!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
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?
I'm not going to rule out the possibility of something existing that we don't know of yet.
However, if we're supposed to look for anything in any way, we first need to know what we're looking for. So, what's a ghost? Is a a soul, and if so, what's a soul?
I think that's an interesting question with or without ghost.
People who believe in souls, should attempt to explain what a soul is and how they experience their existence. Is it an emergent feature of the electrons or brainwaves that can travel in other dimensions that our normal physics can't detect or something completely unknown?
People who have experiences with ghosts and souls should be investigated. How do they detect their observations? Are they somehow able to sense things that happen in other dimensions? That'd be really cool, and I still won't rule it out. The human mind can do weird stuff. For instance echo localization like bats do, seeing more colours than normal or even just perfect pitch. Stuff like that is provable and shows that our senses can be expanded by training. Perhaps we even have dormant senses like seeing magnetic fields like birds do.
So let's say some people can see ghosts but we just can't measure it currently, because we don't know how it works. We can still make an experiment where we compare the observations from these special skills and see if they align. If it turns out that the people who can see ghosts agree, then we should definitely investigate it further and find out what happens in their heads when they see ghosts. Where does the brain impulses come from? That'll teach us about the special sense, which could then prove the existence of ghosts.
I doubt their observations match up in a controlled environment. It's a shame because it would be really easy to prove the existence of ghosts.
Do I believe in ghosts in the literal sense of an actual spirit hanging around in the physical world haunting places and people? No.
Do I think it's fascinating to see how the idea of "ghosts" are used in a cultural sense usually representing an individual or group's desires, thoughts, feelings, etc. after they've passed on and usually storytelling around respecting their wishes or finishing what they started so they can finally be "at peace"? Yes.
I also find it fascinating in a tragic way how people who've gone through extreme grief and loss can cling to the idea of ghosts, particularly of loved ones. Perhaps the pyschie doesn't want to let go of that person so much that it can manifest as audio-visual hallucinations that feel incredibly real to the individual.
After all, we all perceive the world through our brain: it is the filter for everything.
I've experienced some strange stuff personally, but I don't think I've seen an actual ghost. I remember having a dream about a close relative the night they died suddenly and we all found out in the morning. But that could be my memory post-rationalising something.
I've seen a milk bottle fly out from the back of the fridge but I swear I remember that the fridge wasn't rocking unstably and that the milk was definitely at the back of the fridge. But I could have seen incorrectly because who pays attention to the precise location of a milk bottle when opening the fridge.
And I've encountered machines that appeared to be haunted. An ex-gf's iPod classic she kept because it is a time capsule of her music would randomly turn itself on, play 10 seconds of a random song, then turn itself off again.
I can feel how a ghost story would fit all of these and feel like it would make emotional sense to me. Like there's some deep part of our evolutionary psychology that supports feeling this way. Why?
Now in that sense I believe people genuinely experienced "ghosts" that aren't actually there but are a part of their perceived reality and I find that fascinating.
Depending on where you live, your friend might be eligible for using public transportation completely for free with a special id. It is also possible that their job security is going through the roof. One needs to be tested first, though and from what you wrote about them, I'd suggest that you or another person close to them escort them to a clinic. This way they don't get lost and can get help speaking with the personell when the instructions or other information get too complicated for them.
He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence.
Big if true. He should send that to you instead of making memes.
Yeah, this is literally it. There is either evidence and that's the end of the argument, or there isn't and you're just having fun talking about ghosts.
Ghosts are real but only jedi masters (like the one in the meme) can see them. Unfortunately, jedi masters are not real.
We have built systems that have detected:
We have come into a world where people carry around, nearly 24/7, devices capable of recording high definition video, measuring variances in light, magnetism, vibration, storing time correlated data and even processing over it with enough proficiency to put digital bunny ears or makeup on you in real time.
Despite all this, we have no evidence and no mechanism by which we even might expect ghosts could exist. It's reasonable to say you can't be 100% certain they don't exist, but it is also wildly unreasonable to say they do.
Yeah but did those scientists ever point the James Webb Telescope at that creepy house at the end of my street?
If ghosts were real, then I can think of a few people throughout history who would have been swarmed by them. Adolf Hitler would have approximately 13 million spirits haunting him by the end. Something like 100,000,000,000 humans have ever lived, and somehow all the ghosts are from culturally relevant time frames? For all the US civil war ghosts people have seen, you'd think there'd be orders of magnitude more native Americans haunting this place. Did the European colonists just make sure to let the Indigenous peoples finish all their business before hunting them to near extinction?
People who don't believe in ghosts just assume that people who believe in them think they are like blankets moving all by themselves like they are in cartoons. That is, of course, not the case. It's much more complicated than that. Atheists sometimes really fall for the dumbest arguments possible
Dude just thinks he's special. There would be ANY evidence by now. The superiority of the meme is laughable. Your friend is a fool.
The bar for “convincing” is very low when you want to believe.
all it takes is some freaky shit sometimes. People forget that a lot happens in the world that deviates from their baseline and that it isn’t always paranormal.
From my perspective, ghosts are basically the result of...
/3. Infrasound
Ghosts are fun to think about and make good stories, but there's never been one bit of reliable evidence. So no it's not reasonable to believe in something that isn't real.
ghosts are like religion: can neither be proven nor disprofen. what do you even consider a ghost? i do faintly believe in spirits:
when i am sitting at the grave of my grandfather, it does feel as he is around somehow. is that because i miss him and wish he is still with us? likely...
a friend of mine recently lost her father. they are both accomplished mountaineers. on a solo tour, she told me, she heared her father's voice reminding her to be careful - while not paying attention during a dangerous passage. was it her father reaching out? was it her subconsciousness taking the persona of the father? we will never know...
in the end it doesn't matter in the slightest, what these feelings of ghosts or spirits really are. if our ancestors keep watching out for us, that is great. if our subconsciousness keeps watching out for us, while taking on different personas, that is great. life goes on the same - even if it all was just imagination.
Isn't it irrational to believe in things that cannot be proven or disproven?
it is not irrational, to observe (or experience) something and not being able to explain it.
i do not have any reason to assume my friend is a liar. so she heard her fathers voice. how or why she heard it we will never know, as she was not hooked up to a brainwave scanner or similar.
apparently we have different people from different times having experienced similar things. thanks @Timecircleline@sh.itjust.works for pointing to the Third Man Factor! so i would say it is quite reasonable to believe something can happen to us humans in extreme situations. is it just our imagination? quite possible! especially considering the more extreme stories mentioned in the wikipedia page surely drove those people to or past their individual limits. but that brings me back to my last paragraph: it doesn't change anything or even matter. those voices, or whatever they where helped those people survive extreme situations and live to tell the tale. whether it was a deceased loved one, a valkyrie from norse mythology, friendly tree spirit, their subconsciousness wanting to survive, ... or just hallucination due to thirst/starvation/exhaustion.
the effects didn't change. so whatever the cause is, shouldn't change my, your, or anybody else's life
Seriously. There is no reason to believe in something that not only isn't proven to exist, but can't. That argument could be applied to nearly anything.
Vampires? Can't prove they don't exist, so may as well believe in them.
Fairies? Same.
Flying spaghetti monster? Prove it doesn't exist.
Like, I don't want to knock other people's religions, and I'm not so arrogant as to think I have all the answers, but I just can't stand the "you can't prove XXXX doesn't exist" argument.
The second example kind of feels like the Third Man Factor.
thanks! didn't know there is a name for it
There is no reliable scientific proof. Thread/post end.
If you ever watch the video of Karl Sagan describing what the fourth dimension is, that is a slight possibility for explaining poltergeist ghosts, possibly even alien abductions.
Nope. All "evidence" is fake. For example pretty much all UFO vids disappeared once 4k cameras got invented
You got no idea what you're talking about
If you're willing to extend belief beyond what can be proven through science, sure.
We have countless reports but no actual confirmed evidence. Nothing that constitutes proof.
You also have to wonder, where are all the billions of ghosts, both people and animals? We'd be seeing them everywhere.
And how far in the animal kingdom do ghosts go? People have reported ghost dogs, horses, cats, apes, chickens, bears. Do we get ghost mice, spiders, rabbits, whales? If not, why?