Thread: Your driving force

I believe in truth and science. Science has given us many things and made our life better in countless ways. The internet is due to our knowledge in science, so are computers, and modern medicine and most the food we eat are all thanks to science.

Science gives actual accurate answers for the questions we have. We can test and verify anything science tells us. If ghost were real then we should be able to find them, but there is pretty much no evidence for them at all. There is just some people who claim to see them but no one has ever found a way to see a ghost. There are not even any real hypothesis on ghosts, just jumbled stories and most of those don't make logical sense.

If you fear death and wish for immortality you shouldn't put your faith in false gods that will never do anything for you. You should put your faith in science. There are methods science can provide to help you live forever, like cryonics. It isn't guaranteed and people who promote cryonics will be the first to tell you that it is entirely experimental and no one knows if it will work. What do you want though the truth, or what makes you comfortable? I would take a truth every time, and an experimental procedure scientifically done will always have a better real chance of working than some thing someone just totally made up.

Here is what I believe.

I believe most ghosts that are seen are caused by poor human vision, especially night vision. It is extremely easy to see a shadow and mistake objects for something they are not. Especially in cities where light might be reflecting off objects from strange angles. I have seen objects and thought they were something else before, I think everyone has. Even children in their own room, where they have a strong knowledge of everything in the room, still fail to recognize objects they own while it is dark. Often those children think the shadows are monsters and stuff, when it happens do adult we think of ghosts.

I think the sense of dread people get, the feeling of being watched and stuff, is a left over reaction from when humans lived dangerous lives long ago, where things like lions tried to eat us. I think this sense of dread is often attribute to the type of feelings people say they have when they are in a haunted area, and those feelings color their experiences and give them a biased opinion on what really happened.

I think those static recordings people have of ghosts is just humans natural ability to pick patterns out of randomness. There is a word for this, Apophenia. Seeing what you believe are meaningful patterns in randomness. It is part of what leads to seeing false objects at night, it lets you hear voices when there are none in a static recording, and it lets you see holy images of god in piece of toast.

I believe most people who are abducted by aliens or demons, and people visited at home by angels are experiencing sleep paralysis. A well known and studied phenomenon. People are still dreaming while awake and most people's abduction are text book examples of classic sleep paralysis. They are frozen in place, they experience fear or dread, and some creature is trying to do something to do them. If you experience this and you are not aware of what it is, then it is understandable that you could mistake it for being real. After all you are awake when you saw it. I think many other dream related things are also mistaken for supernatural issues.

Another common one is people who claim remote viewing, or astral projection is separate from lucid dreaming. I think remote viewing and astral projections are just normal lucid dreams, and the only difference is people mistake them as being special. Studies done on this show that remote viewing and stuff doesn't work, so there is no reason to believe they are different, even if you get luck once in a while in saying you saw place you hadn't been.

Which goes to the next thing. I think people give to much credit to things that are random coincidence. Statistically, pretty anything that can happen, does happen as a coincidence now and then. You could pray for money and you turn around and find money on the ground. It is extremely unlikely, but it is bound to happen to a few people. That one person will suddenly believe that praying does in fact work, since they saw it for them self, but what about all the other prayers that didn't work? One thing happening one time is pretty much meaningless. If you want something to be believable, it has to be repeatable.

I think the people who believe they have a greater understanding of the world because they do drugs, are just high. They think they have a greater understanding of the world but if you talk to them, they don't. It is just drugs influencing you. Some specifically cause you to become detached emotionally from your surrounding and thus cause a sense of being a part of the 'world' and not your own body. That is just a delusion brought on by the drug, you are not really connecting with the consciousness of the universe.

I have personally seen a ghost myself, when I was much younger. As I recall it, it looked totally like a human and took the form of like a green mist. There is nothing I can think of that would explain how it looked. As I look back I am pretty sure I was awake when I saw it, though it was at night. I wish I had the understand of things back then like I do now, because then I could explain what I saw. Like I said, I don't believe in ghosts so that leaves me with two main idea on what it is. I think the most likely was that I was in fact dreaming but I was not aware that I was, and I am misremembering a dream as real life as it took place in my bed and was like a false awakening. Or possibly a car drove by and it caused some strange reflection off an object in the room that looked ghost like. I actually saw it a few times, always in the same location, so that is possible. I think both are far more likely that it actually being a ghost. Though I understand why someone would think it was if they were in my position. To this day it seemed real, but I know how wrong human perceptions can be.

Originally Posted by Alric

I believe most ghosts that are seen are caused by poor human vision, especially night vision. It is extremely easy to see a shadow and mistake objects for something they are not. Especially in cities where light might be reflecting off objects from strange angles. I have seen objects and thought they were something else before, I think everyone has. Even children in their own room, where they have a strong knowledge of everything in the room, still fail to recognize objects they own while it is dark. Often those children think the shadows are monsters and stuff, when it happens do adult we think of ghosts.

When I was a child I'd wake up from a dream and I'd hallucinate that those objects were alive. A chair with a jacket became a person and so on. Like you said, it happens to everyone. You know what else happens to everyone? Even as a CHILD, within moments I'd realize I was just hallucinating and that monster over there is just some object my sleepy eyes were adjusting to.

But you seem to think that adults lack this capacity?

Its one thing to say that the human being randomly hallucinates *that's a belief, i don't believe in random*. Its another to say that everyone who sees a ghost is simply mistaking actual objects and light phenomenon in the room - in other words deluded.

You should have more respect for the human being. I realize how easy it is to just say the human perception is sometimes false. Its not false, its just always subjective. But if you just pretend that all unexplainable phenomenon is just bad perception then you aren't paying attention at all to what people are actually experiencing. And then you wouldn't pay attention to the important details of why its unexplainable.

Currently, your perception of the ghost phenomenon doesn't even account for one of the most commonly experienced ghost phenomenons. Many if not thousands of people have experienced being contacted by a deceased loved one - PRIOR to receiving the news of their death. As they communicate with the 'ghost', the entire time they assume they are talking to and interacting with a living breathing person. Its only after the experience are they find out the conversation couldn't have been possible because such a person was already deceased at the time.

Researches have found that this experience is so common that they believe a very large number of people will experience this in their life time, and they have also found out your chances of experiencing this is higher the older you get (the more loved ones die) and the closer you are to your own death. If you understand the experience then you'd understand that random hallucination doesn't explain it. As there is nothing random about the experience at all. The sooner society realizes that the sooner we can research seriously and the sooner we can accept these experiences as legitimate human experiences and not some meaningless random visual delusion.