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Could ghosts actually be a life form?

Floyt said:
And quit being so self-righteous, guys, this is a thought experiment and not a case of some creduloid that needs to be educated.
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I was actually being serious about my E=mc2 comment - I hope I did not offend :o
 
Jimbo07 said:
Or, if ghosts only eat DC, you can use a 120V AC to 24V DC converter and leave a pair of exposed leads, as above. You wouldn't want to use a 12V DC battery, because the ghosts might be able to drain it too quickly.
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Or you could just leave the 12V car battery permanently hooked up to a charger.

And make sure it's one of those expensive chargers which have a switch-mode power supply inside instead of a transformer, so you're more likely to pick up strange readings on your RF meter. :)
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@ rorylee...

Is your avatar supposed to be blinking that fast? It's set up to blink for 20ms every 60ms, which is 12.5 blinks per second. I don't know if it was intentionally done that way, but I've made up a slower version for you if you're interested...

265734b8a113ecab51.gif
 
Brian-M said:
@ rorylee...

Is your avatar supposed to be blinking that fast? It's set up to blink for 20ms every 60ms, which is 12.5 blinks per second. I don't know if it was intentionally done that way, but I've made up a slower version for you if you're interested...

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/265734b8a113ecab51.gif[/qimg]​
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legend mate cheers!! it was a bit slower but some reason it went faster when uploaded here.

Thanks again =]
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
For example, plants were recently shown to be using some kind of quantum computing
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The headline is nonsense. What the article describes is photosynthesis, not computing. The only commonality is that they use quantum effects at larger scales than expected/normal.
 
dlorde said:
The headline is nonsense. What the article describes is photosynthesis, not computing. The only commonality is that they use quantum effects at larger scales than expected/normal.
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From the article:
The evidence comes from a study of how energy travels across the light-harvesting molecules involved in photosynthesis....

The route the energy takes as it jumps across these large molecules is important because longer journeys could lead to losses. In classical physics, the energy can only work its way across the molecules randomly. "Normal energy transfer theory tells us that energy hops from molecule to molecule in a random walk, like the path taken home from the bar by a drunken sailor," says Gregory Scholes at the University of Toronto, Canada, one of the co-authors of the paper published in Nature this week (DOI: 10.1038/nature08811).

But Scholes and his colleagues have found that the energy-routeing mechanism may actually be highly efficient. The evidence comes from the behaviour of pigment molecules at the centre of the Chroomonas antenna. The team first excited two of these molecules with a brief laser pulse, causing electrons in the pigment molecules to jump into a quantum superposition of excited states. When this superposition collapses, it emits photons of slightly different wavelengths which combine to form an interference pattern. By studying this pattern in the emitted light, the team can work out the details of the quantum superposition that created it.

The results are a surprise. Not only are the two pigment molecules at the centre of the antenna involved in the superposition; so are the other six pigment molecules. This "quantum coherence" binds them together for a fleeting 400 femtoseconds (4 × 10-13 seconds). But this is long enough for the energy from the absorbed photon to simultaneously "try out" all possible paths across the antenna. When the shared coherence ends, the energy settles on one path, allowing it to make the journey without loss.
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(emphasis mine) The bolded part is my understanding of quantum computer mechanisms. So I'm not sure what your issue is.
 
Floyt said:
If there was an energy-only equivalent to what we define as life (system showing reproduction, a mrtabolism etc.), such "organisms" would presumably be so different from "matter" life that they'd neither attempt interaction nor show interpretable behaviour patterns. I wouldn't expect a virus to protect a territory or enjoy someone's company, and these would be incomparably stranger...
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Why would they necessarily not want to interact with humans? Humans obviously want to interact with them. The relationship could be mutually beneficial. We could help supply them with essentials of life and they could reward us with whatever.
 
rorylee said:
I can see what you're getting at. Its just the same as why people don't like there photo been taken. If they exist, maybe they have some set of rules they have to live by, like we do...
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It's pretty obvious.
Ghosts are those souls that have been stolen when the person's photograph was taken. That's why they don't like photography.
 
Cainkane1 said:
The relationship could be mutually beneficial. We could help supply them with essentials of life and they could reward us with whatever.
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The ability to walk through walls would have obvious benefits in search & rescue after earthquakes. If all they want in return is a few boxes of AAs, then that sounds like a great deal.
 
shadron said:


(Give it a little time - it gets to ghosts eventually.)
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This video is from the point of view that people believe ghosts are the souls of the dead. The idea that ghosts are not dead but living energy beings is a bit different. Lightening goes into the ground but it doesn't go all the way through the earth or fly up into the cosmos. An energy being would evolve a way to stay put as it walked the halls of deserted buildings, old hotel corridores and basements and attics. many reports of ghosts have them walking above the floor and such. The fact that they look vaguely human or whatever may be protective mimicry.

Ok remember to keep this discussion civil. I deliberately made this discussion very very far fetched.
 
What would the environmental pressures working to evolve a more successful "energy being".. one that walks thru walks, yet can manage to go up the stairs?
 
I'm convinced these ghost hunter shows are merely the modern equivalent of the table-floaters and cabinet knockers. They try and use the tricks they have to video things happening, using their own shadows, reflections and kicking knocking something a few feet away from the camera (about two outstretched arms distance) to make it seem like they're not responsible. Using old batteries which even "fully charged" reach empty rather quickly, or using tiny holes in the packaging and a bulb to drain them beforehand is an easy trick.
 
Cainkane1 said:
Ok remember to keep this discussion civil. I deliberately made this discussion very very far fetched.
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I take your point and hope I didn't come off snarky in my earlier post. I personally enjoy discussions about "far fetched" subjects and have read books about the science of Star Trek and Indiana Jones. It's fun to think about how a being such as Superman might theoretically exist or how he would interact with the "real world". The difference between the discussion you're trying to have and a similar discussion about Superman is that practically no one believes that Superman is real. Lots of otherwise rational and intelligent people though do believe that ghosts exist. Hell, I did myself for about the first 20 or so years of my life. There's lots of emotional and intellectual baggage that comes along in a discussion that overlaps with real life in a way that other discussions don't. Looking at it from a another angle, someone wanting to suggest as a thought experiment that the battle of Agincourt didn't have anywhere near the death toll as historians have described isn't going to provoke people in quite the same way as suggesting a similarly themed thought experiment about the Holocaust. Some people will, rightly or wrongly, assume there's an agenda behind the supposedly harmless discussion.

All I'm trying to say is, it's OK to have a problem with people here being uncivil, but for crying out loud, it's a Skeptic's forum, if you or someone else cites some piece of evidence that suggests ghosts might be real, no one should get bent out of shape if someone else chimes in and mentions that that particular piece of evidence has been debunked. Going back to the Superman example, if someone points out that superheroes could exist because an ant can lift 50 times its body weight, it's perfectly OK for some pedantic bore like me to chime in and mention that such comparisons between tiny insects and relatively "massive" human beings are meaningless due to scale and the laws of physics.
 
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I hope this isn't off topic, but I have a good ghost story that really happened to me.

When I was 12 we moved into a house that had previously been used by an out-of-town forwarding agency. The 2 rooms in the front were used as offices, and the rooms in the back were the employees' living quarters. One of the workers, named Manjarrez happened to die in the house. The remaining employees demanded to move somewhere else because Manjarrez's ghost would come at night and terrorize them. They felt him touching their bed covers or heard him working with his mechanical typewriter.

During the first year we spent there, on the first cold night of November, I very clearly heard the typewriter being used. But the sound didn't come from the front rooms, instead, it came from an old, cheap desk where my mother kept her OWN typewriter. The house was totally dark, everyone else was sleeping. Very scared but skeptical (not completely) of ghost appearances, I decided to investigate. There was nothing strange with our typewriter but the noise of someone typing was still there. Then I lowered my ear to the thin wooden boards of the desk and found they were creaking, probably due to the change in temperature.

It wasn't that similar to a typewriter, but in my nervous state I could almost hear the little bell sound at the end of each line.
 
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yomero said:
I hope this isn't off topic, but I have a good ghost story that really happened to me.

When I was 12 we moved into a house that had previously been used by an out-of-town forwarding agency. The 2 rooms in the front were used as offices, and the rooms in the back were the employees' living quarters. One of the workers, named Manjarrez happened to die in the house. The remaining employees demanded to move somewhere else because Manjarrez's ghost would come at night and terrorize them. They felt him touching their bed covers or heard him working with his mechanical typewriter.

During the first year we spent there, on the first cold night of November, I very clearly heard the typewriter being used. But the sound didn't come from the front rooms, instead, it came from an old, cheap desk where my mother kept her OWN typewriter. The house was totally dark, everyone else was sleeping. Very scared but skeptical (not completely) of ghost appearances, I decided to investigate. There was nothing strange with our typewriter but the noise of someone typing was still there. Then I lowered my ear to the thin wooden boards of the desk and found they were creaking, probably due to the change in temperature.

It wasn't that similar to a typewriter, but in my nervous state I could almost hear the little bell sound at the end of each line.
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Yes the imagination can and does play tricks on us. Theres no ghosts and no living beings made entirely of energy that feels about batteries the same way we feel about a pizza delivery. Reality is strange enough without us making things up.
 
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