My Ghost Story

[JayUtah]

Evidently if the conclusion is unacceptable then the degree in which you accept the hypotheses on which it was based becomes questionable.

Hypotheses are accepted as conclusions when they are tested against the evidence and emerge victorious. Until then they are still hypotheses and therefore do not have the power to explain or predict anything.

The worst thing you can say is that I'm biased, but the same could be said for your position.

No. It is not "biased" to decline to accept unevidenced hypotheses. Our positions are in no way equivalent.

 

[JayUtah]

You said communication from my mother after death was impossible...

Actually I said nothing of the sort. But I will now say that there is no appreciable evidence for the existence of an afterlife. Hence by subversion of support there is no evidence of communication with an afterlife.

You on the other hand have affirmatively claimed that your dead mother communicated with you. I am merely disputing that claim.

...therefore you have doubts about the existence of an afterlife.

Non sequitur. One can, for example, believe in an afterlife without assuming communication is possible between that condition and this.

Is it not fair to assume you are an atheist?

It is neither fair nor helpful to assume I am or am not an atheist. You seem to be frantically switching between brushes with which to paint your critics.

Or can atheist embrace an afterlife with no particular godhead? I sincerely don't know, I thought it was an all or nothing proposition.

Atheism is completely orthogonal to this discussion. The existence of a deity is not part of any pertinent line of reasoning. You either have evidence of an afterlife or you do not. Then you either have evidence of communication between that situation and this one, or you do not. Since you've already admitted you have evidence for neither of these propositions (just speculation), then why aren't we done already?

Science isn't subjective but the people deciding which hypothesis or theory is best supported certainly are.

No. Again, you really know nothing about science.

 

[Jodie]

For me, it seems as though you don't understand any of the theories you're basing your speculation on. Instead, you're starting with your conclusion then trying to find key words or phrases in popular science that you can retrofit into your argument.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no whiz at physics. That said, the theoretical part interests me enough that I try to keep up with it. I wasn't looking to retrofit anything, but as I read about how the different dimensions that are theoretically there, the thought did occur to me that we might exist in the others if we exist in the 1st,2nd,3rd, and 4th dimension. Until that point, I'ld visualized a dimensional world as looking like a layer cake, but based on what we see or experience here now, our perception is integrated. Why would these other dimensions be "over there" or "somewhere else"? If they truly exist they would simply be an extension of what is already perceptually here even if we can't see it.

From there, my idea grew. I started searching for some kind of analogy to what the world would look like from those perspectives. My spiritual beliefs kind of disappeared into what I consider to be an idea of what reality/life in total would be like if we exist on multidimensional levels. If we could see it all at once it would be overwhelming like the hallucinations of schizophrenics or some kind of sensory disorders related to autism. I believe we are just fine the way we are seeing what we see in the here and now if we want to make any kind of sense of life.

 

[JayUtah]

I wasn't looking to retrofit anything...

Nonsense, you explicitly told us you were looking for possible explanations for your belief and latched onto speculative metaphysics to do so.

 

[Axxman300]

I was a ghost hunter, long before it was cool.

I spent a lot of time in the dark, I toured some really cool historic places, met a lot of interesting people, and saw some weird stuff.

None of what I did was science.

I learned a lot. I learned history, I learned building construction (the basics), I learned how heating and plumbing works, and I learned a lot about people.

The most important thing I learned is that no matter what I saw (or think I saw) I have no proof, and I have nothing that I could write up as a scientific paper to submit. That's just the way of the world.

I have discovered that Infrasound is a bigger deal than people suspect, and may have effects on humans that are just now being explored. Those effects line up with many of the phenomenon attributed to ghosts.

I have learned that some people get really mad when you tell them their house is not haunted.

My interest in the paranormal led me back to college where I have taken a number of science classes (Oceanography, Marine Biology, Environmental Science, and Geology 1). These have left me with complete confidence in the scientific method. Scientists have open minds about a great many things, but for those things to be accepted they need to be solid, repeatable(verified) data, a cross-section of physical evidence (collected samples), and it should lead to a predictable outcome.

This hasn't changed my beliefs, it has reshaped them.

Today it's not about seeing ghosts but WHY are ghosts seen. To me this is the operative question, and it saves me from freezing my butt off in an abandoned jail at 2:00 AM.

As for dying? I was 10, the nurse gave me an overdose of medication (she was new) that stopped my heart. I was gone for 10 minutes until they could re-establish sinus rythmn. One second I was vomiting and the next I was on a table with my shirt off and an air mask on my face.

That's all she wrote.

 

[Donn]

Jodie you are backfilling in classic fallacy style.

The blinders are on and you are freely browsing sciencish fiction for just-so stories.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Which post number?

#370. The one I quoted in my post.
So, how about it? Would you mind addressing my points?

 

[Daylightstar]

My belief is just that. ...

Except that you appear to have absolute certainty about your mother visiting you in a dream.
To you, it's much more than a belief.

... You are making an assumption about what the dream was about, it wasn't about me, it was something my mother wanted me to do to prevent something from happening. Other than that, the dream wasn't about me at all, I had no unfinished business.

Your mother doesn't want anything anymore, she is gone.
It however appears that you have quite a bit of unfinished business.

 

[Garrette]

I was a ghost hunter, long before it was cool.

I spent a lot of time in the dark, I toured some really cool historic places, met a lot of interesting people, and saw some weird stuff.

None of what I did was science.

I learned a lot. I learned history, I learned building construction (the basics), I learned how heating and plumbing works, and I learned a lot about people.

The most important thing I learned is that no matter what I saw (or think I saw) I have no proof, and I have nothing that I could write up as a scientific paper to submit. That's just the way of the world.

I have discovered that Infrasound is a bigger deal than people suspect, and may have effects on humans that are just now being explored. Those effects line up with many of the phenomenon attributed to ghosts.

I have learned that some people get really mad when you tell them their house is not haunted.
My interest in the paranormal led me back to college where I have taken a number of science classes (Oceanography, Marine Biology, Environmental Science, and Geology 1). These have left me with complete confidence in the scientific method. Scientists have open minds about a great many things, but for those things to be accepted they need to be solid, repeatable(verified) data, a cross-section of physical evidence (collected samples), and it should lead to a predictable outcome.

This hasn't changed my beliefs, it has reshaped them.

Today it's not about seeing ghosts but WHY are ghosts seen. To me this is the operative question, and it saves me from freezing my butt off in an abandoned jail at 2:00 AM.

As for dying? I was 10, the nurse gave me an overdose of medication (she was new) that stopped my heart. I was gone for 10 minutes until they could re-establish sinus rythmn. One second I was vomiting and the next I was on a table with my shirt off and an air mask on my face.

That's all she wrote.

This. A thousand times this, and we are seeing it in spades here.

Jodie strikes me in the way some others I have seen here: intelligent, fairly well read, capable of analytic thought, no more prone to fantasy or confabulation than the rest of us. My hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis with no evidence whatsoever) is that such people have grown up in an environment in which they are generally the big intellectual fish in their ponds and have never been seriously challenged about their positions. Maybe the lack of challenge is because others are simply convinced by what is said or maybe no one wants to bother to make the challenge. Regardless, they have a lifetime of having their sense of being right constantly reinforced.

Then they come here and everything that has wowed people in the past, everything that has been met either with silence or agreement or even congratulations on the deep thinking, everything gets challenged. Not only is the challenge itself a surprise -- a slap in the mental face for which they are totally unprepared -- it is solid, and it highlights that what had been considered right is actually wrong.

That's not a dispassionate discussion. It is not something the person can remain detached from and say "you are correct; that particular position is either incorrect or irrelevant to what I thought was a valid conclusion." It is instead a discussion about social standing. Being told one is no longer king of the mountain and in fact never really has been on the mountain at all comes as a shock.

That's what I see happening here. Jodie is floundering, and it's a shame, because she is intelligent. She is well read. She can be quite funny. And she has the ability to think critically, analytically, skeptically.

 

[Donn]

This. A thousand times this, and we are seeing it in spades here.

Jodie strikes me in the way some others I have seen here: intelligent, fairly well read, capable of analytic thought, no more prone to fantasy or confabulation than the rest of us. My hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis with no evidence whatsoever) is that such people have grown up in an environment in which they are generally the big intellectual fish in their ponds and have never been seriously challenged about their positions. Maybe the lack of challenge is because others are simply convinced by what is said or maybe no one wants to bother to make the challenge. Regardless, they have a lifetime of having their sense of being right constantly reinforced.

Then they come here and everything that has wowed people in the past, everything that has been met either with silence or agreement or even congratulations on the deep thinking, everything gets challenged. Not only is the challenge itself a surprise -- a slap in the mental face for which they are totally unprepared -- it is solid, and it highlights that what had been considered right is actually wrong.

That's not a dispassionate discussion. It is not something the person can remain detached from and say "you are correct; that particular position is either incorrect or irrelevant to what I thought was a valid conclusion." It is instead a discussion about social standing. Being told one is no longer king of the mountain and in fact never really has been on the mountain at all comes as a shock.

That's what I see happening here. Jodie is floundering, and it's a shame, because she is intelligent. She is well read. She can be quite funny. And she has the ability to think critically, analytically, skeptically.

Well said!

 

[JayUtah]

It is instead a discussion about social standing. Being told one is no longer king of the mountain and in fact never really has been on the mountain at all comes as a shock.

I agree; well said. Back in my teenage years, my friends and I delighted in the prospect of metaphysics and multiple dimensions and time travel. Speculating about it was cool beans. But as we grow older, the mountains change. Metaphysics still interest me, of course. But the mountain now is explanatory power, not gee-whiz, mind-blown hypotheticals.

 

[HighRiser]

Science isn't subjective but the people deciding which hypothesis or theory is best supported certainly are.

You don't understand that the scientific method is designed specifically to remove bias and subjectivity from influencing the outcomes of experimentation.

Interpretations of QM are not rigourous expreiments in QFT; they are very complicated games that can only be seriously played by very educated people who have devoted years of their lives to studying mathematics, then years studying the subtlities of QFT that can only be understood in mathematical terms, and then studying the experimental results of particle colliders and other devices, which produce outcomes that even they cannot explain all aspects of. It makes them wonder what the explaination of the observed behavior of the universe means. The mystery of the reason the universe behaves as it is observed to behave is what the different interpretations (thought experiments) of QM are all about.

So... When some theologian who hasn't studied QM and doesn't even begin to understand the complexities of it says, "our souls exist on a higher plane because quantum.", I find no compelling reason to think the aforementioned thelolgian is wise.

 

[Resume]

So... When some theologian (or Deepak Chopra)who hasn't studied QM and doesn't even begin to understand the complexities of it says, "our souls exist on a higher plane because quantum.", I find no compelling reason to think the aforementioned thelolgian is wise.

Pardon my addition.

 

[HighRiser]

Pardon my addition.

Actually, I was thinking of Chopra when I typed that.

 

[dlorde]

I use the terms as meaning the same thing, but there is no evidence that a soul exists.

If there's no evidence that a soul exists and you're using it as synonymous with consciousness, why confuse the issue by using it at all? Just use 'consciousness'.

If you are looking through a microscope and the lens is dirty, scratched, or the illumination isn't adjusted correctly, what you see will be distorted or you won't see anything at all.

By that glib analogy, the equivalent would be dirty or scratched lens making a fly's leg look like a wing or an eye.

Trite analogies apart, you need to recognise that the very science you claim to be using to support your fantasy tells us that it's impossible. Here (again) is Sean Carroll's video that explains it:

As he says, you don't have to accept quantum field theory and its implications, but if you reject it in order to indulge in speculative hypotheses that contradict it, you can't claim to use it in support of those hypotheses.

 

[Axxman300]

This. A thousand times this, and we are seeing it in spades here.

Jodie strikes me in the way some others I have seen here: intelligent, fairly well read, capable of analytic thought, no more prone to fantasy or confabulation than the rest of us. My hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis with no evidence whatsoever) is that such people have grown up in an environment in which they are generally the big intellectual fish in their ponds and have never been seriously challenged about their positions. Maybe the lack of challenge is because others are simply convinced by what is said or maybe no one wants to bother to make the challenge. Regardless, they have a lifetime of having their sense of being right constantly reinforced.

Then they come here and everything that has wowed people in the past, everything that has been met either with silence or agreement or even congratulations on the deep thinking, everything gets challenged. Not only is the challenge itself a surprise -- a slap in the mental face for which they are totally unprepared -- it is solid, and it highlights that what had been considered right is actually wrong.

That's not a dispassionate discussion. It is not something the person can remain detached from and say "you are correct; that particular position is either incorrect or irrelevant to what I thought was a valid conclusion." It is instead a discussion about social standing. Being told one is no longer king of the mountain and in fact never really has been on the mountain at all comes as a shock.

That's what I see happening here. Jodie is floundering, and it's a shame, because she is intelligent. She is well read. She can be quite funny. And she has the ability to think critically, analytically, skeptically.

Agreed.

More to the point, in my experience the ghost is what makes someone feel special, makes them interesting, or the center of attention. Again, this thread is a good example where you have two people posting about their experiences and not the OP, and have gone off on wild tangents which have nothing to do with floor boards and footstep sounds.

I feel it's safe to say that everyone here has had at least one dream that had a profound effect on them in some way, but it was specifically personal to you, and shouldn't be held on the same level as the real, physical world.

 

[Jodie]

This. A thousand times this, and we are seeing it in spades here.

Jodie strikes me in the way some others I have seen here: intelligent, fairly well read, capable of analytic thought, no more prone to fantasy or confabulation than the rest of us. My hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis with no evidence whatsoever) is that such people have grown up in an environment in which they are generally the big intellectual fish in their ponds and have never been seriously challenged about their positions. Maybe the lack of challenge is because others are simply convinced by what is said or maybe no one wants to bother to make the challenge. Regardless, they have a lifetime of having their sense of being right constantly reinforced.

Then they come here and everything that has wowed people in the past, everything that has been met either with silence or agreement or even congratulations on the deep thinking, everything gets challenged. Not only is the challenge itself a surprise -- a slap in the mental face for which they are totally unprepared -- it is solid, and it highlights that what had been considered right is actually wrong.

That's not a dispassionate discussion. It is not something the person can remain detached from and say "you are correct; that particular position is either incorrect or irrelevant to what I thought was a valid conclusion." It is instead a discussion about social standing. Being told one is no longer king of the mountain and in fact never really has been on the mountain at all comes as a shock.

That's what I see happening here. Jodie is floundering, and it's a shame, because she is intelligent. She is well read. She can be quite funny. And she has the ability to think critically, analytically, skeptically.

Garrette I don't think I've been emotional or upset about my discussions regarding the afterlife. This isn't the first thread I've had this type of discussion about the topic and so far they've been fairly civil, for the most part. I actually enjoy them very much.

I grew up in the bible belt and my Dad was a rocket scientist who worked under Werner Von Braun at Red Stone Arsenal in Alabama. Huntsville was a unique little town since there was a high number of professionals living there during the glory days of the space program. Despite it being in the deep south I was lucky enough to receive a very good education because of the tax base and demographics of the population.

However, were I to announce that I received a message from my dead mother I'ld get push back even in the deep south, even from other Christians depending on what denomination they belonged. It would be different from what I'm hearing here, it would go something like this " a demon tried to change the future", or some such nonsense. Life is full of give and take. I've met my fair share along the way. If I took all of this personally do you really think I'ld be coming back for more time and time again? To me, people like JayUtah that resort to cussing you are people that are dealing with their own issues and happen to take it out on you on the forum because there will be little or no repercussions from it. It really has nothing to do with me other than how I choose to respond.

This just happens to be one of my favorite subjects to talk about. I remember over hearing my dad and his coworkers discussing the "many universe" theory in the early 60's when I was a child. I was so impressed by the conversation that, as a child, I reread "Alice in Wonderland" and "Alice Through The Looking Glass" hoping to find clues on how to get to these other places. I was also hung up on "The Wizard of Oz" for the same reason because this was the only way I could understand what other dimensions might look like at the time. That's the extent of my emotional attachment to the topic. It reminds me of home.

 

[Jodie]

Agreed.

More to the point, in my experience the ghost is what makes someone feel special, makes them interesting, or the center of attention. Again, this thread is a good example where you have two people posting about their experiences and not the OP, and have gone off on wild tangents which have nothing to do with floor boards and footstep sounds.

I feel it's safe to say that everyone here has had at least one dream that had a profound effect on them in some way, but it was specifically personal to you, and shouldn't be held on the same level as the real, physical world.

It isn't the physical world, that's the whole point. Neither are those other dimensions that are curled up and entwined with our physical reality. If we exist in the 1st 4 dimensions why would we assume it ends there?

I did mention ghosts. I think it was in response to one of your posts earlier. If you were a ghost hunter then you ought to be familiar with the theory of what causes poltergeist activity. Did you ever encounter a case like that during one of your hunts?

My theory is similar but it doesn't hinge on the psychological aspects so much. If what I think is true about our multidimensional world then consciousness might form a type of conduit for the activity to manifest.

 

[Jodie]

Given that you're doing exactly what I said you were doing, would you mind now answering my questions?

Consciousness as an emergent property of brains? If the brain functions as a lens for the consciousness that resides in all of the dimensions that the mathematical theory states exists then that is exactly what the research would reflect.

There is no consciousness outside of our brains. A brain would have to be present for the consciousness to express itself in our physical reality. My idea is that the brain works as a lens or receiver for that consciousness, the one that animates the body. What you see in the brain is the chemical process that allows that to happen.

Revising our experiments. I don't think that's so, the goal of that research is to understand how to fix brain injuries and to create AI. If you aren't thinking of the brain as a receiver why would you adapt your testing to look for that? They are simply testing processes to replicate function or repair damage.

Revising my assumptions. I don't think I'm wrong in interpreting and synthesizing the research that is a synthesis of various disciplines. My assumption that it was actually my mother might be wrong. It could have been me in that other dimension using that dream figure of my mother to try to warn me of some impending doom, possibly change it, or be prepared to deal with it. I say this because if we are truly multidimensional beings then there would be no need for my dead mother to warn me of anything in a dream, she could simply tell me in that other dimension, or I would see it for myself.

 

[Donn]

Consciousness as an emergent property of brains? If the brain functions as a lens for the consciousness that resides in all of the dimensions that the mathematical theory states exists then that is exactly what the research would reflect.

There is no consciousness outside of our brains. A brain would have to be present for the consciousness to express itself in our physical reality. My idea is that the brain works as a lens or receiver for that consciousness, the one that animates the body. What you see in the brain is the chemical process that allows that to happen.

Revising our experiments. I don't think that's so, the goal of that research is to understand how to fix brain injuries and to create AI. If you aren't thinking of the brain as a receiver why would you adapt your testing to look for that? They are simply testing processes to replicate function or repair damage.

Revising my assumptions. I don't think I'm wrong in interpreting and synthesizing the research that is a synthesis of various disciplines. My assumption that it was actually my mother might be wrong. It could have been me in that other dimension using that dream figure of my mother to try to warn me of some impending doom, possibly change it, or be prepared to deal with it. I say this because if we are truly multidimensional beings then there would be no need for my dead mother to warn me of anything in a dream, she could simply tell me in that other dimension, or I would see it for myself.

No.