Overdose said:
This is what kind of baffled me, you were asking me a question 'how might we distinguish real ghosts from hallucinations' (in your original reponse to me) that you already answered yourself earlier in the thread as you have drawn attention to with that quote.
To me this comes across as confusion of one's own stance on the subject, but that's just my opinion of course.
There is no confusion on my part. More than one person reporting the same apparition at the same place isn't proof of anything in particular without a more detailed investigation. It is far less likely, however, to be "mere" hallucination since no two disconnected people are likely to have the same hallucination except by sheer coincidence. If I were collecting anecdotes I would much rather talk to people involved in a situation like this, than anyone who saw something when completely uncorroborated by someone else.
The trouble is people will frequently say 'more investigation and attention is needed here' the problem being that that very rarely happens.
I am not of the opinion more attention is "needed" at all. I am saying that if someone were already inclined that the best, most potentially fruitful, stories to look into would be multiple witnesses of the very same apparition.
What I think is "needed" is for ghost believers to learn much, much more about hallucinations. I've had them myself and can tell you: seeing should not be believing.
No from what i understand people have seen it in separate rooms, it looks like an old women, and by brother has seen it, but tends to get abit cagey when you bring it up since he 'doesnt believe in ghosts' officially.
Separate rooms is more convincing. It lessens the possibility that everyone is seeing the same freak illusion caused by some intricate play of light in a single location, or something along those lines.
You seem to be saying in this paragraph and earlier in the thread 'we can't distinguish a ghost from a hallucination, but sometimes in special cases we can' clearly this doesn't make sense, could you either set me right or clarify your position?
No, I never said in some special cases we can. Not by anecdote over the internet. In the case of multiple unrelated witnesses the chance of it being hallucination starts to drop dramatically, provided it turns out they did all see exactly the same thing.
In two haunted house cases I've heard about, the famous
Amityville Horror, and another much less well known one I saw featured on a TV program a few years back, it turns out that while everyone in these families all saw and heard frightening, mysterious things, each separate family member saw and heard separate things. No two reported seeing or hearing the same thing even when they were seeing things at the same time.
Why aren't all the family members seeing the same ghostly apparitions, etc? The obvious explanation is that it's because they are all hallucinating. Why? Because it started with some core family member upon whom all the others rely for their sense of stability. If Dad or Mom starts to break down and hallucinate, everyone else will follow suit by sympathetic reaction. Some families are, indeed, that close, and that interdependent.
Well evidence is commonly perceived to be something that compells and makes a case for something, just because a piece of evidence isn't direct proof of something doesn't therefore mean it is not evidence.
I understand this distinction, and stories aren't evidence, they are eyewitness testimony. In other words, they are the report of someone's first hand experience, not something you or I can physically examine. Evidence for ghosts might consist of a piece of ectoplasm left by the ghost that you or I could examine and test, in the way that alleged bigfoot hair is presented from time to time for testing.
At the end of the day we're both here to poke holes in each other's belief systems and come up with some new ideas in between, and so far i personally think we're both doing that pretty well.
Well, I' not out to poke holes in anyone's belief system as some kind of pastime or chess-like intellectual excercize, if that's what you're suggesting.
In the case of ghosts, as with a few other "paranormal" subjects, it's clear that the average person is completely uninformed about any possible neurological explanation. They never even think along these lines in trying to sort the experience out. The result is that just about all ghost reports are taken at face value. Taken together, they have a sort of avalanche effect that persuades because of the huge number of stories there are out there. In fact though, all individual visual sightings of ghosts are all perfectly consistent with what you'd expect to find in the hallucinations of simple-partial seizures, fatigue hallucinations, auto-suggestive hallucinations, and hallucinations from serious organic brain problems like Multiple Sclerosis or brain tumors.
I also hope I made my point about the assumption that, even within the paranormal range of explanations, the fact that everyone jumps to the conclusion that "ghosts" are the spirits of dead people makes the issue suspect.
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