The origins of Big Foot
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| If something affects the real world then it must be objectively measurable, because it affects the real world. If it's not measurable then it has no effect on the real world, and so it doesn't exist. |
ok then - point taken - now I understand your meaning of something existing requiring it to be real in the first place and ascribe the attributes of real to be measurable by science - I can't argue with this.
So, I perfectly understand your reasoning that ghosts do not exist because they are not real (or more precisely fall out of the range our science is qualified to assert itself currently at).
But then to ascribe to the phenomena (I would imagine that we not debating whether the events surrounding the phenomena exists) that most people would deem to be ghosts to rather some alien encounter would seem anti Occam's Razor.
Somehow for me it seems more of a simpler solution to deem that the events surrounding highway Sheila for example to be attributed to the "ghost" of this individual than the "scientific experiments" of aliens.
Well, think about it. My exact proposed explanation was "aliens installed nanobots into my brain and are beaming false perceptions into it from their base on the dark side of the moon". What does this explanation assume?
1. Aliens exist and are nearby (in universal terms).
2. The brain is the center of perception, and doing physical things to it can affect perception.
3. Nanometer-scale robots exist, and they can do physical things to the brain.
4. The moon has a dark (well, far) side.
5. Aliens built and have their base there, presumably without being detected, and can beam instructions to their robots from it.
6. The aliens would have some motivation to do this.
Assumptions #2, #3, and #4 are, I would think, uncontroversial to some extent. We don't yet have nanobots, but they're not beyond the realm of possibility. We do have some machines with nano-scale features, in the form of microprocessors. Really, the explanation hinges around assumption #1. We have no real evidence of alien life, but we do know that life in the universe is possible. If you know it arose once, it's a bigger assumption that it has arisen exactly once, than that it's possible it arose more than once. If you saw something as outlandish as what I proposed, you would at least need to seriously consider it after discarding all simpler explanations.
If you already assume that aliens are around, #3 and #5 are much lesser assumptions. Conquering interstellar travel is much more difficult than either nanotechnology or space construction. If they're from within the solar system it's more of a gray area, but it's safe to assume that if we ever meet aliens they'll be from a different system; other solar planets are unlike to be able to harbor life, at least during the current phase of the sun's life cycle. As for #6, well, they're aliens. Who knows what motivations they have to do they things they do.
None of these assumptions require us to rethink what we know about the world. Interstellar travel is probably the hardest assumption, but it's not necessarily a physically impossible problem.
On the other hand, to assume it's ghosts at the very least requires us to rethink what brains are. If anything of a person can naturally continue existing in any form after the brain is destroyed, suddenly the brain is no longer the seat of consciousness, but rather some kind consciousness receptor. Then you have to wonder, well, what are ghosts even made of? How come they have never been unambiguously detected? That is, in a situation where something else couldn't possibly be mistaken for one. The particle-wave dual nature of light, as strange and unintuitive as it is, is backed by very unambiguous evidence. If I'm to rebuild my understanding of the universe (and I believe I would need to, to accept the existence of ghosts), I would expect nothing short of that much detail in the description of what ghosts are.
Ghosts are only the simpler assumption if you already have a bunch of implicit assumptions.
1. Aliens exist and are nearby (in universal terms).
2. The brain is the center of perception, and doing physical things to it can affect perception.
3. Nanometer-scale robots exist, and they can do physical things to the brain.
4. The moon has a dark (well, far) side.
5. Aliens built and have their base there, presumably without being detected, and can beam instructions to their robots from it.
6. The aliens would have some motivation to do this.
Assumptions #2, #3, and #4 are, I would think, uncontroversial to some extent. We don't yet have nanobots, but they're not beyond the realm of possibility. We do have some machines with nano-scale features, in the form of microprocessors. Really, the explanation hinges around assumption #1. We have no real evidence of alien life, but we do know that life in the universe is possible. If you know it arose once, it's a bigger assumption that it has arisen exactly once, than that it's possible it arose more than once. If you saw something as outlandish as what I proposed, you would at least need to seriously consider it after discarding all simpler explanations.
If you already assume that aliens are around, #3 and #5 are much lesser assumptions. Conquering interstellar travel is much more difficult than either nanotechnology or space construction. If they're from within the solar system it's more of a gray area, but it's safe to assume that if we ever meet aliens they'll be from a different system; other solar planets are unlike to be able to harbor life, at least during the current phase of the sun's life cycle. As for #6, well, they're aliens. Who knows what motivations they have to do they things they do.
None of these assumptions require us to rethink what we know about the world. Interstellar travel is probably the hardest assumption, but it's not necessarily a physically impossible problem.
On the other hand, to assume it's ghosts at the very least requires us to rethink what brains are. If anything of a person can naturally continue existing in any form after the brain is destroyed, suddenly the brain is no longer the seat of consciousness, but rather some kind consciousness receptor. Then you have to wonder, well, what are ghosts even made of? How come they have never been unambiguously detected? That is, in a situation where something else couldn't possibly be mistaken for one. The particle-wave dual nature of light, as strange and unintuitive as it is, is backed by very unambiguous evidence. If I'm to rebuild my understanding of the universe (and I believe I would need to, to accept the existence of ghosts), I would expect nothing short of that much detail in the description of what ghosts are.
Ghosts are only the simpler assumption if you already have a bunch of implicit assumptions.
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| to assume it's ghosts at the very least requires us to rethink what brains are. If anything of a person can naturally continue existing in any form after the brain is destroyed, suddenly the brain is no longer the seat of consciousness, but rather some kind consciousness receptor. |
From my understanding, it is claimed that we still know very little about how the brain actually creates / processes thoughts. Thus to assume that once the brain is gone, then everything relating to that organ ceases to exist is actually an oversimplification of processes we don't fully understand.
Take for instance a fire that you build. Once that fire is gone a stone age man might claim that it is all gone whereas a scientist would claim that residual energy of that fire still exists (in the form of heat, infrared radiation, etc ...)
Furthermore, these "ghost" encounters do not seem to be constrained to merely nanobots in a person head especially when we have tons of footage of cameras recording something that falls out of the realm, we consider reality/normal.
Your list of points made above just seem like too many moving parts to be an elegant simplest solution, and when considering the point regarding actual camera footage then your solution will become even convoluted to fit the scene.
Have you never personally had the feeling of the presence of a dead ancestor around you?
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| Thus to assume that once the brain is gone, then everything relating to that organ ceases to exist is actually an oversimplification of processes we don't fully understand. |
| Take for instance a fire that you build. Once that fire is gone a stone age man might claim that it is all gone whereas a scientist would claim that residual energy of that fire still exists (in the form of heat, infrared radiation, etc ...) |
If you want to make a more apt analogy, imagine you're running a prime search program on your computer. After some time, the computer has warmed the room up somewhat. You then turn the computer off and format the hard drive. Does the prime searcher still exist in the waste heat in the room?
| we have tons of footage of cameras recording something that falls out of the realm, we consider reality/normal. |
| Have you never personally had the feeling of the presence of a dead ancestor around you? |
Have you ever felt a globunor rubbing itself against your sixth-dimensional protrusions?
| There is no unambiguous, legitimate recordings of ghosts. |
Thats beside the point - the point is that those videos / images recorded are most definitely not images that exist only in one's brain resulting from the beamed images/streams from aliens.
Clearly if aliens beamed things into your head they should only exist there and not be picked up by conventional cameras /recording devices.
This would make your explanation for these recordings invalid. As such you would have to come up with some other theory to fit these scenarios. This is somewhat like the flat earthers I've come across - they have many disparate theories to avoid the heliocentric model which actually fits all the scenarios we observe far better than the arguments they pose.
Um... No, it's not beside the point, because those images are not of ghosts in any way. They're of things that can be mistaken for ghosts, or of things that some people want to pass off as ghosts. There's no need to resort to nanomachines in brains as an explanation, because there's a much simpler explanation: it's something mundane being misidentified, or it's a hoax.
I'll reiterate my scenario: if I personally held a conversation with a translucent intangible person, I would sooner think aliens installed nanobots into my brain and are beaming false perceptions into it from their base on the dark side of the moon thank think I was talking to a ghost. You can't take the explanation out of its original context and apply it to a completely different phenomenon to use it to accuse me of some kind of double standard.
If, for example, hundreds of people had independent recordings of a single ghost sighting in broad daylight that lasted for several minutes, obviously nanobots in brains would not work as an explanation. It still doesn't mean it would have to be a ghost and not some kind of technological trickery, though. We would need to completely rule that out as a possibility first. It's unclear to me how to do that, though.
Here's the thing. If everyone saw something they couldn't explain and said "it's a ghost" as an explanation, that wouldn't actually explain anything, because we don't know what ghosts are, because they've never been observed before and they've never been studied. Imagine anything else that you don't know what it is, replace "ghost" with it, and see if it works equally well as an explanation. "It's god starting to wake up from his dream that is reality and reality tearing at its seams." "It's the ear-farts of tetracorns from beyond the stars." "It's the devil trying to lead people astray for his mahjong team." Why are any of these worse explanations than "it's a ghost"?
I'll reiterate my scenario: if I personally held a conversation with a translucent intangible person, I would sooner think aliens installed nanobots into my brain and are beaming false perceptions into it from their base on the dark side of the moon thank think I was talking to a ghost. You can't take the explanation out of its original context and apply it to a completely different phenomenon to use it to accuse me of some kind of double standard.
If, for example, hundreds of people had independent recordings of a single ghost sighting in broad daylight that lasted for several minutes, obviously nanobots in brains would not work as an explanation. It still doesn't mean it would have to be a ghost and not some kind of technological trickery, though. We would need to completely rule that out as a possibility first. It's unclear to me how to do that, though.
Here's the thing. If everyone saw something they couldn't explain and said "it's a ghost" as an explanation, that wouldn't actually explain anything, because we don't know what ghosts are, because they've never been observed before and they've never been studied. Imagine anything else that you don't know what it is, replace "ghost" with it, and see if it works equally well as an explanation. "It's god starting to wake up from his dream that is reality and reality tearing at its seams." "It's the ear-farts of tetracorns from beyond the stars." "It's the devil trying to lead people astray for his mahjong team." Why are any of these worse explanations than "it's a ghost"?
A bit off-topic but this discussion of ghosts reminded me of this recent xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/2828/
Since OP has abandoned this thread, I may as well use it to convey a little reflection.
I was listening to a video about the Mandela effect and wondering about why it is that Occam's razor is a useful tool. I came to think that in the same way that there are more n+1-character strings than n-character strings, there are more n+1-assumption explanations than n-assumption explanations. Also, (at least) generally the more assumptions an explanation makes, the greater its explanatory power; the more a candidate explanation assumes, the more phenomena it's able to explain. And that implies the opposite is also true: the more assumptions you're willing to make, the more candidate explanations are available to you that you're therefore forced to separate into valid and invalid.
If you don't first eliminate the simplest explanations and instead prefer a complex one, then you betray your bias in choosing that particular one over the myriad other ones with equal explanatory power, not to mention the infinitely-many ones with greater explanatory power. Why that one in particular instead of all the other ones?
I was listening to a video about the Mandela effect and wondering about why it is that Occam's razor is a useful tool. I came to think that in the same way that there are more n+1-character strings than n-character strings, there are more n+1-assumption explanations than n-assumption explanations. Also, (at least) generally the more assumptions an explanation makes, the greater its explanatory power; the more a candidate explanation assumes, the more phenomena it's able to explain. And that implies the opposite is also true: the more assumptions you're willing to make, the more candidate explanations are available to you that you're therefore forced to separate into valid and invalid.
If you don't first eliminate the simplest explanations and instead prefer a complex one, then you betray your bias in choosing that particular one over the myriad other ones with equal explanatory power, not to mention the infinitely-many ones with greater explanatory power. Why that one in particular instead of all the other ones?
| Since OP has abandoned this thread |
That happens a lot with occasional posters. They drop their query or conjecture and go elsewhere when others express differing views and opinions.
And I don't see someone not replying in a couple of weeks as abandonment, they might actually have a life in the meat world. *GASP!*
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