Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts 606
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?
The supermajority of Americans belive in religion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Only a third are religious? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Since the existence of God can't be proved or..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Important Warning (Score:2, Insightful)
Spooky? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where is your proof... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The supermajority of Americans belive in religi (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Faith is a good thing. Otherwise no ignorant people would take risks.
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?
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.
What a retarded definition of faith (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because someone denies the existence of something that we have absolutely no evidence for, does not mean that they are making a "faith statement." I think you misinterpret reasonable deniable for absolute, "could-not-possibly-exist" denial. Few true scientists will claim that there is absolutely no possibility of a god-like being existing. However, these same sciences will also grant the same (quite possibly even greater, depending on the scientist) possibility for the existence, somewhere in this universe, for a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater. Clearly, it's reasonable to deny the existence of the latter, since we have absolutely no proof of it, so it is therefore also reasonable to deny the existence of the former--not in absolute, I'm 100%-positive terms but in everyday "No, I'm pretty sure 'He' doesn't exist" terms.
Re:Okay, I'll bite. (Score:2, Insightful)
That explains Bush, Vista, and the Ford Pinto (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Nothing spooky about it, Zonk (Score:2, Insightful)
Physicalism is incompatible with moral realism (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you serious? (Score:2, Insightful)
Where does spirituality come into play here? Does your spiritually guided, moral compass tell you that killing someone is wrong without question - or - is killing someone who will be responsible for the deaths of millions morally acceptable? Does it tell you that you should love your parents unconditionally - or - should you stop loving them if they are responsible for heinous abuse, neglect or even murder??? Where do you draw the line? Do these things suddenly become moral or immoral based on some sort of invisible, cosmological line drawn between wrong and right?
Exactly
where in your spiritual text book does it explain you to you, word for word, what is absolutely morally right or unquestionably morally wrong? Is it 'instilled' inside of you? Does that mean you always make the right, moral decisions? If so, it must be nice to be you...
And I guess can no other living being make a moral decision without spirituality? When dolphins care for their injured or sick, is this not a moral decision? When animals such as dogs and walruses 'adopt' animals of other species and take care of them even though there's nothing to gain, is that not a moral decision?
It's hard to believe you summarized the entire multi-verse up in two categories - "immoral" and "spiritual". If spirituality is solely responsible morality, then nothing could have been immoral without it, no? You can't have good without evil and you can't have immorality without morality. It makes me sad that people have such a narrow vision.
If there's a universal right and wrong, then human beings don't know what the Hell they are doing.
Re:Hey, let's add some secular mysticism.... (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a big difference between faith and the recognition that a particular method is the most pragmatic and reliable method available.
Nice try though.
Re:You can - sometimes. (Score:3, Insightful)
The physical world is more complex, where negative and positive statements, derived from previous mathematical and physical truths, are possible, but novel proposals about reality are only "positive" in nature. Empirical evidence is used to provide inductive backing for positive statements *only*. When you say the earth is not flat, the negative statement is proved by combining mathematical axioms with physical observations that result in absurdity. Of course, you can also prove that the earth is in fact round, but that is another matter, for you are then proving a positive statement (which then can be used as a logical disproof for flatness claims).
But lets say you want to talk about an isolated particle z, claiming that it exists. You need to first provide either theoretical or empirical evidence. The theoretical is uninteresing..it is just a consequence of information that already exists, so it's a simple math exercise. You are only novel when you add to theory/information by offering an observation (I saw a trail in a cloud chamber). You defend your statement by proving a few negative statements via mathematics, like "it is not particle a or b which we already know because that leads to conclusion x, which is absurd". Your proofs of the negatives are simply a reduction to absurdity of the other possibilities, leaving only YOUR possibility (new particle) standing. But if you hadn't observed the particle somehow in the FIRST PLACE, then you cannot even begin. We have nothing to talk about. Hence in the real world, you are bound to begin - no matter how distant that beginning is- with reality, and reality is what you observe. The physical axioms are true not because of convention but because you observe something in the world around you that you believe you can formulate into an undefeatable truth, and you hold it undefeated.
Having said this, you cannot actually disprove proposed physical statements about the world: you can only knock down the "proofs" for them. You cannot disprove "the earth is flat" or "a particle a exists that has property b".... You cannot disprove because you do not need to. The increase in information offered by each of those statements is the step that needs to be justified, because it is adding something to our dear list of truths, and that justification is what needs to stand the test of our skepticism.
God (ghosts..etc) is physics - in terms of information: God is an addition, a new thing, a proposal, an increase in entropy. If you observe things that lead to belief in his existence, then all the other possibilities leading to your observations must be eliminated(as in the particle case above), and of course this is not possible because science is hard to eliminate. Hence you cannot prove God. You cannot defeat the logical skepticism.
And you do not need to disprove him either, because there is nothing to disprove. He is not a logical product of predicates nor is he a tangible object of study, he is a proposed reality that cannot be linked to anything at all. So why should we worry about him? I was at one time religious, I still feel the instinctive pull, the psychological comfort and evolved appreciation in my human cognition of the universe's beauty and order. But if there was a God, he has left us in logical confusion. We have no reason to be worried about the promises that come from the mouths of ancient people, long dead, much less their threats.
The atheist doesn't want to prove anything about otherworldy things. The atheist's request is merely to be left alone.
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?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The supermajority of Americans belive in religi (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Okay, why was I born? (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:No witness, no proof. (Score:1, Insightful)
We live in a world of probabilities.
I cannot prove that you will die if you jumped off a 10 story building, but it's likely enough that you don't do it (unless you wished to die). I cannot prove to you that you will get paid if you find a job, since your employers might get bankrupt or run away away with the money (or whatever), but it's likely enough that if you want to put food on the table you go find a job. I cannot prove to you that you will get yourself arrested if you went out and punched a cop in the face, but it's likely enough that you don't do it (unless you have some other reason, like if he slept with your wife or whatever....)
On the other hand, I cannot prove that God did not create the universe some couple of thousands of years ago, but it's unlikely enough that I dismiss the idea as laughable. I cannot prove that Hell (as described by Christian orthodoxy) does not exist, but it's unlikely enough that I won't become a Christian in fear of getting into Hell after death. I cannot disprove *anything* written in the Bible, but many events are so unlikely to be true that I regard the stories as mere fiction.
You also do not address a difference between religion and science.
Religion says "God did it, he can do anything he wants, so don't ask me how he did it".
Science says, "This is what we think happened. [And details follow]"
Religion says God created the Universe by some "magical" means that are not explained. Science puts forward a story on the mechanisms. For those curious about how things work, religion just doesn't provide any answers -- so unless one is prepared to do extensive research to find out themselves, people are only left with "science" as the sole alternative. Believe me, many people who "believe" in science would not be satisfied to have canned answers like "God did it", "God wants it that way" for difficult questions.
Sadly, we can never KNOW anything for sure. But in everyday language "KNOW" does not mean "for sure", and "for sure" does not really mean "for sure". It means "it is true for a high probability". With science, the probability of it being correct, at least perceived by me, is higher. The probability that any particular religion is literally correct (i.e. Noah really brought two animals of each kind and saild for some hundreds of days in a universal flooded Earth) is lower.
Arguing "neither is 100% correct, so I'm justified to choose either" is a fallacy. You may claim that you believe one is more likely than the other, and I wouldn't object, but to say that science doesn't "know" anything simply isn't correct.
Re:Hey, let's add some secular mysticism.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The parent didn't really imply that science proves itself. The parent stated that science provides a way to disprove itself. Those are two very different things.
If the parent meant to differentiate between articles of faith and axioms, that is correct to do so. Axioms are not articles of religious faith. You can tell this, in part, because articles of faith almost never qualify as axioms. Axioms allow for the construction of logical arguments and systems; articles of religious faith rarely if ever do. Just look at religious systems. They inevitably derive more articles of faith from an initial article of faith, and often not in a way that exhibits systemic consistency. This is not to belittle faith by any means; faith can and often does confer emotional comfort and subsequent stability that has real world benefits. It is also often a vehicle for social support as well - not an inconsequential thing at all.
Is seems to me that science says a lot about empirical observations of the natural world. Doesn't it address the nature of those it addresses? Aren't those often starting points for formulations of theories which attempt to explain the observations, or am I missing your point?