Reasons not to scoff at ghosts, visions and near-death experiences

https://aeon.co/ideas/ghosts-visions-and-near-death-experiences-can-be-therapeutic

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

11 21 7 years ago

0d311• 7 years ago

I’m not sure I really needed “fart” to be censored to “f——“. Am I out of touch with how acceptable it is to use the word fart? Am I going to accidentally offend someone?

hinoki• 7 years ago

It’s a quote from 1766, so you’re only out of touch with the 18th century.

EDIT: [you’re/your]

harimau777• 7 years ago

In the same sentence but before the quote it is not censored. I'm guessing that the censorship was part of the original quote. Given that Kant wrote in the 1700s I could see it being considered impolite at the time.

kitsuac• 7 years ago

Relax, I'm a time traveler from the future. By 3030 fart is the only acceptable word. I've taken great risk by typing this message.

gus_massa2• 7 years ago

It's easy to solve the problem of science ignoring the ghosts and visions. All you need is a good experiment. Preferably something reproducible like saying "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice". An alternative is something that can convince Randi, but a lot of people will claim he sell out.

My favorite example is high temperature superconductivity. In 1970 if you claim that you have a high temperature superconductor people will dismiss you. It was not theoretically impossible, but all tries had failed and there was no theoretical support to expect one. But one day, someone made a high temperature superconductor and published a difficult to follow recipe, and then someone else published an easy to follow recipe, and now everyone with a good lab can make a high temperature superconductor.

krapp4• 7 years ago

The problem's been solved. Every supernatural claim that can be tested has been tested, and every conceivable experiment done, the data collected, and the results are in... ghosts and other paranormal phenomena aren't real.

DougN72• 7 years ago

Dark matter is the ghostly realm. And boom, suddenly it hasn’t all been disproven :)

gus_massa2• 7 years ago

You can't prove that ghost don't exist. For a technical discussion, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

What if ghost only realiablily appear when someone dies and there is a big neutrino flux? Have someone build a room for dying people in the path of a big neutrino beam?

What if neutrinos push ghost, so they are pushed to deep space by the neutrinos of the Sun? I guess the best place to put a ghost detector is at the top of a hospital and try to measure a passing ghost at midnight.

I obviously don't expect neither of these scenarios to be real, but I guess nobody had measured them.

Going back to my superconductor example, let's imagine that you go back in time to 1950 and say that the best superconductor is a ceramic, but you don't remember the exact formula. Hey, you don't even remember the formula of any ceramic material. They will think you are nut. Someone will even try with the wrong ceramic. Or with the wrong composition. Or let it catch some humidity and ruin the sample. Everyone will get convinced that all the conceivable ceramic are tested and it is impossible. They are not even conductors!

yokaze2• 7 years ago

That's a false dichotomy: It isn't "Science has been wrong before, so anything is possible" (https://theconversation.com/the-thinking-error-at-the-root-o...)

There are degrees of "wrongness" or likelihood. Pseudo-sciences exists practically as long as there have been sciences. With no evidence, and not for lack of trying. People really like to believe in that stuff. But with that track-record, it is on the rather wrong end of wrongness. Might be true, but on the likelihood of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, yes, a reproducible experiment by an independent party would be the way to go,

On the other hand, the discovery of existence of high temperature superconductors while certainly baffling and had people scrambling to explain it, is exactly how science works. It was not completely out of the blue, we had a reasonable understanding of electromagnetism. But that "detail" didn't fit. It was just one more puzzle to solve, and it didn't invalidate everything we knew before. Also, there were gradual steps of increases of temperature of achieving high temperature supra conductivity. So, not "theoretically impossible", but rather "practically rather unlikely". A different ball-park then ghosts and visions.

The healthy skepticism to high temperature supra-conductivity (and low temperature fusion) comes from the mantra "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (Sagan), and a lot of pseudo-science people came with the claims for supra-conductivity but without the evidence.

qubex• 7 years ago

At the risk of drawing an inordinate volume of fire and critique, I’m going to be candid and state openly that there’s no way ai could possibly integrate this kind of material into my world view and therefore it stays on the cutting room floor.

I’m so utterly materialist and rationalistic that the lack of plausible mechanisms by which any of this might occur leads me to (arguably ‘unscientifically’) dismiss it out of hand.

Not can I support the idea that promoting a benevolent fiction can in any way be positive. After all, one could always hew to honesty (as indeed this piede does) by arguing that benefits can accrue from believing in something irrespective of its veracity, without directly engaging with the truthfulness of the beneficial statement itself.

dvfjsdhgfv• 7 years ago

the lack of plausible mechanisms by which any of this might occur

But some of the mechanisms themselves are already reasonably well known. We can already make light points appear to another person via electric signals in spite of the fact no such light points actually exist in front of that person's eyes. So it's not a question of whether these phenomena exist or not, but rather how exactly they are related to the brain.

Reasons not to scoff at ghosts, visions and near-death experiences

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