AggressiveProgressiv

Considering all the billions of people that have died in the history of mankind... there should be ghosts everywhere. Why have I never seen one in my life?

jayh

notice whenever people see something they can't understand, it is intepreted as a 'ghost'. Why is that the default explanation.

An interesting thought. In the very unlikely event that there are non physical sentient beings, which would be more likely: that they are former humans who somehow got their whole existence and sentience transferred after the destruction of the brain... or that they are a life form totally unconnected to humans but just happen to be interpreted that way from our brief encounters. The idea that a conciousness completely dependant on a physical brain would automatically transform into another life form (how would that evolve???) is highly questionable. But alas, it's more comfortable for some people than the concept of death.

jayh

A great deal of interesting research has been done on the illusions that people tend to interpret as ghosts, gods or space aliens and they tend to fit into a few standard categories.

Very often the lighting is poor and tricky. It's not at all unreasonable that multiple people can see the same perceptual illusion at the same time if it is indeed a trick of lighting.

PJPSYCO

My wife reminded me of ather way to learn about ghost debunking, watch ghosthunters or most haunted. Watch them very carefully.

One episode was most easy to debunk. The family had bats, and I'm not talking one. The paranormal investigators were swooped every 5 seconds. The paranormal investigators couldn't explain the disterbances and chalked it up to ghosts. I very quikely chalked it up to the bat freaking comming out cracks in the basement. The house is most likely on top of a cave filled with bats.

javarush

While on the "base tour" evolution during Hell Week, one guy stopped in front of a telephone pole and started dropping "coins" into the "soda machine". When his "soda" didn't come out, he started flipping the "return lever", and when that didn't work, he started beating and shaking the "machine".

I don't think we yet know enough about the brain to be sure how it reacts to external influences beyond what's provided by the known senses. It's an electrochemical device whose activity can be detected and monitored with non-invasive sensors. As such, it seems reasonable that the reverse would hold; that the brain could react to certain external EM fields. Combine that with our imperfect ability of conscious recall, it's possible that a spurious field could reactivate a lost memory and at the same time, give it dream-like animation and sensations, superimposed on reality. Of course, this doesn't explain all paranormal sightings/experiences but is one factor which would have to be ruled out in an investigation. And this isn't truly possible without knowing how to drill for information that's in the brain, especially when it's fragments beyond conscious recall; i.e. probing to see if the sighting matches a lost or unconsciously acquired memory.

As for disembodied "souls", I like to think that consciousness (or soul) is centered on the higher cortex. The body can continue to live without a functioning cortex (evidenced recently by Terry Shiavo) but cannot independently sustain/feed itself and so must eventually die. On the other hand, a person can retain almost full functionality despite astounding loss of brain tissue; I'm certain of one case where an entire hemisphere was gone. As such, one challenge is to identify the point at which the "soul" -- if there is such a "thing" -- would leave the body. How much brain loss? Is it a sudden or immediate event (e.g. following decapitation or even more explosive such as impact from a high-energy round)? Or is it a slow leak as the brain slowly decays (e.g. Terry S. again or severe Alzheimer's)? The second challenge is to identify how a "released soul" could imbed/persist in the environment -- As "residual" EM?

It would be interesting to have a case where a person blind since birth was introduced into a "haunted" environment. Would this person "see" the entities? What would Helen Keller (blind and deaf) have detected, if anything at all?

MadPhatCat

Why shouldn't you believe in _____ ?

Isn't that the wrong way to think about things? I am sure there is independent eyewitness testimony on alien abuductions too.

Hyndis

Furthermore, why is it that only humans seem to be allowed to be ghosts? At what cutoff point in evolution are members of a species allowed to become ghosts?

And if there is no cutoff point in evolution, then why aren't trilobite ghosts crawling all over the place? :rolling:

Add up all of the things that have ever lived and died in the planet's history and compare it to all living things currently alive right now, and we each should probably have billions of ghosts following us around.

So, where's all these ghosts?