Truth poll

[ciphergoth]

I should really post this on a Monday but I might as well do it now. A whole bunch of assertions to do with truth that it occurred to me to poll about...

[Poll #1365485]

Comments

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Why do you believe in ghosts/spirits? There really is AFAICT no real evidence that they exist.

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

Personal experience. (Sorry - hard to put into words, so I'm not going to go into further details unless you ask me in person. It also implicates others, so there are details I am not at liberty to tell - "Not my story". Nothing personal, honest!)

I recognise that there may be other explanations and these are not things I have seen so much as felt, but it's sufficient for me to believe they exist without the scientific evidence. (Which if you read the other responses I gave, is a bit of an exception!)

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Yes, but lots of people believe they've had personal experience of all sorts of things. Jesus curing their cold, UFOs, the royal family being lizards. I'm guessing that you'd prefer the rational explanations for all of these things.

I don't see how you can therefore think that your personal experience is special, especially since there are other explanations. It certainly doesn't convince me.

[Not meaning to be insulting here, btw. I hope it doesn't come across that way.]

[battlekitty.livejournal.com]

[No insult taken, but thank you for adding the comment! Hopefully my answer won't come across as such, either.]

This is going to end up sounding all over the place, so apologies in advance!

A rational explanation that fully encompasses the experience would be preferable. I could conceive an explanation of "nutter" which really wouldn't. :) I don't know of any explanations for the experiences I have had. I should note that these are experiences replicated by others at different points in time and completely separate to me - I know I am not alone in these experiences. I do think that eventually there will be a full explanation, but I doubt it will be in my lifetime. (I have heard a vague theory along the lines of - from memory - quantum strings representing different planes of reality and "spirits"/"supernatural" being due to the interaction of these planes/worlds on each other. I don't have the knowledge to dismiss or admit this as a possibility, though.)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "special" there, so to answer in a couple of senses:
- I know that these are not experiences that are solely my own - others have also experienced them both in my company and separately.
- I can think of (usually unproven) explanations for many other experiences - the briefest umbrella statement for them would be that I believe that the human brain is capable of much more than is currently understood (eg, the placebo effect). These experiences were sufficient at suggesting an external influence for me to not dismiss them as delusion, and as such I don't class them as irrational. (ie: special as in why do I make an exception with this, if that wasn't clear.)

I guess it comes down to not dismissing the experience just because the rational explanation hasn't been found yet. A good example would be all that stuff about people being sensitive to EMR - It's been shown by experiment that they aren't, but that doesn't mean they aren't experiencing the symptoms and it is possible that there is another reason or maybe even an indirect link to EMR that hasn't been deduced yet and hence wasn't replicated in the lab.

It's a fine line here, by the way - if someone was to say similar things as this regarding the existence of God, I'd be very much on the other side, mainly due to my feeling that there are other much better explanations. I can't properly qualify exactly what the difference is in this case, but I do feel that it exists.

And finally, I wouldn't expect it to convince others. It's an experience I have had which has led me to this belief, and in isolation I wouldn't expect others to believe it just because I choose to. (Besides, I haven't told of the experience itself - I don't think it would change minds if I did, but it is infinitesimally more likely to in much the same way as asking a super-model out makes the chances of going out on a date with a super-model change from absolute zero to practically zero!)

[damerell.livejournal.com]

'I have heard a vague theory along the lines of - from memory - quantum strings representing different planes of reality and "spirits"/"supernatural" being due to the interaction of these planes/worlds on each other. I don't have the knowledge to dismiss or admit this as a possibility, though.'

It's complete guff, I'm afraid, just a series of words strung together. It's like crystal healers blathering about "energy"; the words are science words but it doesn't mean anything.

In other news I'll swap you the first two volumes for Admiral Hornblower.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Regardless of the guff or the insufficient attempts to explain/rationalise/etc., I have also had experiences that suggest to me that there are ghosts/spirits/energy/presences/insert your favourite term. These do not prove anything, nor do they suggest anything. But I have had them enough to be convinced that there may be happenings in this world (and therefore 'natural' as opposed to 'supernatural') that we don't yet understand.

Might my (and others') experiences have been ghosts? Who knows?
Might they have been something else that we interpret as ghosts? Perhaps.
Might they never have existed at all? Unlikely, due to the sheer volume and accuracy of the experiences. But still possible.

Absence of evidence does not confirm evidence of absence. And fwiw, I agree that crystal healing is complete guff, unless we're talking about the placebo effect, which is significant.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Er, do they suggest anything or don't they?

I'm fortunate enough to suffer (eh?) from occasional lucid dreams, to the point that I sometimes have to ask if a particular conversation or event actually happened. It's perfectly clear to me, therefore, that the brain has an ample capacity for self-delusion.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence of something whose presence would be expected to cause evidence. Of course then we chase down a hole where the characteristics of the supernatural conform to fit the absence of evidence - mysteriously, ghosts never bother to do their thing in front of anyone with a camera - and that's an invisible pink unicorn.

The leap from "sometimes weird shit happens" to "sometimes weird shit happens and it's not just the brain playing brain tricks" is a large one; the leap from "well, it _might_ be ghosts", in the sense that there _might_ be a flying spaghetti monster, to "the ghost hypothesis has any actual evidence for it and is worthy of examination" is a huge one.