm aware that I've been generalising here, but I can focus on something more specific like the stone-throwing, and give the details from some cases.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

I know this a lighthearted squib, but...The wife can see that the grass is long. That's empirical evidence. Whether it's long enough to require cutting is a matter of interpretation .This isn't analogous to the case of ghosts and poltergeists, because we're not agreed that those phenomena exist. And we're not agreed that those phenomena exist because there's no way that I can independently confirm the reports you have provided (which is why those reports are anecdotal evidence).Let's assume the wife is away at a conference for the week, and the husband rings her up and tells her the grass is long so he's going to have to get the lawnmower out to cut it. She's not going to find anything exceptional about this, because she's got plenty of experience of the grass getting long and needing cutting. (In fact it's so unexceptional an event that she's likely to consider getting a divorce on grounds of boredom).On the other hand, let's imagine the husband rings up and says he's been hearing lots of strange banging noises coming from the attic, and that things keep going missing in the house. He's getting so worried he's decided to call in the SPR (the Society for Psychical Research, for our US colleagues). I'm sure she'd need a lot more convincing than in the first case, don't you? (It fact, she's likely to suggest he calls in a plumber rather than the SPR )The degree of skepticism you need to apply depends on circumstance. The less experience you have of a phenomenon, the more skepticism you need to apply. It's as simple as that (as Jar would say).Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

H: OK, follow me....There is your empirical evidence - the length of the grass.W: You must prove to me that the grass needs cutting.H: No - not unless you are using 'need' to mean something very strict. I used it to mean that it is strongly desirous from both our points of view that long grass needs cutting. We have evidence that the grass is long therefore it is strongly desirous that the grass gets cut. Since it will only likely be cut by one of us, and I'm doing x this afternoon - I was hoping you would be kind enough to do it.Then you'd have something quite close to the kind of argument we have in my house when one of us tries to be a smart arse.

LOL yes you both are right. My question is, though, when do you decide to employ your skepticism; and then, how much, if it comes in degrees? Every time someone tells you something, you have to decide whether to trust that they are telling the truth, or the truth as they think it is, or whether they are telling a half-truth, or an outright lie. Probably you wouldn't have a problem with being told that the grass is getting long and needs cutting. Maybe you would accept that assertion by someone else in your family without bothering to look yourself, yes? So at what point do you decide that you aren't going to believe someone until you have verifiable proof?Maybe we need to start a new thread on the nature of skepticism, and its application to different life situations?

The skeptic's watchword is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Things that are completely, reasonably within our sphere of experience don't require substantial evidence to accept.For instance if my wife asks me to mow the lawn, her personal testimony that the grass is long might very well be so convincing that I'm out there with the lawn mower all gassed up before I notice that it's not long at all. Grass grows, after all, and neither the existence of grass nor the fact that it grows is all that controversial.But extraordinary claims - like the existence of ghosts that contradict 200 years of scientific understanding of the nature of matter and life - require extraordinary evidence. It takes more evidence to substantiate ghosts than to substantiate long grass in your yard, simply because asserting the existence of ghosts is such a much more significant claim.If ghosts exist, our understanding of the universe has been fundamentally flawed for 200 years without us noticing, because the putative behavior of these ghosts is inconsistent with the laws of physics as we've derived them. Inconsistent with biology as we understand it. Inconsistent with chemistry as we've developed it. Etc.It's not just "ghosts" or "no ghosts." It's "ghosts" or "200 years of science." I'm not saying that should lead us to immediately dismiss ghosts under all circumstances, but it does require that we see extraordinary evidence before we accept the existence of ghosts.Somebody throwing some Legos around doesn't rise to that level. A few videos on YouTube don't rise to that level. Interviews conducted with a whole population of ghosts under rigorous laboratory settings might rise to that level.

It's to do with the level of the claim in context with what we know about the world around us.What if I told you I had a Ham sandwich for lunch? - you would have little reason to doubt it.What if I told you I had a ham sandwich for lunch and it was made by Nigella Lawson for me? It's likely at this stage you are going to ask me some more questions about the experience and be a bit more skeptical.Your situation is worse because it does not rely on simply the personal interactions of a couple of people, it relies on everything we know about science and the university to be wrong. It relies on every piece of physical piece of research that has been conducted and is being conducted as being wrong. It relies on 100,000s of scientists getting science wrong on a fundemental level.

I don't think it's that difficult LindaLou. Don't we all make this kind of judgement a hundred times a day?I think we use at least three criteria to judge how sceptical we are about a person's claims:1. How much we know and trust the person making the claims;
2. How likely the claims are (based on our prior experience);
3. How important the claims are to us (if it doesn't really matter whether they're true or not, then we don't really expend much energy in trying to verify them).Let's say my car regularly acquires a squeak after it's been driven for more than 25 miles. I've got two friends, both of whom I trust implicitly, but who give me contrasting advice.Friend A tells me that my brakes are probably faulty and that I need to take the car to a car mechanic to get its floating caliper adjusted.Friend B tells me that my car's energy is probably faulty and that I need to take the car to a karma mechanic to get its chi adjusted.So which friend do I trust?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I always apply scepticism, except by mistake when I fail to do so. If my partner calls and tells me that she is going to be late because the tooth-fairy has stolen her keys - that would cause me to disbelieve her story is literally true. The tooth fairy is an explanatory entity for which there is no evidence for its existence.I would therefore assume she was being colloquial and ask if the tooth-fairy has done as the shoe-menders did and branched out into keys.IF she told me she was late because the bus had broken down, I'd compare the explanatory reason to what I know - do buses break down? - and I'd believe her. Right. I know that grass grows and that long grass should be cut. When the assertion requires an entity whose existence or whose likelihood is questionable (sorry I'm late - the bus got held up by terrorists, then Gordon Brown wanted advice on the stock markets and I had to do some undercover work for the KGB). If you feel there is more to explore or more questions to ask than I have been able to cover here - then go for it!