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?
Hi, I’m the friend. I don’t want to reveal too much about my identity here but my science education was actually very thorough (I know that sounds arrogant but I just wanted to defend my honour here). Let’s not get bogged down with personal detail though like that though because ad hominems like this can often cause a conversation to unravel into personal attacks.
Regarding what my friend said about my views on the scientific method: This is a bit of a mischaracterization. I don’t have anything against the scientific method. I just think that the set of things we have reason to believe is larger than the set of things that we can provide evidence for scientifically. (Broadly speaking I think this is a fairly standard view of things.)
Another way to out this is this. The question is not ‘is xyz scientific’ but ‘do we have reason to believe xyz’? It turns out that if we can demonstrate something scientifically it does give us reason to believe that thing. But there are some things we have reason to believe that we cannot demonstrate scientifically. For example I have good reason to believe solipsism is false, or that chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap, even though I cannot strictly speaking demonstrate these things scientifically (examples like this often have something to do with the subjectivity of the mind, which cannot be directly measured but is nonetheless very apparent to us).
For the ghost stuff, I think you actually could make a reasonable scientific case for the existence of ghosts (very hot take, I know), but that’s not my primary concern. What I’m worried about is do we have good reason to believe in ghosts? As it happens, I believe the answer to that is yes. The details here might be a bit out of scope for a c/nostupidquestions thread but I’m basing my thoughts here on the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane. I used to have a similar view as most people in this thread (that ghosts were irrational and unscientific etc) until I read this book and it forced me to change my mind. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic.
Edit: for grammar and typos
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.
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
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.
Does the book posit new laws of physics, or even call into question the current set? That’s what Gallileo did, but the promotional copy for the book doesn’t suggest that it does.
That‘S not what Galileo did. Newton is the one who eventually came up with the new laws is physics that explained Galileo’s findings.
What was it that convinced you?
Basically, there are reliable, repeatable and measurable effects that are best explained by people ‘surviving’ their own death. A good example of this is near death experiences. People come back from having been clinically dead and can tell you things that they shouldn’t know. For example like where items are placed on the roof of the hospital or events that transpired when they had no brain activity. These people would have no way of having knowing this stuff unless they’ve seen it for themselves, which would have been physically impossible. So this makes their own fist-person accounts of what happened (“I was out of my body and literally floating around”) start to seem more credible.
The power of the book is the sheer volume of cases it presents for these sorts of events and other related phenomena. It shows you that events like these do occur reliably and repeatably and are quite literally scientific in that people can and do study them scientifically (and more of this study should occur, but that can only happen if we get past the current social stigma).
The power of the book is that it just inundates you with credible stories (and credible science!) from credible people, all of which is suggestive of the supernatural. It might be possible to talk yourself into dismissing one or two of these cases, but when you have several hundred of them compiled back-to-back-to-back it becomes harder and harder to find the willpower required to muster up a skeptical response. After a while you have to admit “okay, theres something more going on here, and I don’t understand it”. At least, thats what happened to me.
It’s a great book though, and I’m not doing it justice. I highly recommend giving it a read.
Near death experiences are a tricky thing to study. There are physiological explanations for much of it, such as weird brain activity is likely to be interpreted as a weird experience.
The problem of this argument is confirmation bias. An anecdote of seeing information you couldn’t have seen and being right is going to be more memorable than seeing information and being wrong.
The scientific method involves looking at both the cases where it seems like something happened and the cases where nothing happened (e.g. someone said they had an experience but it clearly didn’t match reality). If you cherry pick just the events that “showed” what you want, that’s confirmation bias.
I did some googling of my own and found some studies on the topic from seemingly reputable sources that suggested physiological explanations might not be sufficient to explain the patterns they saw. Several of these had the same first author. I also found plenty of studies suggesting physiological explanations can be sufficient, as well as some specific criticisms of the couple studies that suggested they weren’t sufficient.
It’s interesting for sure that there is a doctor or two who seem to believe in the supernatural. The topic of near death experience seems to be of research interest regardless of any supernatural theories because of what it tells us about the brain.
It seems we will likely arrive at scientific consensus about near death experience in the future. I wouldn’t hold my breath that supernatural theories will survive that process.
I think I saw the case this was talking about during my googling. It said “brain activity was not expected” which is not the same as “there was no brain activity”.
That’s the problem with a book like the one you are describing. It’s deliberately cherry picked, exaggerated, and biased to drive you to a certain conclusion.
I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.
Here’s a place to start.
Thanks for your response. If you and I agree on anything it’s that we should do more science to understand this stuff better.
Confirmation bias is real, but this isn’t it. If I believe that all swans are white , and then I come across a black swan, should I just dismiss that data point because it would confirmation bias (perhaps people would accuse me of wanting this outcome)? No. Ignoring the black swan isn’t the way to go here. It wouldn’t be ridding ourselves of confirmation bias, it would be ridding ourselves of critical data that contradicts our starting hypothesis.
Similarly: even if supernatural stuff that is hard to explain happens in only a percentage of cases, discarding that data isn’t ridding ourselves of confirmation bias; it’s simply choosing to ignore critical data. That’s not good science.
This is what I started with, so for the longest time I was very skeptical, just like most people in this thread. It is my belief that anyone with an open mind who takes in all the information on this topic (including the studies that suggest supernatural outcomes and those that don’t; the first-hand accounts and the skeptical rebuttals) will inevitably come to the same conclusion that I have. That was my experience, anyway. This is not a conclusion I was looking for; I was really stubbornly against this stuff for the longest time, but I was forced to change my mind.
It’s also worth noting that the book talks about more than just near-death experiences; I just used them as an example.
Confirmation bias is when the outcome could be adequately explained by luck.
In the topic of near death experiences, if there are 1,000,000 near death experiences and 100 involve someone “knowing something they shouldn’t be able to”, those 100 cases are more likely to be remembered or recorded as significant than the other 900,000 cases. This can lead to an apparent statistical significance in correctly knowing “unknowable” information, when really it’s just people “guessing” correctly.
The “black swan” scenario is a bit different but it would be something like if you are more likely to record a swan sighting if the swan is black, you will significantly overestimate the frequency of black swans.
Im not saying the cases of apparent supernatural effects should be ignored, I’m saying they need to be taken in the context of all similar events, including the mundane, to understand if there even is an effect (knowing something that shouldn’t be possible) or if it’s just a handful of lucky guesses.
These are nowhere near the real numbers. No one could realistically conduct a study on near death experiences that included 1,000,000 participants
That’s a number I threw out there to estimate how many near death experiences might have happened, studied or not, and that’s why it’s such a problem to only focus on the anecdotal cases that get recorded because they are interesting.
A proper study doesn’t need to include 1,000,000 cases, but it does need to ensure that it doesn’t have bias in the cases it does include.
Okay. Thanks for your comment. This discussion we’re having here is one of the few threads that hasn’t devolved into name-calling so I appreciate that.
I have two responses to this.
The first is that I’m still not so sure I agree with the framing here regarding cherry-picking or bias. Your concern seems to be (and correct me if I’m wrong) something like this: in most cases nothing out of the ordinary happens, so if we only focus on the few cases where something paranormal seems to have happened then we disregard the vast majority of the data and are only focusing on anecdotes. It’s more scientific to focus on the bulk of the data, where nothing interesting happens. (Again, please correct me if this is a misrepresentation.)
I don’t agree with this characterization because important data is often few and far between. But we shouldn’t discount it simply because it is rare. For example, consider Hawking radiation. From what I hear it’s an important concept in theoretical physics. But Hawking radiation is very hard to observe. In fact, it’s only been observed once, and the observation wasn’t even in the wild; it was in a lab. This was an important observation; it provided experimental support for an important concept. Say I was a physicist and I was sceptical of Hawking radiation. What should I do with this information? Should I say “well, this data doesn’t matter, most of the time we can’t observe Hawking radiation anyway so this data is just anecdotal”? No, that would be an improper response. Sure, this data is rare, but that doesn’t mean I can just label it as anecdotal and reject it on that basis. Because the data, though rare, still is very hard to explain without the concept of Hawking radiation. Similarly: it is possible that interesting data regarding near-death experiences are rare. Does that mean that this data is anecdotal and should be ignored? No. So long as we have cases that are genuinely hard to explain without supernatural explanations (and, I believe, we do) then that data will be very important. Because we still have to explain what was going on in those cases.
Another example of this is in the Earth sciences, where the large portion of the field is literally trying to create theories to explain one-time events. For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs. Should we reject the theory that they were killed by an asteroid or meteor or whatever simply because that event only happened once, and the event is therefore merely anecdotal? No. Even events that only occur once may require us to construct novel theories. So long as we cannot explain the event with current theoretical frameworks then it is our duty to invoke a new framework. As it is with dinosaurs so too with NDEs: even if there was just one, spectacular event that was difficult to explain with current frameworks, then it is our duty to invoke novel theoretical frameworks (so long as we actually want to know what’s going on). If the data leads us to theories that are paranormal in their character then, oh well, that’s just where we’ll have to go. If we want to follow the data to where it leads, then we cannot rule out certain destinations ahead of time.
It’s also worth pointing out that focusing on single cases is common practice in psychology and medicine. Sure, it’s not a replacement for theoretical understanding or large-scale studies, but it is still informative (for the reasons mentioned above). When researchers document and discuss a single interesting case it is known as a case study.
The second thing I wanted to say was regarding your estimates of total NDEs versus potentially paranormal NDEs. You seemed to be trying to aggregate over all the NDEs that have every happened and tried to find the ratio between the NDEs that are interesting versus the one that are amenable to mundane explanations. But I don’t know if this is super helpful. Because, for one thing, we’re largely left guessing at the numbers (how do we how many were interesting? how do we know how many were mundane? there’s literally no way to know). Even if we only look at all the data that we do have then we have to do that in a controlled manner, otherwise we’ll run into issues. If we only run thing haphazardly, back of the envelope style then we don’t know our scope (how many cases are we dealing with?) and we cannot control for any confounding variables (is this data interoperable?) or trace the data chain-of-custody (how did we even get this data to begin with, and how did that colour its presentation?). In short, it’s too messy.
So what we need, instead, is something more controlled. Ideally for something like this we’d want to look at a meta-analysis. But unfortunately I don’t know if anything with the required scope exists (if you can find one though, let me know). So the second-best thing to look at is an individual study. You mentioned earlier that you were looking at some studies. If you found any that you thought were interesting then it would probably be more productive to poke holes in that study specifically. I would be happy to discuss the merits of any study of your choosing and then take things from there.
But if we do that then I think the ratios you were discussing in your message would dissolve. This is because its practically impossible to conduct an NDE study with a large sample size (it’s hard to predict if/when/how/where someone will die, and the vast majority of those that do die don’t come back to talk about it). And with small studies even a single hard-to-explain NDE would be a relatively large percentage of the total sample (which should, I think, mitigate the concerns you expressed in your earlier message; but correct me if I’m wrong on that).