A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
That’s essentially a “god of the gaps” argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong ‘yes’.
Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.
Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it’s energy. There’s no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we’d have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We’d be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv2, and the two sides of the equation balance, always.
More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they’re invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn’t strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they’d by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you’d at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don’t have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we’d have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don’t, and there really just aren’t any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.
As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.
I am familiar with the Gods of the gaps argument. Its not a God of the gaps argument (I’m literally an atheist, if that matters). I don’t know how you can assume that you already know where this book goes wrong without having even read it. Or maybe you got that from my comment? Bur literally no where in my comment did I make any argument, and I certainly didn’t make any Gods of the gaps argument
This is exactly the problem with this topic, people have an understanding of it based on popular debunkers like Neil Degrasse Tyson or whoever and they think thats all there is left to hear on the topic. They just want to be on the side of science (understandable, I do too!) and see these guys are scientific and think thats it, cased closed. They never actually engage with the subject matter. They acquire a repertoire of buzzwords and debunking strategies that allow them to dismiss everything wholesale, then they never dig any deeper so they never realize the ways in which these skeptical responses are insufficient
With all due respect, you’ve latched onto 1. my introductory literary device for framing the argument, and 2. where I dismiss the book based on my argument, but missed my argument, which I would succinctly state as: By definition, we don’t know anything about the supernatural, but we know the natural world extremely well, and we can explain the way that it behaves fully and completely without supernatural influence. Not only do we lack evidence of the supernatural, the evidence that we do have rules it out.
How can you dismiss a book you’ve never read? You have to admit thats a bit shoddy. Even if you’re sure that the book is a crock of shit you won’t know why its a crock of shit (and which rebuttals to apply) until after you’ve finished reading at least part of it.
Regarding the other stuff: I don’t have the time to get into the weeds on the matter with everyone here so I’m considering this comment here to be my official statement.
If a book claims something that’s fundamentally impossible by the laws of physics, I don’t need to read it to dismiss it.
This is literally the same justification the church gave to Galileo when they refused to look through his telescope. His discoveries violated what they thought to be the laws of physics at the time, so they knew he was wrong and therefore was no need to even look fo themselves.
You seem like an extremely gullible person.
you seem like an extremely close-minded person
To fantasy creatures? Yes, I am close minded towards things that cannot be proven or disproven because they don’t exist in the first place.
What a ridiculous hill you’ve chosen.
You are an unserious person.
Why so you care? If you want to discuss, sure, but why go out of your why to just name call people on the internet simply because they disagree with you? Get a life
Why do I care that people believe in fantasy stuff? Because we live in reality and people wasting their time on this crap is counter productive to society.
Use your brain. Read more than just that one book that agrees with your feelings.
Of course ghosts don’t exist, humans made them up. It’s that simple. It doesn’t require any additional thought. If there were ghosts, they’d be EVERYWHERE. There’d be animal ghosts, there would be virus ghosts, there would be neanderthal ghosts. They’d overwhelm the surface of the planet, and they aren’t and they don’t. Mystery solved. Use your precious life and energy on real things instead of this, again, ridiculous shit.