Overdose said:
They can't be, or rather or so unlikely to be (hallucinations) that i see very good reason to purpuse other answers. I've gone into detail in previous posts about specific cases, namely those where separate people see the same ghost in the same house, offen without ever knowing or having been in contact with the person who witnessed the ghost before them.
This seems cut and dried on the surface, but I have never looked into a brief report like this without finding that it is never quite accurate. Sometimes it turns out one person saw a "figure", another, a "man" another, a "glowing orb" and another, "a man dressed in 17th century clothing, holding a book." In other words, the supposed separate reports of the same ghost turn out to be actually quite different from each other.
This happens all the time in reports of haunted Hotels where it is rumored that many different guests see the same ghost on different occasions. It turns out the teller of the story has called many different apparitions "the same ghost".
Again i agree, but what you are actually doing in practice is offering it up
as the only explanation, even when the explanation is being stretched to its seams just to fit at times.
I think it just seems like a stretch to you because you are sure people can tell the difference between hallucination and fact. They often can't.
How big was the disparity between what they saw in these cases?
Much closer than possible by chance but too different to say it was the same thing.
Youre trying to compare apples and oranges, there's a distinct difference between getting someone to to take part in something weird and agaisnt their best interests and a mutal group hallucination.
No, it's basically the same dynamic: the most influential person in a group steers the course of the others beliefs, by pressure or by example:
folie Ã* deux: Definition and Much More From Answers.com
Address:
http://www.answers.com/topic/folie-deux
But what if people have already considered your line of reasoning and still don't accept it?
Then I would say that person doesn't realize we don't have built in hallucination detectors.
Prehaps they are for all we know, why do believe you have the monopoly on the truth of his experiences?
This sounds like the real argument you are trying to make is that nothing is an hallucination. If you only understood how the brain forms our experiences for us when it's working properly, you would understand how it easily creates hallucinations when it isn't working properly.
Says who? how are we to sort out the hits from the misses? I am guessing the misses would be conclusions people have reached that don't fall inline with your own conclusions that you reached in regards to your sleep paralysis experience?
When I say it's a hit or miss proposition, I'm saying that I don't know why some people have the presence of mind to consider that something which is impossible might be an hallucination, and others don't. Even with drugs like LSD. Some people hallucinate and remain aware of it, others get lost in the hallucnation and believe it all.
Im not saying everyone does, I am saying that most people have had hallucinations in whatever form by early adulthood and therefore are able to recognise them and separate them from reality, or at the very least have a good shot at doing so.
Absolutely not. People can hallucinate and have no idea they are hallucinating:
"Vilayanur Ramachandran, of the University of California, San Diego, told the Tucson conference about a particularly odd class of stroke effects. His patients are women who have not only been paralysed down one side by a stroke, but have also been robbed by the calamity of the knowledge that this has happened to them.
If someone "normally" paralysed is asked to pick up a tray of drinks, he will use his one good hand to pick it up from the middle. If one of Dr Ramachandran's patients is asked to do so, she will grasp one side of the tray as if her left hand was grasping the other, and lift confidently. "Oh, how clumsy I am" she will exclaim when she spills the tray's contents everywhere. His patients simply cannot see that one of their hands is not taking part in the process. They are lucid in all other respects: they are able to tell him when and where they had a stroke, but simply unable to admit even to themselves that this stroke has paralysed them.
He describes one patient who was convinced that her left hand, which could not move at all, was touching his nose. "I couldn't resist the temptation ... I said, 'Mrs B: can you clap?' "She said, 'Of course I can clap.' "I said, 'Clap!' "She went" (he moves his right hand in a lurching motion through the air to the point where it would have met the left hand). "This has profound philosophical implications," he continues, as laughter ripples round the conference hall, "because it answers the age-old Zen master's riddle - 'what is the sound of one hand clapping?' You need a damaged brain to answer this question." Dr Ramachandran follows his strange findings into unpopular waters. For decades now, nothing could have been more unfashionable in serious academic psychology than Freud. Yet what Ramachandran sees reminds him inescapably of Freudian theories of denial, repression and other defence mechanisms. He believes that the pattern of denial his stroke patients exhibit points to the mind's continuous struggle to produce a coherent picture of the worlds, and to prefer coherence to accuracy - a very Freudian notion.
In Ramachandran's view, the struggle is between the brain's hemispheres. When isolated facts are reported which might upset the mind's currently held view of the world, the reaction of the left hemisphere is to ignore them. Most of the time, this will be the correct response; sensory systems are not perfect. But the right hemisphere carries out the occasional reality check, just to be sure, and if it thinks something's awry, it gets together with the left hemisphere and, quite literally, changes the mind. In stroke patients who cannot recognise their condition this mechanism stops working. The right hemisphere messages never get through and then, he says, "There is no limit to the delusions that the left hemisphere will engage in."
The condition is not permanent. Though it will reassert itself, it can be dissipated for a few moments by squirting ice-cold water into the ear on the unparalysed side. The effect is easy to miss, because if you squirt cold water into the wrong ear, as Dr Ramachandran did the first time he tried it, you are left with a patient who is confused, and angry that anyone should have squirted cold water without warning or reason into her ear, but still unaware that she is paralysed. But if the water is squirted into the ear of the damaged hemisphere the patient experiences a period of confusion and then about ten minutes when she knows perfectly well that she has been paralysed - cannot imagine not knowing this, in fact. Six hours later, she will have forgotten the whole episode, and once more be convinced that everything is working properly."
WIRED 2.08: One Hand Clapping
Address:
http://consc.net/misc/wired.html
(also note i never suggested that ghosts were people who have slipped through time, rather they might be the image or imprint of pre-existing people, being no more conscious and aware than a reel of film showing a person walking down a street).
I know. The "time traveller" notion is my idea.
Ive no idea what a pooka is so you'll have to explain it for me.
A "pooka" is a mischievous spirit with the power to make people see things. The character of Puck in Shakespeare's Midsommer's Night Dream, was a pooka. Harvey the rabbit in the James Stewart movie
Harvey was a pooka. The word "spook" came from the word "pooka".
I think it absolutely hinges on it, if they arnt sure atall of what they saw and state now and again, that it might have been some reflections off the tv or the next door neighbour walking past the window etc. then that persons story i would say to most people minds would loose a great deal of credibility and weight.
People can't be categorically relied on to report completely mundane things accurately, even when they are 100% sure they know what they saw. This has been proven over and over in psychological tests.
And of course, they may have auto-ignored and forgotten about the smoke, then see the pictures days later and wonder what's going on.
