One of the definitions of "physical" in the American Heritage Dictionary is:

Of or relating to matter and energy or the sciences dealing with them, especially physics.

An utter lack of evidence thus far

Religion tends to justify itself in the face of absolutely no evidence with "proof denies faith." It's a garbage argument, but it's accepted.

Ghosts don't have any similar excuse to fall back on when we fail to see any credible evidence whatsoever.

Is the soul a thing? Does consciousness exist as more than the sum of the electrical network of the brain? Who am "I"? These are all interesting and probably unanswerable philosophical questions. "Do ghosts exist" though, is a pretty straightforward no.

There's nothing to disprove ghosts because there's no real definition of what a ghost is.

If someone gives me a real unambiguous agreed upon definition of what a ghost is, I'll explain why we know they don't exist.

I can also admit that there could be unicorns on Pluto, because it's nigh impossible to prove a negative.

Debunking: https://psychologycorner.com/skeptics-review-surviving-death-2021-netflix-original-series-movie-analysis/

Aw man. The northern tip of Australia has the cleanest air in the entire world. That data is from pre-y2k

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.

What was it that convinced you?

Not sure about that, you might be thinking of the Southern tip. Indonesia often conducts burn offs with a lot of wind blowing smoke over Australia as well as cultural burning conducted by the indigenous in the region. I remember seeing the haze growing up and walking through the burnt country at the start of the dry.

and I'm sure you're the one who is going to find the evidence.

it is not as though humanity hasn't been looking for evidence of the supernatural since... well... probably before hommo sapiens were a thing...

I'm not really sure why you chose to reply to me, as opposed to anyone else who replied on this thread. You can believe whatever you want.

There's no evidence that ghosts exist. Yes, there are many unexplained things. Yes, existence of ghosts is not impossible. But without evidence, it's impossible to argue for something.

I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't believe in it. I'm just going to tell you that I won't.

Their point is that one could come up with a billion hypotheticals for what might theoretically exist, because we cannot disprove it. If we spent as much time humming and hawing whether each one actually does exist as we do for ghosts, souls, gods, Big Foot etc., then you won't be doing anything else in life.
That's why it's a typical position to just say that they don't exist until proven otherwise.

Or in the more general sense, this is Occam's Razor: If there's multiple possible explanations for something, then one should assume the simplest explanation until proven otherwise.
And if you hear a door slamming shut in your house, then wind is a much simpler explanation than ghosts.

chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap

This is absolutely something you could scientifically test.

The scientific method is building up knowledge by noticing a pattern, coming up with an explanation for that pattern, then thinking what further effects that explanation would imply, and looking for those effects.

So when someone claims something is “outside the realm of science”, how could that be?

Often it’s either because it isn’t reproducible (it’s a miracle that supposedly happened once and never will happen again) or it doesn’t affect anything.

If it isn’t reproducible, it’s hard to believe that it happened that way. Perhaps you are missing some details?

If it doesn’t affect anything, why care?

For the ghost stuff … the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane.

I’ve heard of many, many attempts to scientifically prove supernatural effects and none that showed a result. Most ghost stories I’ve heard have other more reasonable explanations if you think about it. Memory tends to be unreliable so sometimes details may be added or changed to fit the expected explanation, even if the person doesn’t intend to be misleading. Of course, sometimes people do exaggerate or make things up deliberately.

Nevertheless, if you have some decent examples of actual evidence of ghosts, I’m genuinely curious.

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 = mv^2^, 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'm always surprised to hear people believe in ghosts, not because I consider it particularly ridiculous, but rather because ghosts have no relevance in my life. I don't need them to exist to explain what's happening around me.

Every few years or so, I might hear a noise where I don't have an explanation, but that always feels adequately explained by me not knowing things. I'm constantly surrounded by living beings as well as materials that are subject to gravity, temperature, humidity etc.. Occasionally, they'll make noises quite naturally.

imo it's just an aspect of the fear of death, some believe in ghosts because it gives them hope there's any sort of afterlife

I have both feet planted firmly in the real world but I have experienced three or four undeniably supernatural things in my life and yeah it does happen sometimes.

not sure about your local critters, but red foxes also have vocalizations that scare people sometimes

e: if there are lynxes around then maybe foxes aren't, because these two compete heavily

Aaah the plot thickens

I've got some unexplained phenomena that happen from time to time at my lab (workplace). Valves closing for no reason, oddly specific equipment failures, that kind of thing. I don't believe it's ghosts, but also I genuinely can't think of any reason for why those kinds of things could happen. I just say that it's ghosts anyways because it's fun.

In any case, my belief is that out of all supernatural phenomena to possibly believe in, ghosts are the least horrible thing to believe in, so anyone who believes in ghosts gets a pass from me

Lmao what evidence?
Everybody has a phone nowadays, how come there is no proof?

If ghosts are dead people, with the passing of time there should be more ghosts and be easier to spot.

If ghosts are from people who died violent deaths or whatever, how come nobody sees them in places such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima etc.?

More simply: if ghosts existed there would be many people who have seen them. How come there's a lot of people who believe in ghosts but almost nobody who has seen them (allegedly)? It's the classic "I want to believe"

OP's friend is here, we can talk to them.

The difference is that unicorns on Pluto is something you just made up right now as a smug dismissal of a reasonable stance.

Ghosts, on the other hand, are our attempt to explain an unexplainable phenomenon that tens of millions of people have personally experienced here on Earth. Outright dismissing the idea that there's zero chance something weird is going on isn't that far from claiming absolute certainty that ghosts are real.

A few hundred years ago you'd have been thrown into an insane asylum for insisting there are these tiny invisible living beings all around us - and that it would be smart for surgeons to wash their tools before sticking them inside another person.

It terrifies me sometimes (recently had a dream about ghosts and I was so wondering in the dream if I've lost my mind). My partner was scratched by a misogynistic ghost during a ghost tour and we recorded audio and after they said "I'm scared" you can hear laughter. That and Chris Watts case has kept me scared some nights driving home thinking of the afterlife. https://youtu.be/5To4nn4ZVc4

IMHO "ghosts" is just an older word vor virus.

People in earlier times knew that some diseases jumped around from person to person and that that could be dangerous, but didn't have a proper explanation for it.

So they assumed that there must be something invisible in the air that creates the kind of spooky effect that people fall ill sometimes without being touched or physically hit in any way. Kinda spooky, if you think about it and only know about mechanics, but not about cellular biology.

Many animals do, yes. Even mice whose sole offense is skittering about.

This was fun to read

Here I made a meme you can send him back

https://imgflip.com/i/al4sce

It doesn't need to be supernatural though - just something we don't yet understand. Aliens aren't supernatural - they're just life from a different planet. It's not just lack of evidence why I don't believe in God. The whole concept collapses under scrutiny.

Aliens at least seem like something that could conceivably be real. We already know there's life in the universe. Claiming we're alone is already a kind of a crazy position in itself.

You could have said “souls” instead, because that’s just another word for consciousness.

I'd refine that a bit. By "soul" most people are referring to a perceived "center" of consciousness where the experiencer is located. Things happen in consciousness, but the "soul" or "self" is what we think those things are happening to.

I once saw something I can't explain. Had I been alone, I would've just told myself I was imagining things, but the fact that right after I saw it my friend goes: "Did you fucking see that?!" convinced me there really was something there.

We went back immediately and it was gone - despite this happening in the middle of an open field with nowhere for it to disappear to.
Do I think it was a ghost? No, it was most likely a human. But it was an unexplainable, genuinely weird event. Having experienced something like that makes me a lot more sympathetic toward other people who claim to have seen similar things. This wasn't a floorboard creaking and my mind filling in the blanks. I absolutely saw a figure.

Technically, if he is convinced then it's convincing evidence. The fact that you and I are not convinced is a separate matter.

What is a reasonable person?

A 100% rational person? Probably not.
A person who was smart enough to do well in school and keep a well paying job? Yes.

It’s interesting how many people in this thread seem almost angry at the possibility that someone believes in ghosts.

remind me... was it caltech or MIT that had an infamous light switch that, was hooked up to nothing but could shut down servers?

You are confusing Thought Experiments with daydreaming.

Maybe not genuinely, but i think im a reasonable person and I have a slot in my head for ghosts. I dont truly believe in them but have seen and experienced some weird stuff that I cant explain, and since I cant recreate the weirdness to test out a bunch of different things until they can be explained, "a ghost did it" is a convenient box to put them in.

I have a similar mental box for aliens in the sky.

While we're here, I just witnessed a Crow trying to talk like a parrot. Shits getting weird

I mean, that's a pretty horrible case, but that video is a bit dumb.

It doesn't show anything, really. There's a fetus linked to a nuclear bomb and a skull arristically placed with some liquid around it people interpret to be oil because of the implication. You literally see such scenes all the time. It's a bit of a coincidence that it was shown then, but still.

So what, do you think ghosts learned to video edit and animate scenes and fed it to some broadcasting network?

I would like to know what that footage is from, actually.

If ghosts are dead people, with the passing of time there should be more ghosts and be easier to spot.

One estimate I can see of the total cumulative human population is about 100 billion people, if there was just a 1% chance of becoming a ghost when you die there should still be about a billion of them on Earth currently.

Imagine if 1 in 9 people on Earth was actually a ghost.

Even within the perspective of religious philosophy, the existence of ghosts in the sense of a spirit that stays on Earth and causes noticeable effects is difficult. Mainly- ghosts would not be made of matter, but could interact with matter. Within the realm of religious philosophy there are all sorts of explanations for the "mundane" version of this question of how a spirit attaches itself to the matter of the body in the first place, but all of those explanations kind of go out the window when the spirit sticks around and starts interacting with other matter. If ghosts only appear in sensory visions and do not truly interact with matter (I believe this was the view of Aquinas), then you have a major problem in proof and then ghosts effectively do not exist for practical purposes. The Catholic Church believes that the dead can appear to the living in visions but takes no stance on physical manifestations.

Within science, of course, there has never been a scientific observation of any supernatural being such as a ghost or effects it might have. But that doesn't disprove the idea of purely spiritual apparitions. Then again, it also doesn't disprove that Zorlon the Gorilla God appeared to me in a dream either. I think we can pretty conclusively say that you can live your life under the assumption that ghosts don't exist and be completely 100% fine.

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 so, why not?

This seems to be a phenomenon I'm coming across increasingly frequently in real life. People outraged about "how dare you think that....".

This has always been quite common online, but I never saw this much IRL. Sometimes I have to shut down a conversation with someone because they're getting too worked up to talk about the issue.

I'd avoid planetary alignments, pixies. maybe starwberry milkshakes, but those are hard to pass up. especially the malted ones.

None of what you've said is n this thread makes any logical sense...

Which would be fine cuz it's about ghosts, but you keep acting like physics backs up your wild statements and made up vocabulary...

Except that’s not what we mean when we talk about ghosts. Ghosts are meant to be actual beings with an actual existence, if very different from living beings.

The concept of ghosts exist (as does for all things for which we have words). Some people do believe ghosts exists, and some might have seen ghosts (just like someone actually sees a hallucination). All this doesn’t mean ghosts exist, or else the actual concept of non-existence doesn’t exist - which makes the fallacy evident: if we are to consider that all concepts actually exist (further than just an idea), non-existence has to exist.

Ghost sharks, they could have been anywhere when they were alive.