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Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 26, 2007 06:32 PM
from the in-the-heart-of-translvania-in-the-vampire-hall-of-fame-yeah dept.
from the in-the-heart-of-translvania-in-the-vampire-hall-of-fame-yeah dept.
Esther Schindler writes "Sure, everyone uses technology on the job. But you may not have contemplated the tools used by paranormal investigators (at least, not until you began thinking about Halloween) who look for the truth in ghosts and other things that go Bump in the Night. In Paranormal Investigations and Technology: Where Ghosts and Gadgets Meet, CIO's Al Sacco writes about the most unusual of tool chests, with everything from thermometers to blimp cams." You want spooky? An anonymous reader passed a link to a survey that says a third of Americans believe in ghosts. Who you gonna call?
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NS (Score:4, Funny)
captcha: fainted
Photos (Score:3, Interesting)
Years ago a fellow I knew took to hanging out in graveyards with his camera and film sensitive to Infra Red (pick up the background IR, except where spirits, which apparently suck the energy out of their surroundings when they manifest themselves.) He claimed to have taken actual photos of ghosts hanging about graves, including some which were posessed. He offered to show me some of his work, but I wasn't in a mood for it as my Grandmum had recently passed away.
So here's this bloke:
I do believe in spooks! I do, I do, I do believe in spooks! Oh, sod, who was it then? [thinkgeek.com]
Re:Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
So this fellow with pictures was fiddling the film?
He was probably sincere, but ghost hunters are infamous for seeing ghosts in everything, especially from photographic effects. Google for ghosts and "orbs", as one example. It's a well-known flash effect from dust, but a lot of ghost hunters believe that they're paranormal.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That why we have gone to pictures with ghosts that look like humes.(Actually a person from a previous pictures.
To nothing for a long while because they fixed the camera.
To blobs which are an artifact of digital photography.
AS well as a myriad of things out side the camera body.
Re:Photos (Score:5, Interesting)
In my experience, though, most of the people involved have no clue what they are talking about. They want to see a ghost and prove their existence so badly that they see them anywhere. They also do not understand the technology they are using.
The fools in this article seem to be the same... at least one of them, who talks of photographing ghost orbs. Ghost orbs are the most ridiculous load of crap. You know what else causes those orbs? Dust in the air. Moisture in the air because you're outside at night when the temps are changing (I've got just such a picture about with hundreds of "ghosts"). That streetlight off in the distance that you didn't notice while just standing there because it's just a streetlight (I've seen this from a local ghost hunting group with pictures of a place that was maybe 10 minutes from where I lived at the time). Reflections off of shiny polished headstones. About a billion other things.
I think the following quote sums up nicely exactly what the problem with the whole paranormal investigation field is, why it gets no respect, and why it deserves no respect.
To paraphrase, "I can't tell what it is in this picture, so it must be a ghost." That's their most solid evidence is a picture that they're not sure what it is. What the hell is a "reverse shadow" anyway? Light?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's an excellent picture of some orbs [cowlark.com] I took in a cave in Greece. What it actually is? Falling drops of water from the cave ceiling lit up by the flash.
Somewhere --- unfortunately, I seem to have lost it --- I also have a photo with a ghost on it. What it actually is? A strand of my own hair straying in front of the camera lens and being illuminated by the flash. It forms a vague bright blur overlayed over the image that could quite possibly be interpreted as a human figure. I must try and duplicate it
Re:Photos (Score:5, Funny)
Fascinating. If that was me I wouldn't be trying to photograph them. I'd be trying to run a heat engine off them. You've got an object here that's going to be consistently cooler than ambient temperatures? That's a perpetual motion machine right there.
Parent
Re:Photos (Score:5, Interesting)
About a year or so ago, I wrote myself some notes about a possible short story, and had a premise very similar to what you mention. The gist of it was that "souls" (for lack of a better word) were proven to exist, and then promptly exploited for the special properties they exhibited, creating a clean, limitless energy source. The downside? To the "souls" being used in this manner, the process was basically hell--fire, brimstone, unending torment, etc.
Hmm. Maybe I'll work on that now, since you've brought it back to mind... thanks!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I had seen the Matrix. I disagree with you that it's almost exactly the same, though--I agree that it boils down to the same point of morality (slavery) but the Matrix is little different than the present day real world. Only a VERY small percentage of the population even realizes that anything is wrong--and even those that do, how many are like Cypher, who would actually be happier as slaves? There's also the poi
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Pardon if it's too obscure, but based on your sig, I thought you might get it. Cheers!
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The IR sensitive film on the market is only sensitive at very near infrared wavelengths. See this [kodak.com] spectral sensitivity curve. Note that 500nm is about the bottom end of color the human eye can see and peak sensitivity occurs around 550nm.
"Suck the energy out of th
To quote Penn and Teller... (Score:3, Funny)
The supermajority of Americans belive in religion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The supermajority of Americans belive in religi (Score:3, Insightful)
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There's very little direct evidence of a lot of things, and especially scientific ones, who's to say Einstein's Theories of Relativity are how the phenomenon they explain works, or much of quantum mechanics or string holds water
Quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity theories make predictions that have been tested repeatedly. When there are competing theories in science predictions and tests of those predictions are used to choose among them. So how do you decide which religion to believe in, or whether to believe in ghosts?
The "Subject" heading for the parent of this seems to be a little bigoted.
The subject mentioned Americans because the story summary said "An anonymous reader passed a link to a survey that says a third of Americans believe in ghosts."
Re:Hey, let's add some secular mysticism.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
No faith needed.
"Everyone has something they believe in that they can't prove," unless taken to an absurd level, that is not true.
Parent
Re:Hey, let's add some secular mysticism.... (Score:5, Informative)
Slow down there, cowboy. Nothing proves itself -- you always start with a certain set of axioms.
While it is indeed one of the great tools for knowing things that we have, it is certainly not the only way things become known. We can learn certain things through reason alone (such as math), and many things can only be learned through word of mouth (Sally said that Harry said that...). Statistics is one of the fundamental answers to epistemology (how can I know something), but ultimately we only can learn things at certain (not very high) confidence levels. While a p-value of 0.05 or 0.01 might sound pretty impressive (and are the standard rules of thumb for statistical 'proofs'), they represent 1-out-of-20 and 1-out-of-100 studies' results being nothing more than the result of random chance. If you have, say, 10,000 papers published a year, 500 or 100 of them will be wrong.
Given how often scientific answers have indeed been found to be wrong, especially in epidemiological studies (which is a sort of scientific wishful thinking), it hardly proves itself to be true (which can't be done anyway). A better way of putting it is, "It's the best method we have of figuring out empirical truths about nature."
There are very major limits on science and the scientific method. Notably:
1) Singular events. Science can't handle singular events very well, or not at all. For example, suppose the people that claimed they had seen cold fusion back in '89 really did see Cold Fusion. Perhaps a gamma ray hit something at just the right time, or maybe it required high altitude, or something. But when researchers tried to duplicate it, they couldn't and so the guys were branded as frauds. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't... but they could actually have made an honest empirical observation, and then branded as frauds as a result of it.
2) Trust. The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullis in Verba" ("On the words of no one") In other words, don't believe what people say, but only trust in reproducible experiments. The trouble with this is, of course, that no one can come close to reproducing all of the empirical experiments needed for a full understanding of modern science, and so it always boils down to trusting what other people say. If a car full of scientists drove through a mountain pass and saw a white substance outside, they could send one of their members out to report if it was sand or snow... without accomplishing anything. The friend could be playing a practical joke on them, after all. All of them would need to go outside and make an empirical observation of the substance themselves in order to be satisfied. This is a very fundamental flaw in the system, which only works since malicious papers (as far as I know) are not inserted into the literature like viruses.
3) The old induction problem / uncertainty. Science is based on inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning from empirical events can't actually prove anything. We can make certain claims, but not proofs in the sense that logical or mathematical statements can be proven true. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is a scientific claim, but it cannot be proven to be true. The fundamental problem is that what is true in the past might not be true in the future. Since certain things like universal constants are likely to stay the same (though some have theorized they have not in the past!), it can be answered by simply stipulating "If things stay like they are now..." but this is still not the same level of proof as people deal with in logic and math. All scientific knowledge, ultimately, is uncertain.
4) Heretics. The heretics of science have always received rough treatment. Most of the time it is deserved (there are a lot of nutcases out there), but sometimes people have followed the scientific method but had their papers rejected because the reviewers assume their preconceived conclusion. The guys
Parent
Re:Hey, let's add some secular mysticism.... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. It's true that experiments are bad at dealing with rare events (I'm generalizing your statement by substituting rare for singular). The challenge, as a scientist, is to come up with a situation where you can study the same underlying phenomena in a system or regime where those rare events become more common. It's true that there are situations where this can be difficult or impossible, but saying that's a limitation of the scientific method is somewhat trivial. Science is dependent on observation, and you're saying that it doesn't work when you can't observe something. More on that below...
2. Trust is less of a problem in science than any other human activity because science builds cumulatively on science done before. Despite what you suggest, direct reproduction is actually not even close to being the primary mechanism for validating past results. The truth is that new experiments are based on models constrained by old experiments, even if the new experiment is not a direct duplication of the old experiment. For example, your computer wouldn't work if all those experiments on electrons and whatever done in the 1950s were wrong. So old results, at least the ones that matter, are tested and retested every day as the findings are incorporated into the models.
3. You seem to imply that it's possible to "prove" things in the real world, but I would argue that it simply is not, through science or any other method. You can prove things in math because math is all made up. Sevens don't actually "exist." Those of us who operate in reality don't have it quite so easy. The type of "proof" you're talking about is not only impossible, but more importantly, completely unnecessary. We risk our lives every day wearing shoes we can't prove won't explode, using keyboards we can't prove won't electrocute us, confident that gravity will not fail us and fling us off the face of the earth. The level of certainty science can provide is sufficient.
4. It is simply untrue that "heretics have always received rough treatment" in science. Look at Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th Century. Your example of the discovery of the role of H. pylori is more an indictment of the medical establishment, which at the time was very dogma-driven and insufficiently scientific in its thought (and remains so today). Also, those guys eventually won the Nobel, if you forget--hardly the Galileo treatment.
I think the biggest problem with your understanding of science is that you seem to think that the sole activity of science is in providing "facts" and studying "events." I would argue that the main activity of science is in creating models based on observations, then refining those models. You make a lot of the idea that science rejects unique events, but I would argue that the very idea of truly unique events is fundamentally incompatible with the model of the universe that science has provided (i.e. we're all made out of the same atoms, those atoms all move around according to the same rules, etc.). Science seeks not to collect random facts, but to discover the general underlying principles of reality (which you refer to as "the natural world," as if to imply there is another).
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How exactly are origins not part of science? If you want to know how a system originated, you might carefully study its current state and the manner in which it develops over time, and thereby attempt to deduce by reason the state it would have occupied in the past. Or alternatively you might invoke God. One of these approaches is science, the other is not.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to know how a system originated, you might carefully study its current state and the manner in which it develops over time, and thereby attempt to deduce by reason the state it would have occupied in the past. Or alternatively you might invoke God. One of these approaches is science, the other is not.
...and I believe the other poster's point was this:
While science has some really interesting guesses about the origins of the universe, as does religion, the simple fact remains that they're BOTH guesses. True, it's more systematic with science. However, most real agnostics and atheists I know will admit it's a guess either way, and as a Christian I need to honestly admit the same.
Folks, I'm with Jubal Harshaw [wikipedia.org] on this:
"Come Judgement Day, if they hold it, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo ... was Big Boss all along..."
No witness, no proof. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the thesis that I am arguing against. I say that there are scientists or at least people that speak for it, who argue that science does KNOW, as in factually, how the universe was made and how we evolved. They cross in their minds a preponderance of evidence based largely on internal consistency with a faith that the fabric of physics has been constant and unchanged over the
Re:Hey, let's add some secular mysticism.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a rather stupid argument, unless I'm missing something.
The earth is our environment. We live in it. If we don't treat it right, it won't treat us right; is has nothing to do with deals or brains, it's just simple physics and biology.
Would you take a shit on your dinner plate and eat it? Of course not. You'd get sick. Would you eat toxic wastes? Of course not; you'd get sick, and probable die. Polluting the earth is the same thing, only in smaller concentrations, and usually the concentrations are higher around people with less money. The toxins make people sick, and they die sometimes. These toxins don't just stay where we put them; as humans, we're dependent on air and water, which come from the earth. Pollute the air, and you're going to breathe it. Pollute the water, and you're going to drink it (at least water can be filtered; no one walks around with gas masks on, yet). Even worse, the food grown in fields for us to eat uses air and water. It's all a big cycle, so if you screw with it, it's going to come back and bite you in the ass most likely.
There's nothing mystical about this, and any idiot should be able understand it. Anyone who thinks it's ok to just pollute willy-nilly is either completely selfish (only cares about short-term consequences and not long-term), astoundingly stupid, or has some irrational belief that it won't affect them and others.
Then, of course, there is faith in science itself. It is an act of faith...
This is a rather stupid statement. Science doesn't require any faith at all; it's just a method for gaining knowledge where models are created and tested using evidence, and thrown out if contradicted by evidence. Do you have a better method?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on the con job (Score:3)
More than that believed Saddam was behind 9/11 - it's not about people being stupid it's about effective storytelling and PR making people believe stupid things. See the "Amityville Horror" for a leading example. One of the major players (M. O'Gara ) in spinning that story to the public ended up spinning the story about SCO that people will be familiar with here.
Only a third are religious? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nobody has proof that God does not exist. Because you can't prove a negative.
Just as you don't have any proof that The Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean you've been TBHNA.
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The physical world is more complex, where negati
Important Warning (Score:5, Funny)
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So? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not knocking the religious, just saying that 1/3 of Americans believing in the supernatural should not surprise anyone.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article above, "By 31 percent to 18 percent, more liberals than conservatives report seeing a specter." So even the demographic that is often included in the "reason" catagory have something they believe in.
Faith is a good thing. Otherwise no ignorant people would take risks.
There, fixed that for you. Some of us without faith in anything supernatural still take risks, who believe in our own abilities to cope with the unknown. But I know that's a hard thing for lots of people who believe in God to understand, belief in oneself.
You too can see ghosts (Score:3, Insightful)
http://ladyscientist.com/the_ghost_in_the_machine.html [ladyscientist.com]
There is evidence that ghosts appear in regions with high electrostatic fields. The fields are often/usually the result of the piezo-electric effect of rock under pressure, ie in mountain regions. The other thing that will give people the willies is sub-sonic vibrations.
I think trying to find ghosts is the wrong idea. These guys should be looking for the things that make people see ghosts.
I see ghosts all the time (Score:4, Interesting)
Ghosts!
Or...maybe not. I went to the optometrist for my regular check-up, and she found a bunch of "floaters" in my eye. If I look at a blank wall, I can see them sometimes, they drift in and out of my field of view, and if I look steadily, the optic system edits them out and they vanish.
So, of course, when it was late at night and I was already tired, and moved my eyes after staring at something steadily (the book) a floater would sometimes wander into view briefly, and I'd "see" a moving shadow for a second or two.
Parent
Spooky? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ghosts vs. Neutrinos (Score:3, Interesting)
Experience with believers in the paranormal. (Score:5, Insightful)
As old as the house is, it has slightly unnerving properties: the floors creak, drafts blow napkins and receipts, etc.. I find it very easy to come up with reasonable naturalistic explanations for what my co-workers consider paranormal. All of the servers at this restaurant believe that it is inhabited by a ghost -- one that interacts with the world we experience. A poltergeist.
Most also believe in astrology and homeopathy. One server recently paid ~ $15 for a chalk tablet cold remedy. No matter how hard I try to dispel these harmful beliefs, I am (ironically) met with skepticism. For instance, today someone told me that they believed in symbols foretelling the future. I suggested that any notion of psychic ability is likely due to confirmation bias -- we are more likely to remember when our intuition was correct than when it had failed us. I also told this person about the JREF/Randi Prize.
At this point in most of my conversations with my mystically inclined associates, some "scientific explanation" is offered dealing with photons, leptons, "we're all made of light," and other new-agey pseudo-quantum-physics.
I am at the point where I have almost given up, except to always ask people to examine how they know what they proclaim to know without resorting to their feelings. I find it very hard to not come across as condescending when having these conversations.
I know, I know! (Score:3, Interesting)
Listening to the skeptics guide to the universe podcast. It has helped me learn how to deal with these people and how to bring them back to reality.
Re:Since the existence of God can't be proved or.. (Score:5, Informative)
People had to prove that the earth was round, because with my own two eyes, without knowing which signs to look for (even though in this day and age they are extremely obvious, but weren't always so), it looks flat. Therefore, its flat until someone proves its not. Someone proved it wasn't, therefore it isn't, until someone proves otherwise, and so on. No faith about it, its a methodology. Saying "there is no god!" is just short for "There is no solid evidence there is a god, thus by applying the commonly accepted scientific methodologies, we can say there is no god until proven otherwise". Thats just a bit long to say everytime, and people with scientific background, or who follows in standard science footstep just shortens, since they'll understand each other.
Then there are the morons who think they understand what science is but don't, and don't quite get that EVERYTHING in science is "theories until a better theory comes up", and use the words the wrong way. Can't help those.
I mean, now science says the earth is round. Sometime in the future we most likely will prove something similar to string theory (or some such), and realise that there were obvious signs around us that after all, earth isn't round, its in 1 dimention and our one dimentional human brain just interprete that 1 dimention as a sphere based on other inputs. Then scientists of the time will make jokes about "lol the earth is round rofl!". But we know that. Thats as opposed to people asserting something is true as if it was a fact, without evidence. There's a freagin big difference between "it doesn't exist until you prove it does", and "it exists until you prove it doesn't".
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There definately ARE some people that will say there is no god as a faith statement, and that IS equaly as rediculous, I completly agree with that. But when a scientist says "There is no god", that is NOT what they mean. Again, keep in mind: "There is no god" is equaly as valid or inva
Re:Since the existence of God can't be proved or.. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Since the existence of God can't be proved or.. (Score:4, Insightful)
How, exactly? Certainly the idea that the creator of the Universe would manifest as spaghetti is pretty implausible, but is that inherently more weird than manifesting as an Iron Age carpenter? Who went on to get killed and then come back from the dead so that he could forgive everyone for something that happened four thousand years previously, except that it probably never actually happened at all?
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This is why... (Score:3, Interesting)
(There is nothing particularly supreme about any of the Greek, Nordic or Celtic "Gods",
$1M Challenge (Score:3, Informative)
Now there's nothing a good academic center likes more than funding - I think we can all agree on that. So, why haven't they taken Randi's One Million Dollars [randi.org] from him to buy more Aeron chairs?
Re:Okay, I'll bite. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Superstition comes in many forms.
-jcr
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Physicalism is incompatible with moral realism (Score:3, Insightful)
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It is nothing but a label for what we humans consider to be right behavior. To say morality requires supernatural is just daft. The concept of morality doesn't need a supernatural source any more than do the concepts of stinky or cute.
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-jcr
Re:Okay, I'll bite. (Score:5, Funny)
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