Do you believe in Ghosts/Spirits

[Conundrum 1]

My experience is due to faulty memory? That's a good one.

You can give whatever explanation you want to try and discredit my story, but everything you have used so far to try and do that really doesn't apply to my experience. There were no leading questions, neither of us used the power of suggestion over the other, we didn't know about the dead guy, and we weren't lying.

I know what I saw, but you are free to believe or not believe.

[Vallerina 2]

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My experience is due to faulty memory? That's a good one.

You can give whatever explanation you want to try and discredit my story, but everything you have used so far to try and do that really doesn't apply to my experience. There were no leading questions, neither of us used the power of suggestion over the other, we didn't know about the dead guy, and we weren't lying.

I know what I saw, but you are free to believe or not believe.

That's why it's going to be impossible for anyone to discredit your story. I threw out the most likely reasons. There are several others, and I don't know as much about the real reasons for supernatural experiences as others. Basically, just because you can't explain it doesn't mean it can't be explained. I also used to explain situtations by saying, "It must be supernatural," but after learning more about it, I find it much more interesting to find out the real reasons things happen as opposed to chalking it up to ghosts/esp/psychics/etc.

The faulty memory thing was not an insult. People do not remember events exactly as they happened. Basically, when we recall an event, that memory changes slightly every time. People can have crystal clear visons of that memory, but it is different than how it actually happened. The most likely case is that since the point that you initially thought it was a ghost, when you remember it, you are more likely to dismiss information showing that it wasn't a ghost and focusing in on how it was in fact a ghost. It's also why people can remember such vivid ghosts, but there are no recordings/pictures/video of ghosts/esp/supernatural/etc.

There's a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning

[Conundrum 1]

We didn't initially think it was a ghost.

Look, we can go back and forth about it all night. I can give you more details, and you can conitune to come up with reasons why I didn't really see what I saw or I remember it incorrectly or whatever else.

I know exactly what I saw, I remember it like it was yesterday, and with all due respect, I don't care if you don't believe me. I do appreciate your opinion, though.

[quade 3]

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only one point of view can actually be correct, which means that either 35ish percent or 55ish percent actually are, in fact, delusional.

perhaps this is way off, but in my short time on this planet, I have witenessed many situations where two parties experience the exact same thing, yet believe something different from eachother.

Belief itself is perception, so how can there be a wrong or a right answer to this question???

Because, contrary to the popular phrase, perception is not reality.

A skillful magician can make a person perceive, and therefore believe, he did one thing when in fact the reality of the situation can be quite different. People's eyes can play any one of a number of tricks on them. Imaginations can run wild.

There either is or isn't a cat in the box regardless of what Schrödinger may have thought. Believing that it can both "be there" and "not be there" simultaneously depending on one's point of view is simply ludicrous.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[Conundrum 1]

Wait... I thought the cat was in the bag? Where does the box come in?

[quade 3]

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Wait... I thought the cat was in the bag? Where does the box come in?

Google it.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[Conundrum 1]

Geez, it was a joke.

[quade 3]

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Geez, it was a joke.

heheh.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[freefallfreak 0]

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Ya know, i just mentioned to val earlier today that i wanted to go there.

Edited to say...val doesn't wanna go...anyone else wanna go with me?

I'd like to go to Waverly Hills Sanitarium again. I went once a couple of years ago and there is definately something there - just what I don't know - but I was pretty jumpy the whole time. Of course, darkness and winds blowing through the place may have played a part in the experience but I loved it and would go again. I'd also be game for a trip to Eastern State but Waverly Hills is where I'd rather go. I especially liked the place they called the "Death Tunnel". That place was spooky.

TripleF

"Upon seeing the shadow of a pigeon, one must resist the urge to look up."

[jenfly00 0]

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No. The ghosts/spirits that people see or hear can be explained by other physical factors.

Physical factors or psychological factors.

Some people have a abnormal need to experience things strange or exceptional.

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"O brave new world that has such people in it".

[Shotgun 1]

I don't know... I don't tend to believe in ghosts/spirits as in the souls of dead people. But I do believe that we've barely scratched the surface of knowing anything about our world, so I think that there are a lot of possibilities of what could be.

[Zenister 0]

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No. The ghosts/spirits that people see or hear can be explained by other physical factors.

I'd love to know the 'rational explanation' for this..

I was playing bass late one night in our studio loft ((above a friends retail store, the building was one of the older ones downtown and had been rumored to be haunted for years) The studio was actually a radio station in the early 50s)

Since I was the only one there I was cranked up waaaaaay louder than usual literally rattling the walls.. a couple times that night I could have sworn I heard a womans voice call my name, right behind my ear... I'd stopped several times, and even walked around the whole place when I paused for a beer and smoke break..

so back upstairs i'm wailing away again when I very clearly heard glass shatter (which i sort of can understand, as it is a completely different frequency range so..) thinking I broken a window or some expensive vase down stairs in the shop I stopped playing and walked out to see what I broke.... I didnt find anything walking around checked all the windows and stuck my head out into the street thinking someone might be breaking in nearby....until I went back upstairs and found a light bulb in the corner of the stairwell that had fallen some 18+ feet from the ceiling to the floor (I know I'd replaced them before and it was quite a pain) and NOT BROKEN.

I'm all about rational explanations, but I still cannot imagine how that bulb (even if it wasnt screwed in properly which i'm fairly sure it was because it was on earlier) fell 18+ feet to a hardwood floor and didnt break, and I really dont know what it was I'd been hearing on and off all night, and particularly what I'd heard break right before than made me stop...

what I DO BELIEVE is that there are many types of energy and many ways of manipulating that energy we have yet to understand... there is no such thing as 'super natural' there is simply 'nature' we have not grasped the edges of yet.

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Those who fail to learn from the past are simply Doomed.

[jenfly00 0]

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No. The ghosts/spirits that people see or hear can be explained by other physical factors.

I'd love to know the 'rational explanation' for this..

I was playing bass late one night in our studio loft ((above a friends retail store, the building was one of the older ones downtown and had been rumored to be haunted for years) The studio was actually a radio station in the early 50s)

Since I was the only one there I was cranked up waaaaaay louder than usual literally rattling the walls.. a couple times that night I could have sworn I heard a womans voice call my name, right behind my ear... I'd stopped several times, and even walked around the whole place when I paused for a beer and smoke break..

so back upstairs i'm wailing away again when I very clearly heard glass shatter (which i sort of can understand, as it is a completely different frequency range so..) thinking I broken a window or some expensive vase down stairs in the shop I stopped playing and walked out to see what I broke.... I didnt find anything walking around checked all the windows and stuck my head out into the street thinking someone might be breaking in nearby....until I went back upstairs and found a light bulb in the corner of the stairwell that had fallen some 18+ feet from the ceiling to the floor (I know I'd replaced them before and it was quite a pain) and NOT BROKEN.

I'm all about rational explanations, but I still cannot imagine how that bulb (even if it wasnt screwed in properly which i'm fairly sure it was because it was on earlier) fell 18+ feet to a hardwood floor and didnt break, and I really dont know what it was I'd been hearing on and off all night, and particularly what I'd heard break right before than made me stop...

what I DO BELIEVE is that there are many types of energy and many ways of manipulating that energy we have yet to understand... there is no such thing as 'super natural' there is simply 'nature' we have not grasped the edges of yet.

We had a guy in the ER with a linear skull fracture. Strangely enough, he was hit in the head with a chicken egg which DID NOT BREAK...it then fell to the ground and broke.

I have no idea what strange spirits or energies were in play there, but while drawing his blood, I clearly heard a woman's voice calling my name and an erie high pitched noise.

Further investigation revealed it was the patient in the next bay calling me ...and another ambulance coming in.

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"O brave new world that has such people in it".

[jakee 1,257]

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Belief itself is perception, so how can there be a wrong or a right answer to this question???

Because ghosts either exist or they don't. If the two of us see a bird and identify it differently (eg. I say Ostrich and you say Chicken) it doesn't make a blind bit of difference to what type of bird it actually is. How could it? Similarly if we see something that I think is a cloud of dust and you think is a ghost, the thing itself is either one or the other. What we believe it to be will not change what it is.

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the glass is half full or half empty
you and i experience the exact same lunch, I thought it was fantastic, you thought it was horrible

the glass has a certain number of oz. this cannot be argued
the lunch was comprised of certain ingredients this cannot be argued

but how you or I feel about those experiences can be VASTLY different

You've just disproved your own argument! Whether the lunch was good or bad is subjective feeling. Whether it was omellette or steak is objective reality.

Whether ghosts exist or not is a question of objective reality. Our beliefs do not change it.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[Bodyflight.Net 0]

dreams are not objective reality
yet we experience them and they are real to us
they can feel real, seem real and you can retain memories from dreams... but they are fake and NOT reality.

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You've just disproved your own argument!

There IS NO arguement here... and doing so will lead this right to the SC. I'm sure there are plenty of threads over there with plenty of argueing.

No one knows what a ghost IS, so we cannot say for sure wether they ARE an outside physical force or an interpretation of energy that we read in our minds. Therefore, I know, that neither YOU or I can say what or wether they are real. The question was do you "believe" in ghosts?... NOT are "ghosts" real?
No room for argueing what someone believes or doesn't... that is joyfully for their ownselves to contend with one way or another.

"...the goal is not to BEND the spoon. The goal is to only realize the truth, that the spoon does not exist"

[dumstuntzz 0]

i didn't used to believe in them but.... in the 70s a bunch of us were camped out on the packing tables at the dz. around 2:30/3a.m. a ghostly female figure appeared and walked thru the packing area. it was the ghost of the wife of a well known(at the time)jumper who had bounced recently.

[jakee 1,257]

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dreams are not objective reality
yet we experience them and they are real to us
they can feel real, seem real and you can retain memories from dreams... but they are fake and NOT reality.

If you're saying that ghosts are, like dreams, a pure figment of imagination then you'll get no argument from me.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[jakee 1,257]

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No one knows what a ghost IS, so we cannot say for sure wether they ARE an outside physical force or an interpretation of energy that we read in our minds.

What are you talking about? If you think that a ghost is anything other than a pure figment of your imagination then we are back to objective existence, which has a yes/no answer. If you think that ghosts are a complete figment of your imagination then the whole exercise is pointless. You might as well ask if people believe in mellow.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[Bodyflight.Net 0]

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If you're saying that ghosts are, like dreams, a pure figment of imagination then you'll get no argument from me.

I'm not saying that at all, because I like you, do not know what or if they are, no one does at this point in our evolution.

added: here's something from a science forum that I often refer to:
"Objective reality, in the sense that it is commonly used, is as much of a philosophical chimera as God; we can never verify that our assumptions about it are true, and so any argument we make about it runs the risk of being an unsound argument."

[jakee 1,257]

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If you're saying that ghosts are, like dreams, a pure figment of imagination then you'll get no argument from me.

I'm not saying that at all, because I like you, do not know what or if they are, no one does at this point in our evolution.

Then it was quite useless to compare them to dreams, wasn't it?

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[Bodyflight.Net 0]

I didn't intend to compare the belief in ghosts to dreams, my intention was to compare your belief in "objective reality" to dream states.

"There is no way that we can ever prove that anything but ourselves exists without accepting that our senses are giving us valid information and confirming it with the information supplied by others. How valid and complete the information is can be tested and varified but only through our senses and the interpetation that our mind makes on that sensory input."

that is perception

[jakee 1,257]

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I didn't intend to compare the belief in ghosts to dreams, my intention was to compare your belief in "objective reality" to dream states.

How and why? I believe that people dream, just as I believe that people believe in ghosts. I also believe that neither ghosts nor what happens in our dreams is matched by any kind of objective existence. They are both generated by the mind.

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"There is no way that we can ever prove that anything but ourselves exists without accepting that our senses are giving us valid information and confirming it with the information supplied by others. How valid and complete the information is can be tested and varified but only through our senses and the interpetation that our mind makes on that sensory input."

"Brain in a jar" scenarios are irrelevant to what we're talking about here. If you want to go down that road then "Do you believe in ghosts?" is a moot point until we have an answer to "Do you believe in reality?". If the answer to that is no, then you cannot believe in ghosts. If the answer is yes then ghosts are, once more, an objective exist/ not exist question.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[Bodyflight.Net 0]

***"Brain in a jar" scenarios are irrelevant to what we're talking about here. If you want to go down that road then "Do you believe in ghosts?" is a moot point until we have an answer to "Do you believe in reality?". If the answer to that is no, then you cannot believe in ghosts. If the answer is yes then ghosts are, once more, an objective exist/ not exist question.

The beauty of life is that we do not understand it...that's the mystery, the magic and often times the "hope" for people.

Nothing is a moot point if people are interested in the topic, even if someone feels that the subject is closed or a pointless discussion.

Now... do I believe in reality? Interesting thread... start it, I'll be happy to join in.. because I'm not sure that I actually do.

[BillyVance 34]

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Or spend a night at the Eastern State Penitentiary

Ya know, i just mentioned to val earlier today that i wanted to go there.

Edited to say...val doesn't wanna go...anyone else wanna go with me?

I'm game.

Me too! I just wish it wasn't so far away, but it could be worth the trip. It is one of the scariest and most haunted places in the US. TAPS had an investigation there and I saw things on video the team couldn't explain scientifically. It is the first true penitentiary ever built in the US and conditions while prisoners were housed there were abysmal. It was probably one of the worst prisons to be housed in. So I'm not surprised that there are some tortured souls who cannot rest in peace.

How about a DZ.com posse go in there for a night?

"Mediocre people don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre people." - SIX TIME National Champion coach Nick Saban

[BillyVance 34]

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***
I'd like to go to Waverly Hills Sanitarium again. I went once a couple of years ago and there is definately something there - just what I don't know - but I was pretty jumpy the whole time. Of course, darkness and winds blowing through the place may have played a part in the experience but I loved it and would go again. I'd also be game for a trip to Eastern State but Waverly Hills is where I'd rather go. I especially liked the place they called the "Death Tunnel". That place was spooky.

TripleF

Is that the one in Louisville, KY? I believe TAPS did that one too.

I'd like to visit Tombstone though. The saloon there and other points in that town are teeming with spirits from the rough and tumble days of the lawless west.

"Mediocre people don't like high achievers, and high achievers don't like mediocre people." - SIX TIME National Champion coach Nick Saban