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How do we explain ghosts?

Darat said:
Unless you advertise the “5G waves” as reducing the appearance of fine wrinkles* and then a certain schizophrenic group of consumers will flock to them.



*according to one person out of the hundred people we randomly asked.
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I don't even think they'd need to be schizophrenic in order to believe that, lol. I imagine some of them would do it if Eamon Holmes merely hinted at it!

xterra said:
Darat, who is the "we" in your statement above?
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The Family Fortunes studio audience, of course.

Our survey says...!
 
xterra said:
Darat, who is the "we" in your statement above?
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The skin care companies. It’s a bit of silliness. I’ve noticed a certain type of person, probably the best representative is that Paltrow with her steaming vaginas, all for the organic, the natural until it comes to their skin and wrinkles then they want THE SCIENCE.
 
Darat said:
The skin care companies. It’s a bit of silliness. I’ve noticed a certain type of person, probably the best representative is that Paltrow with her steaming vaginas, all for the organic, the natural until it comes to their skin and wrinkles then they want THE SCIENCE.
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Thank you so much for the nightmare fuel image of Paltrow and her steaming vaginas. Vaginas.. Plural!!! And they're steaming!!!!

AAAARRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!


[Sound of diving through window]
 
Gilbert Syndrome said:
I don't think ghosts, or any myriad of mythical creatures, can be explained as simply as that, personally.

I don't think we invented these things just to explain away the weird, not necessarily. There's many reasons for why we tell stories and create myths, it's just part of our nature.
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No, not just that. But, as you seem to agree: “as a species, have a natural tendency to explain things by inventing fictional explanations”.

We've not really changed much when it comes to being a race of myth-makers and story-tellers, it's just that the Werewolves are replaced with evil Muslims, ghosts are replaced with corrupt politicians, we pass around conspiracies like kids used to pass around tales of "Bloody Mary", 5G masts are the latest haunted house on the corner of the street, lol.
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Well, we’ve not so much replaced them – we still have an overabundance of werewolves and ghosts on TV etc. – we’ve just added to them. Because, even too much evil is never enough. :rolleyes:

Our fears change and adapt over time, but they're generally not far from the basic fears that humanity has always had.
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We always seem to need enemies – fictional and real.
 
Tassman said:
No, not just that. But, as you seem to agree: “as a species, have a natural tendency to explain things by inventing fictional explanations”.



Well, we’ve not so much replaced them – we still have an overabundance of werewolves and ghosts on TV etc. – we’ve just added to them. Because, even too much evil is never enough. :rolleyes:



We always seem to need enemies – fictional and real.
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I don't know, I think Bigfoot and the Werewolves' time on TV is coming to an end as well, tbh. Save for the odd bit of twonk telly on the History channel or something, those shows have taken a complete nosedive. These myths still exist in the world, but not like they did, certainly not in the western world, we've replaced some of those arcane devils with newer ones, and conspiracies seem to be the devils of choice nowadays for many people. 5G phone masts are rap-rap-rapping on chamber doors. :p

Who doesn't love a good enemy, though? lol.
 
I never just happen to have a ghost story cross my path while I'm actually looking for something else or not looking for anything. The reason is that I have no history of having ever sought them out or clicked on them before, and online media give you suggestions based on what you've done online before.

If you really don't want to see more ghost stuff, simply unsubscribing from any related subscriptions and not clicking on those suggestions for long enough will convince the algorithms that you're not into that stuff anymore and they'll give up on suggesting it to you. It takes time but it works.

If that's not a sharp enough break for you, you can start over with a clean new online history by dropping your old accounts & creating new ones, possibly including on your own computer (or get a new computer). Also, although keeping your previous human contacts is fine, don't resubscribe to your old ghosty subscriptions. With no ghosty history to your new online identity, the algorithms will have no reason to try throwing ghosty links your way.
 
That is giving Google's algorithms a frankly wishful-thinking amount of credit. Presumably based on not understanding that it just matches keywords and text pieces, rather than actually understanding what the video is about.

Point in case, my clicking on some lefty-stuff videos back in the day -- you know, feminist stuff, social issues, that kinda thing -- also made it quite persistent in recommending douchenozzles like Sargon Of Akkad. Because apparently, hey, he's flagged his stuff with those keywords too, so that must mean I'm interested, right?

It got better recently when they seem to have weighted the author more, but I click recently on a video which happens to mention him as someone promoting a wrong opinion, and guess who gets recommended to me again? Yep, Sargon Of Akkad. Because apparently for Google he's like Candyman: someone says his name three times, and he's there :p

Similarly, clicking on atheism related videos quite often produces recommendations in which some outright lunatic thinks he's totally defeated atheists, even if he has to preemptively proclaim it himself, by repeating the same nonsense I've heard a million times before. And of course he tagged it as "atheism", because why wouldn't every atheist need to see his magnum opus?

Again, this has gotten better lately, but it still happens.

I have no reason to assume that only for ghosts it would totally work differently.
 
HansMustermann said:
it just matches keywords and text pieces, rather than actually understanding what the video is about.

Point in case, my clicking on some lefty-stuff videos back in the day... made it quite persistent in recommending douchenozzles like Sargon Of Akkad...

Similarly, clicking on atheism related videos quite often produces recommendations in which some outright lunatic thinks he's totally defeated atheists...

I have no reason to assume that only for ghosts it would totally work differently.
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I wasn't talking about how to pick one side of a topic and only get recommended that side. I was talking about not engaging with any part of the subject from any angle. She doesn't need to see a bunch of "ghosts aren't real" stuff while avoiding the "ghosts are real" stuff. She just needs not to keep seeing any stuff about ghosts at all.

She's depicted just casually running into more & more of this stuff all the time as automatic or unavoidable with no action taken on her part to cause it, but it isn't. If it were, I'd be getting sent the same stuff, and I'm not, because I've never done anything to draw such materials toward me. It doesn't even call for active avoidance measures like blocking (although some media sites do have that option as well). All it takes is not taking actions that explicitly tell the internet she does want this stuff, such as clicking on the links to it when they're offered (for long enough, to give the process time to make sure she means it... or a clean break from her old internet history if that takes too long for her).

(Also, even on the subject of wanting one side of a subject instead of both or neither, even though that's supposedly not the situation we're talking about in this thread: you must be sometimes clicking on the links from the wrong side, because I don't and I don't get those. I have in the past, but just actually never clicking the wrong stuff for long enough trained the algorithms my way.)
 
Re the thread title: Ghosts do not need to be explained. Quite the opposite. Ghosts are entirely an explanation, used by rather ignorant people as the explanation for natural phenomena that they do not understand. What needs to be explained is the natural phenomena that those people attribute to ghosts.
 
I dunno, but personally, I find that the average person is less and less inclined to bring the subject of ghosts up anymore, and most people don't outright believe in them like they once did. Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but having worked in all kinds of places over there years doing security, I used to have at least one person talk to me about ghosts, or about an old story of a ghost supposedly haunting some place or other.

Barely anyone seems to bother these days, might be a generational thing.
 
I don't hear people taking about ghosts or ufos much, but people are talking about alt-med and conspiracies.

Especially alt-med.
 
Axxman300 said:
Must be a thing where you live. In my neck of the woods ghosts are freely discussed by a cross-section of society that one wouldn't expect.
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It might be, although I suspect it's happening in a lot of places, where ghosts are just naturally being replaced with more modern concerns. I don't think the younger generations are all that interested, although some of them are definite flat-earthers, moon-landing doubters and all-round conspiracy nuts in general.

Ghosts, in a lot of places, just seem like old news, IMO.
 
arthwollipot said:
I don't hear people taking about ghosts or ufos much, but people are talking about alt-med and conspiracies.

Especially alt-med.
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I tend to agree, although I have had a few people talking to me about aliens and UFO's over the past couple of years. A couple of people have even claimed that they might as well believe in UFO's, as there's more evidence for them than there is for God, which, for me, is honestly a sentence that I can't make sense of no matter how many angles I attack it at, lol.
 
MohamedTaqi said:
To 'explain' something, implies that the something is a phenomenon. Ghosts are not a phenomenon, but just a definition.

So, there is nothing to explain.
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You could look at it that way, although I do think that there is an explanation, or, explanations, for why we endure these stories, and why we create them, why we pass them on, etc. Folklore, IMO. Modern folklore seems to be more based around conspiracies than wailing women in white or hairy man-beasts stalking the local woodland.
 
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