How do we explain ghosts?

[Axxman300]

The difference between UFOs and ghosts is that nobody sees UFOs in their garage.

The atmosphere will distort and reflect images over a great distance, and sunlight makes distortion worse. Combine this with the fact that most people are unfamiliar with the sky and you get most UFO sightings.

In short: External input.

Ghosts are seen as a result of Internal input.

For example a security guard hears a familiar sound, and as he looks in that direction he is moving, and in that split second the visual aspect ratio changes making it seem as if a shadow moved before vanishing. The security guard combines the misidentified shadow with the sound he heard, and - if he believes in ghosts - comes away from the incident thinking he's seen one. Even if he doesn't believe in ghosts the guard is disturbed by what he THOUGHT he saw before correctly blowing it off as an active imagination.

 

[Steve001]

People always underestimate the difficulty of gauging distance, size and speed of any object against/in a featureless sky.

Even experienced sky watcher, plane spotters, pilots and birders for instance, can be fooled and certainly fool themselves. Even when you are aware of this, mistaken estimates are easy to make.

I never intimated how far away it was. Though knowing the maximum height of stratus clouds and my viewing angle I can infer that it was not miles away. There's a detail I left out. Since it was tending towards dusk I specifically remember looking for a orange glow on the cloud, I saw none. From that I can infer two things either it was much too low to cast a glow or if it did the glow was too dim too see. Though the sky was featureless that wasn't how I referenced its speed. There were trees nearby that help. In my years I've seen many aircraft that appear to fly slowly for reasons such as they actually were or do to great distance or they were flying slowly coming towards me. This orange ball of light was moving from my left to right.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

The accuracy is, in the fact I witnessed an orange ball of light moving slowly across the sky.

But that's not a measure of accuracy; that's only an allegation of fact. The only way to establish its accuracy would be to measure it against other verifiable facts, which neither you nor anybody else can do at this point. The apparent vividness and clarity of detail you attribute to your memory gives no indication either way as to how accurate it is. Not even to yourself.

All of the other details I wrote are irrelevant.
I've noticed something about your modus operandi. And that is you like to argue over the most nitpicky things just for the sake of it. Your reply is evidence of that characteristic.

If the claim is that your memory is accurate, then your ability to report details with consistent fidelity is relevant, even crucial. If it turns out you can't even pin down when you saw this thing, that justifiably calls into question the accuracy of your report.

Our brains are not camcorders, nor our memories playbacks of faithfully-recorded and largely intact video files. Which is one reason why it's a bad idea to get butthurt when somebody makes the perfectly reasonable suggestion that maybe the event didn't occur exactly the way you narrate.

Now certainly there must be a reply somewhere if this forum that is surely worthy to argue over instead of wasting time and brain power doing it with my trivial story.

Sour grapes. Your butthurt here suggests a higher degree of emotional investment in having your audience believe your story than you are admitting to.

 

[theprestige]

The accuracy is, in the fact I witnessed an orange ball of light moving slowly across the sky. All of the other details I wrote are irrelevant.
I've noticed something about your modus operandi. And that is you like to argue over the most nitpicky things just for the sake of it. Your reply is evidence of that characteristic. Now certainly there must be a reply somewhere if this forum that is surely worthy to argue over instead of wasting time and brain power doing it with my trivial story.

I think it's actually a central part of the discussion: The limitiations of human memory and perception.

All I'm saying is that we can't evaluate your UFO sighting, first and foremost because fifty years on we have no way of knowing whether you actually saw what you remember seeing. Human memory just isn't that reliable.

Given what you know about the limitations of human memory, why are you so confident that you remember this particular incident accurately?

My contention is that it's pointless to try to explain ghosts or UFOs that come to us from decades-old memories.

It's one thing to look at a radar plot or a photograph and try to deduce what it shows. It's another thing to try to deduce what happened, from a decades-old memory. Did you see it? Sure, whatever. Can we be certain enough that you saw it to bother trying to explain it? I don't think we can.

Why did you bring up this anecdote, anyway?

 

[Thor 2]

I don't think you're intimating aliens.

Inaccurate memories aren't characterized by the absence of detail, but by the presence of inaccurate detail.

This is one of the problems with trying to identify UFOs from secondhand reports. There's no way to be sure that the reporter is remembering the right details.

ETA: Earlier you said it was the summer of '72. Then you said it was the summer of '71 or '72. The details are there, but where is the accuracy?

The accuracy is, in the fact I witnessed an orange ball of light moving slowly across the sky. All of the other details I wrote are irrelevant.
I've noticed something about your modus operandi. And that is you like to argue over the most nitpicky things just for the sake of it. Your reply is evidence of that characteristic. Now certainly there must be a reply somewhere if this forum that is surely worthy to argue over instead of wasting time and brain power doing it with my trivial story.

This touches on what I pointed out in the thread "Trial By Jury". A nitpicker will point out some irrelevant detail in your recollection (A detail you never gave much attention to.), and use that to discredit your recollection of that which was the centre of your attention.

While ready to admit to the susceptibility of error in eye witness testimony, I think we must allow some credibility in many cases, and try to find explanation rather than dismiss the testimony automatically. This is particularly so when no other evidence is on offer.

Some years ago when observing the night sky I noticed a bright object moving up, then down. I pointed this out to a friend who drew my attention to the fact that I was standing on the deck of a ship. The rolling of the ship was so slow I didn't feel it.

This is the way we honestly assess the accuracy of an observed event. We try to find explanations for the apparently unexplainable, not just automatically dismiss the observation out of hand, with the claim that it was only an eye witness account after all.

 

[MohamedTaqi]

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.

Agree, that's another way to look at it. To explain "Ghosts" as a system of traditions and folklore , I think it is a social and psychological phenomenon, that is : It is nearly impossible to have conscious beings and intelligent civilizations without exhausting the scope of different psychological experiences that might emerge from the many possibilities that our brain is capable of.

So, in a sense : religion, folklore, traditions are a psychological phenomenon. They do not prove "Gods" or "ghosts" or "Djinns" , but they prove that humans exhaust all their creative experiential resources.

 

[MohamedTaqi]

No. Ghosts are a side-effect.

Not explaining them can get people hurt, as in the case of CO2 poisoning, and outgassing from toxic sheetrock. They may also be diabetic.

This is why it is important to understand why people see, or think they see them. Non-existence is a starting point, not an end point.

Yes, I might misunderstand the question.

If you look at it that way, it is the "belief in Ghosts" and "subjective experience of Ghosts" that needs to be explained, this is the phenomenon : Why do people 'see' ghosts'.

And not : Ghosts.

A phenomenon must be objective in order to qualify as a phenomenon as far as science is concerned. The objective phenomenon here is that people see and believe things, and not the content of what they see.

The contents of our conscious experience are never taken seriously in science, what is taken seriously is why the content exists and why does the brain give rise to the qualitative aspects of it.

Here is an example, this is an example of a "Ghost"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GALLMJxLvgA


The illusion itself is not important, the content "what white or gray look like" are not important, and are not taken seriously in science. This is not the phenomenon.

What is important though, is that why this psychological illusion takes place? why is it that the gray looks like white under the shadow?

One of the answers lies in the integration of information in the brain, the space of our experience is not a space with separate independent entities, but everything is integrated in such a way, that adding a dot or line to the scene, makes the brain recompute the whole scene.

Here, just adding the shadow makes the brain recompute the colors of the whole scene. That's why "ghosts" arise. The brain is highly interconnected so that one can never predict what might arise just by introducing some stimuli to the system.

 

[MohamedTaqi]

People here don't see Ghosts, they see Djinns .. Because the Qur'an states that Djinns are just like humans, but created from fire instead of clay, and there are Muslim and non-Muslim Djinns according to the Myth, and they also will be judged like humans in the hereafter.

The Qur'an says that they served Solomon to build his temples and statues, and many Muslims believe that Solomon controlled them using his magic ring, and bad Djinns are kept in lamps.

In Morocco, fanatics insist on eating salt at least once in 40 days (since they believe salt keeps Djinns away), they also believe that not eating salt for 40 days helps you see Djinns , and sorcerers and witches use this method to communicate with them and use them (sorcerers are still executed in Saudi Arabia to this day !!). According to the folklore, pouring hot water in a sink or wash basin may cause you harm, since hot water may kill a Djinn's children and bring harm to yourself.

When I was a kid in the 90s, people used to talk about Djinns more often compared to now, as the technology and the internet made people less interested in those stories, and many people in the 2000s don't believe in them anymore. Many reported seing Djinns and such hallucinations, but personally I've never had such an experience.

The only "magical" experience I've had personally is this : I was dreaming a couple years ago that I saw myself looking for "camilidae" and llama species on google.

Believe me, the results page and its images were exactly the same thing I saw when I verified upon waking, the same images, the same titles, but the order is different.

The only explanation of this is that I have already searched that, and the impression stuck in my long term memory. Although I don't remember searching that exact term, but it must be the case, since I am used to take zoology and systematics courses at home.

That's the closest I got to a "miracle", and it was amazing ! To know that a google result page is stored in my brain without me knowing.. wow! I know it is not a big deal, but having the experience is a shock, to know that your brain stores things you don't know about.

 

[Steve001]

This touches on what I pointed out in the thread "Trial By Jury". A nitpicker will point out some irrelevant detail in your recollection (A detail you never gave much attention to.), and use that to discredit your recollection of that which was the centre of your attention.

While ready to admit to the susceptibility of error in eye witness testimony, I think we must allow some credibility in many cases, and try to find explanation rather than dismiss the testimony automatically. This is particularly so when no other evidence is on offer.

Some years ago when observing the night sky I noticed a bright object moving up, then down. I pointed this out to a friend who drew my attention to the fact that I was standing on the deck of a ship. The rolling of the ship was so slow I didn't feel it.

This is the way we honestly assess the accuracy of an observed event. We try to find explanations for the apparently unexplainable, not just automatically dismiss the observation out of hand, with the claim that it was only an eye witness account after all.

Next thing ThePrestige and Reformed Offlian will be arguing after I restated the time frame is my inaccuracy calls into question I saw anything at all. I posted this story of mine merely as a curiosity, never expecting it to be cross examined nor wanting to be.

 

[Steve001]

Sour grapes. Your butthurt here suggests a higher degree of emotional investment in having your audience believe your story than you are admitting to.

No sour grapes. Do you know why? Because it's just a story of no importance to anyone not even to me.

 

[Steve001]

I think it's actually a central part of the discussion: The limitiations of human memory and perception.

All I'm saying is that we can't evaluate your UFO sighting, first and foremost because fifty years on we have no way of knowing whether you actually saw what you remember seeing. Human memory just isn't that reliable.

Given what you know about the limitations of human memory, why are you so confident that you remember this particular incident accurately?

My contention is that it's pointless to try to explain ghosts or UFOs that come to us from decades-old memories.

It's one thing to look at a radar plot or a photograph and try to deduce what it shows. It's another thing to try to deduce what happened, from a decades-old memory. Did you see it? Sure, whatever. Can we be certain enough that you saw it to bother trying to explain it? I don't think we can.

Why did you bring up this anecdote, anyway?

I wasn't asking for an analysis. I just wanted to share. As hard as that may be to see that is the truth.

 

[Axxman300]

Yes, I might misunderstand the question.

If you look at it that way, it is the "belief in Ghosts" and "subjective experience of Ghosts" that needs to be explained, this is the phenomenon : Why do people 'see' ghosts'.

As I explained earlier in this thread and in others, the question isn't, "Are ghosts real?", the question is. "Why do rational people see ghosts?". As I said, there are many latent factors which can make a person an unwilling witness to what they believe is a paranormal encounter. Things like outgassing from bad sheetrock, bad wiring, CO2 poisoning, and infrasound all contribute to what is a very real experience to the person who has the experience. Throw in the crazy way the brain takes shortcuts in processing sensory input, and you have a bunch of factors which was not obvious to the general population.

A phenomenon must be objective in order to qualify as a phenomenon as far as science is concerned. The objective phenomenon here is that people see and believe things, and not the content of what they see.

The contents of our conscious experience are never taken seriously in science, what is taken seriously is why the content exists and why does the brain give rise to the qualitative aspects of it.

Again, the biggest factor which turned me away from a believer was that the most common "ghost" is that of a living person. Understanding the sensory input which leads someone to believe a family member is somewhere in the home when they are not is the master key to understanding the engine behind the illusion.

People here don't see Ghosts, they see Djinns .. Because the Qur'an states that Djinns are just like humans, but created from fire instead of clay, and there are Muslim and non-Muslim Djinns according to the Myth, and they also will be judged like humans in the hereafter.

That is a whole other can of worms, and infrasound runs wild in parts of the middle east due to the heat rising keeping the air circulating. There are a lot of stories which came out of our invasion and occupation of Iraq that could have been told by soldiers from a thousand years ago. Men on edge being effected by infrasound, and seeing and hearing things. Shooting at shadows only to find an empty perimeter.

There is so much to the human brain and the mind we have yet to explore.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Next thing ThePrestige and Reformed Offlian will be arguing after I restated the time frame is my inaccuracy calls into question I saw anything at all.

Is that what we will be arguing next? Well, damn. Now that you’ve predicted my plot twist on the internet, I guess I’ll have to rewrite what I was going to post.

*types furiously*

There. Now: neither thePrestige nor I made this about the details; you did. Specifically, you, like Nessie earlier upthread, progressively added details to your story as you went along. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed before. The script goes something like this:

Claimant: “I once saw an orange light moving across the sky/heard footsteps in an empty hallway.”
Audience: “Maybe it was just x”.
Claimant: “No, it couldn’t have been x, because new and conveniently-recalled detail a.”
Audience: “…or maybe it was y.”
Claimaint: “No, it couldn’t be y, either, because new and conveniently-recalled detail b.”
Audience: “Are you sure you recall a and b correctly? I mean, you admit you don’t even remember the exact date.”
Claimant: “Yes, my story is totally accurate, and you can trust me because I also vividly remember new and conveniently-recalled details c, d, and e.”

The claimant wants to keep alive the notion that whatever they experienced defies easy explanation, while dismissing the alternative that they simply missed or forgot details that would indicate such an explanation. And to do so, he increasingly assures us both that his recollection of the event is rich in accurate detail, and that those details happen to preclude the proposed explanations.

You saw this light almost 50 years ago, and you obviously didn’t take notes at the time (because then you would be able to consult them for the date) so we have to consider seriously the possibility that you simply don’t remember the event nearly as well as you claim to, especially when your addition of details follows the rhetorically-convenient pattern mentioned above.

I posted this story of mine merely as a curiosity, never expecting it to be cross examined nor wanting to be.

You posted a UFO anecdote on this thread never expecting it to be cross-examined. Oooookay.

 

[MohamedTaqi]

As I explained earlier in this thread and in others, the question isn't, "Are ghosts real?", the question is. "Why do rational people see ghosts?". As I said, there are many latent factors which can make a person an unwilling witness to what they believe is a paranormal encounter. Things like outgassing from bad sheetrock, bad wiring, CO2 poisoning, and infrasound all contribute to what is a very real experience to the person who has the experience. Throw in the crazy way the brain takes shortcuts in processing sensory input, and you have a bunch of factors which was not obvious to the general population.

Thank you .. Yes, I misunderstood an interesting question, It is easy to deceive the brain, just consider the case of Pareidolia : when you wake up late at night, and see a curious face staring at you : You turn on the light to find it is just a curtain ...

Again, the biggest factor which turned me away from a believer was that the most common "ghost" is that of a living person. Understanding the sensory input which leads someone to believe a family member is somewhere in the home when they are not is the master key to understanding the engine behind the illusion.

I think in the absence of stimulus (e.g during sleep), the brain works in a random way which gives rise to dreams, hallucinations, and maybe the so-called OBEs.

The brain is an amazing organ.

That is a whole other can of worms, and infrasound runs wild in parts of the middle east due to the heat rising keeping the air circulating. There are a lot of stories which came out of our invasion and occupation of Iraq that could have been told by soldiers from a thousand years ago. Men on edge being effected by infrasound, and seeing and hearing things. Shooting at shadows only to find an empty perimeter.

There is so much to the human brain and the mind we have yet to explore.

Iraqi people are more into Imams and religious figures (like Ali, Fatima and a about 12 Imams...etc) compared to Moroccans. I guess soldiers started to see deceased (or coming) Imams

 

[Axxman300]

Iraqi people are more into Imams and religious figures (like Ali, Fatima and a about 12 Imams...etc) compared to Moroccans. I guess soldiers started to see deceased (or coming) Imams

I forget the Djinn run the length of North Africa all the way into the Hinu Kush. The great thing is the way the Djinn stories vary depending on landscape, which is a wonderful clue as to how infrasound works on the mind.

 

[AmyW]

Thanks Axxman just read your replies . Hope you all are safe and well

 

[Thor 2]

Next thing ThePrestige and Reformed Offlian will be arguing after I restated the time frame is my inaccuracy calls into question I saw anything at all. I posted this story of mine merely as a curiosity, never expecting it to be cross examined nor wanting to be.

Well maybe they get off on doing this sort of thing - mustn't deny them their jollies. I see Reformed Offlian is having another quite elaborate and detailed go at it ^.

 

[Steve001]

Well maybe they get off on doing this sort of thing - mustn't deny them their jollies. I see Reformed Offlian is having another quite elaborate and detailed go at it ^.

I just skimmed through it. Poor chap is gettin' his knickers in a knot over nothing.

 

[arthwollipot]

I notice that I was not similarly cross-examined about my UFO story.

 

[Thor 2]

I notice that I was not similarly cross-examined about my UFO story.

The nit pickers are picky about who they nit pick.