At what age did you stop believing in ghosts?

[Karnos]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

Quote Originally Posted by Karnos That said, I am very interested in “fringe” research. One of the most famous "fringe" researches is here Global Consciousness Project -- consciousness, group consciousness, mind What they try to do is to find deviation in random data. As I understood it, computers all over the world are continuously running random numbers, that in average, taking all of them into account, should be more or less zero. They found that when something happens, like Egyptian revolt, these random numbers give an average value other than zero. True or False? Would it be a good example of mind interacting with matter in an unorthodox way?

Thanks for directing us to this link. It reminds me in a way of something called "The Whether Map" by "the Arlington Institute", whose goals are to create a type of global forward looking machine by analyzing the images and symbols contained in dreams. Their hypothesis goes that before any major event, people around the world begin to have troubling dreams and visions. Now I can say for my part that I don't remember anything in particular showing up in my dreams before 9/11 or the Japan earthquake from early this year, but it is interesting, nonetheless

--Documents

A similar line of research is the so called Web Bot. Have you heard of it?

Wikipedia (Links)

Web_Bot

All of this is very questionable, but it still makes interesting food for thought. With the rise of emergent technology and the ever increasing relationship between ourselves and our technology (that we already give from granted) it would not surprise me if some interesting events begin to take place.

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote Originally Posted by Karnos

Their hypothesis goes that before any major event, people around the world begin to have troubling dreams and visions.

Thank you, Karnos. You have reminded me that a reread of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" is long overdue. Sweet dreams...

[Dr. Bantham]

Long ago, yet long after I stopped believing in people. The latency inherent with my observations to both myths haunts me more than the obvious lack of proof from the outset. Go ahead, mock my lack of faith. It only proves the hypothesis, from my perspective. How about yours?

Drunk and listening to LCD Soundsystem simultaneously streamed on two sets of nearfield monitors, four satellites and two subwoofers. I think the wattage is in the neighborhood of a million watts, give or take a localized brownout. I wonder if the neighbors believe in me? I could lick them in the litmus test, regardless.
, , and ad infinitum.

[gveranon]

In 1991 I lived for six months in the basement of a century-old, three-story house that had been subdivided into apartments. Horrible place, worst place I've ever lived, but it was cheap. Cold in the winter when I first moved in, and no a.c. in the hot, humid summer toward the end of which I moved out. The floor was covered with old, stained carpet samples which had been taped together. There were cracks and holes in the wooden walls which separated my apartment from a storage area in the basement. And there were plenty of cockroaches, more than enough really. In the summer, tiny spiders kept building webs that hung down from the low ceiling to about head level. Clean them up, and a day or two later they would be back. Webs hung from the ceiling all over the room. Anyway, as I was moving out, another tenant who was moving out of an apartment on another floor asked me if I'd seen the ghosts. "What ghosts?" I said. He was surprised I hadn't heard about them. There were lots of stories about the place, he said. In the 1930s a man who lived in the house had murdered his two daughters in the basement...right in the area where the bathroom of my apartment was. He said the ghost stories were mostly about the basement, and that people had claimed to feel the presence of an evil spirit down there. Being the sort of person who mostly flees from small talk, or from any kind of talk really, I had somehow managed to live there for six months without hearing about the ghosts. I had to disappoint the guy by telling him I hadn't experienced anything supernatural down there at all. The horribleness of the place was all natural. I would never have guessed that some murders had happened in that space half a century before.

So that's my (non-)ghost story. Having lived unknowingly in a supposedly haunted place with an evil spirit, and having sensed nothing supernatural (only the awfulness of the natural, as always), I wonder how much these phenomena have to do with suggestibility, emotion, and imagination. If I had heard about the ghosts while I still lived there, would I have experienced the supposed haunting myself? Probably not, but I think the likelihood would have increased.

[Karnos]

There’s a slightly supernatural tradition that used to run in both my father and my mother's families until stupid little tragedies made the family break contact. My father used to tell stories about his grandmother's sister, a woman with the most disturbing blue eyes you'd ever see, who apparently was in contact with the spirit world and could even break glass cups by just concentrating long enough. One of my mother's aunts spent some time with gypsies and natives and claimed to have learned how to "clean" tainted spirits. I still have memories of my desperate, gullible aunts taking their bratty children to her house and have them cleansed, for surely it was pixies or evil spirits the ones responsible for their antisocial or shy behavior. As Christmas approached, my mother's family would traditionally stay until the long hours of the night telling ghost stories around the dinner table until my grandfather would break it with his skepticism, of which I inherited a not so cynical version of. This background was fertile enough to infuse an interest in the weird at an early age and I blame it more so than my antisocial behavior latter in my life as the prime source for my interest in weird and supernatural fiction.

I remember when I was a kid, probably around 9 or 10 years old, rumors started to spread around the school that there was a ghost living in a small, old, concrete room abandoned in the farthest corner of the school yard. Every one of us believed it was a shack for the maintenance people to store their brooms, mops and other cleaning equipment, but rumors about a strange presence spread far and wide when one of the other kids saw the maintenance people storing their things in another location. We were just kids in an all boys catholic school with a rather unorthodox way of teaching where both scientific and religious studies were taught under the same rigor, so there was a curious mix of scientific inquiry and metaphysical wonder hanging over the heads of us the small curious lot, the freaks, of the school.

For days we tried to break into the room, for we reasoned that it was ridiculous for a “supernatural” presence to be active only during the nights, but the door was firmly shut. We could hear, -or so we thought-, sounds coming from the other way and if we stared through small holes in the walls, we could see rapid movement. Of course, we were all just curious kids with an overactive imagination so our dreams ran wild. Curiosity got the best out of us one day and we pretty much decided to somehow blow the door open and put an end to the mystery, but our brilliant infantile plan did not go as far before one of the maintenance people caught us trying to open the door with a steel rod and had us reported to the highest authorities in school.

We were all assembled on the principal’s office, where she ranted for thirty minutes over discipline and respect for private property and she wouldn’t take any of our ghost story into account. “How could there be a ghost here if this ground is holy? The archbishop himself carried out the rites years ago” she said, somehow hinting simultaneously at the monetary and political influence our school used to have in the old days. Of course we did not have an answer for her question and one disciplinary report latter and it was the end of it. I did not sleep that night.

Days went by and our interest in the lonely ghost fleeted away, in part due to our prohibition to get anywhere close to the old concrete room, in part to UFOs, aliens, parallel dimensions, cryptids and other more physical manifestations of the paranormal taking our attention. People down in Mexico City were reporting strange things flying in the skies and reporters were flooding the news with videos of lights and silver objects and we kids in the dry, mountainous north needed something modern to believe in. The early 90s fascination with UFOs was just starting.

A little more than a year ago, before coming to Europe, I went to my old school, in part for memories’ sake, in part because I needed some papers from a government office just besides it. I was surprised to see the old concrete room gone, a small vineyard growing in its place. I tried to inquire about the old room, but of course no one of the people working there knew anything about it, all the grownups from my childhood having either died or moved away, the room gone with them too. I still wonder about what was inside that god damn, stupid room that got us into so much trouble, because there was definitely something inside, for we could hear the noises made by something… these days it is my personal belief that maintenance probably kept a deformed, retarded, dog inside, but of course I can’t prove a thing.

[Russell Nash]

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

I wonder how much these phenomena have to do with suggestibility, emotion, and imagination.

It is reported that just minutes before dying one experiences absolute peace (not always the case, I know). Scientists refer to this fact by saying that when dying our brain flood us with natural substances that allow us to die in peace, more or less this is the scientific thought. However, since a person dies after feeling that, how is it transmitted from generation to generation by evolution? When the person is dead there is no genetic transmission of any kind. How is that the new generation will feel more or less the same? When was this knowledge, the mechanism of this process learned by blind evolution (trial and error)? How could we have trial and error is there is no way to transmit the information genetically to the new generation?

Second, why is it that when a person dies (according to links I posted) there is still consciousness even after 20 minutes that the person died? Of course, more experiments are required to verify or refute it, but how could we have consciousness when neurons didn't get oxygen form 20 minutes? Wasn't it consciousness generated by neurons...? Well, almost all neurons are dead after 20 minutes, what happens then? What generates this conscious activity when neurons are already long dead? And if we follow the scientific speculation on this issue, they talk about neural discharge. But if they knew about this effect, why is it that no scientist predicted it before? Wasn't it known before? No.

If consciousness is not generated by our brains, then our brains just interact with it, like our radios interact with electromagnetic waves. It may be that when a new species developed a neural network by evolution, this is capable of interacting with consciousness, and this interaction is what we call being here. If this is the case, when a person dies, there is just a disconnection between brain and consciousness. Consciousness is still alive but not possible to reconnect or interact through neural networks with our world as we see it. Some people may still have a rare capacity of interacting with this already dead consciousness through an active brain, mediums is the word. The fact that a ghost should appear in an old house, or a brand new place, makes no sense to me. It this is the case, consciousness independent of brain activity then it would be a matter of interacting with it. Like when one talks on the phone and can hear someone else talking somewhere far away (cross-talking) . Our brains are maybe capable of listening to other conscious activity. I know that this sound pure speculation but no more than dark matter only existing at the border of galaxies, in halos. How can I see a ghost? Well, you need to be synchronized to the ghost conscious activity, which is hard to believe. But also strange matter never interacting with matter and only located at the border of far away places is hard to swallow.

Finally, that random numbers are being influenced by world events is easy to prove or refute. Very easy indeed. TLO may add a random number generator on this website, produce a number every second, add all the numbers, and by the end of the day, calculate an average. If everyday this calculated average is more or less zero, then the Global Consciousness Project would be falsified. So, either this people are counting on our ignorance, that we don't know how to verify it, or it is true. See that scientists do not say that they invent the samples but that they use the samples incorrectly.

After the 12 billion dollar failure finding the Higgs boson, I can believe anything, even in unicorns, ghosts, or the tooth fairy.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

It is reported that just minutes before dying one experiences absolute peace (not always the case, I know). Scientists refer to this fact by saying that when dying our brain flood us with natural substances that allow us to die in peace, more or less this is the scientific thought. However, since a person dies after feeling that, how is it transmitted from generation to generation by evolution? When the person is dead there is no genetic transmission of any kind. How is that the new generation will feel more or less the same? When was this knowledge, the mechanism of this process learned by blind evolution (trial and error)? How could we have trial and error is there is no way to transmit the information genetically to the new generation?

My (completely amateurish) understanding is that not all traits of an organism are directly selected for by reproductive success, i.e. not all traits could be considered adaptive. Some are just byproducts of other traits that were adaptive, at least at one time. Stephen Jay Gould called these spandrels. How this might relate specifically to your question about biochemically peaceful death, I don't know (haven't even thought about it), but just thought I'd mention that evolutionary theory doesn't claim that all characteristics of an organism have been directly selected for.

Concerning some of your other questions, well . . . I'm far from being an apologist for overweening scientism, and I take seriously the notion that not all things can be discovered by scientific methods, even in principle, much less in practice. But I'm not persuaded by argumentative ploys that depend so much on supposedly unanswerable challenges, demands for sudden answers, jumping to drastic alternate conclusions as if that's what we must do, etc.

[Karnos]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

If consciousness is not generated by our brains, then our brains just interact with it, like our radios interact with electromagnetic waves. It may be that when a new species developed a neural network by evolution, this is capable of interacting with consciousness, and this interaction is what we call being here. If this is the case, when a person dies, there is just a disconnection between brain and consciousness. Consciousness is still alive but not possible to reconnect or interact through neural networks with our world as we see it. Some people may still have a rare capacity of interacting with this already dead consciousness through an active brain, mediums is the word. The fact that a ghost should appear in an old house, or a brand new place, makes no sense to me. It this is the case, consciousness independent of brain activity then it would be a matter of interacting with it. Like when one talks on the phone and can hear someone else talking somewhere far away (cross-talking) . Our brains are maybe capable of listening to other conscious activity. I know that this sound pure speculation but no more than dark matter only existing at the border of galaxies, in halos. How can I see a ghost? Well, you need to be synchronized to the ghost conscious activity, which is hard to believe. But also strange matter never interacting with matter and only located at the border of far away places is hard to swallow.

This somehow reminds me of the metaphysics involved in Mark's "The Face of Twilight". I like your way of thinking about this, I actually do see it as a possibility.

However, I don't think we should jump at conclusions so fast. The LHC may not have found the Higgs boson (MAY, there's still not conclusive proof either way) but that does not mean it may not eventually discover something else. The cosmic background radiation, which was the decisive proof for the Big Bang model, was discovered by accident by an instrument designed for something completely unrelated. Many discoveries that revolutionize either our world or the understanding of it, have come by accident.

The brain liberating chemicals to easy transition into death, I don't see much mystery there. Our bodies have billions of pre-human evolutionary years behind, I don't see it impossible or mysterious for an organism well tuned into survival to "know" it should release certain chemicals to ease the pain. Endorphins are naturally released by the body under many different circumstances, one of them being as pain relievers. For all we know, death might be a very painful experience that triggers pain sectors well known by the brain, releasing chemicals to make the transition into the great Beyond easier on the dying.

I'm interested in what you say about consciousness existing even twenty minutes after clinical death, however what about consciousness past that threshold? Maybe our synaptic connections are made to last between 20 and 30 minutes, as a "back-up" plan just in case the dying body is kicked back into action...? When we find something that questions the current understand it, we shouldn't just ditch current knowledge right away, but rework it around what we have found. That's the way we have come around the modern technological world we live in, for better or for worse.

[Robin Davies]

[QUOTE=Russell Nash;70292]

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

After the 12 billion dollar failure finding the Higgs boson, I can believe anything, even in unicorns, ghosts, or the tooth fairy.

Why?

[gveranon]

[QUOTE=Robin Davies;70332]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon After the 12 billion dollar failure finding the Higgs boson, I can believe anything, even in unicorns, ghosts, or the tooth fairy. Why?

Er, looks like there was a problem with the nested quoting. I didn't say that.