PIT2 said:
Could u give me some example of how this goes about?
Excellent question.
I always have this idea that it is only schizophrenic people, or people on drugs who have vivid visual hallucinations.
For some reason I can't explain the diagosis of "schizophrenic" is only given to people with the particular hallucination of "hearing voices". You wouldn't expect, therefore, anyone with that diagnosis to be also having vivid visual hallucinations.
If I rearrange your question to say you only had the idea that mentally ill people and people on drugs have vivid visual hallucinations, then I can answer it better.
A vivid visual hallucination does, in fact, mean the person's brain is misprocessing an internal mass of signals, and presenting them to the person's mind as if they were responses to something coming from the outside. That is what makes a hallucination a hallucination: it is generated inside the person's brain, and isn't an authentic "perception" of information from the senses.
There is every degree of this from distorting one tiny detail of a real visual experience to creating full blown alternate settings where the person seems to be surrounded by a place completely different than where he actually is.
I have very little knowledge about how often 'regular' (meaning not mentally ill or on drugs)hallucinate and what actually brings this about.
People are diagnosed as "mentally ill" not because they have a hallucinaton, or because they are subject to delusional thinking. "Mental illness" is really an artificial cutoff point, and is meant to apply to people who are losing their ability to funcion in life as a result of anything whatever going on in their mind that is troubling them. A severely depressed person who has stopped going to work, say, falls squarely into "mental illness" without having had an hallucination of any kind.
If you ask around, it turns out that almost all "regular" people have had some kind of hallucination they know about. SGTs strange pidgeon is a common sort of example: he caught the hint of something he couldn't see well, and his mind filled in all kinds of details from memory and fed those details to his visual processing center.
I have had the same thing happen to me: I have been certain I saw something briefly only to have it change completely on closer examination. In my case it is mostly with people: I catch a glimpse of a person walking toward me on the street. They are looking directly at me, so I look away, because I don't want to stare a stranger in the eye for the whole 30 seconds it is going to take to pass them. Right before they pass I will look up at them again to see if they are still looking at me, and I suddenly realize the person is a lot older, younger, taller, shorter, heavier or thinner, than I remembered from my first glance. Sometimes, they aren't even the same sex I took them to be. I hadn't seen them anywhere near as well as I first thought, and had filled in all kinds of erroneous details about them from my immagination.
Without being anything close to "mentally ill" "regular" people can have "off" days, as a result of who knows what: an allergy they didnt realize they had, some kind of hormone shift from some novel food they ate, lack of sleep, some new stress in their lives. such that they are more prone to sustaining one of these little incidents of "filling in the details" without stopping to question it.
All of our experience is always "in the brain" to begin with. We receive stimulation from the outside through our senses, and the brain processes the stimuli and then we have "an experience". Reality is real, but our "experience" of it is limited to what our brains are capable of doing with the information. It turns out it can do a massively huge number of gloriously interesting and directly useful things. It can also, unfortunately, go awry and create fiction that looks completely real.
Ivan is quite persuaded by his argument that level-headed people who show no signs of mental illness who report these kinds of things are all we need to know about to know ghosts exist. But all I can agree to about a good source is that it only gives you confidence that 1.) they're not lying, and 2.) they are much, much less likely to be giving a mixed up, incoherent report of their experience.
Wolram, I think, has a better attitude, which is that reports from good sources are strong indications that something we haven't properly explained and don't understand is probably going on. This might, in fact, be something so extrordinary as to fall into what we now call the "paranormal".
Even, if I stipulate for the sake of argument that the paranormal exists, no individual can prove to me their "ghost" wasn't, to give a shocking alternative, a devil masquerading as a ghost to subtly tempt them into some false belief. Nor can they prove it wasn't a wood sprite masquerading as a ghost, just to mess with their heads. Nor can they prove it wasn't an angel of God taking the form of the departed one in order to give them needed advise from a source they would accept. Nor can they prove it wasn't a grey space alien masquerading as a ghost simply to experiment on human behaviour. Nor can they prove it wasn't a Japanese Ninja with the power to "cloud the brain" just out practising on random strangers. And, I could sit here all night writing more possible alternatives.
The decision to call it a "ghost": the spirit of a dead person, is cultural. In most older cultures these things were considered to be separate beings unto themselves that have always been without a physical body. The decision to call anything a "ghost" is pretty arbitrary. Most people who make that call do so in support of a belief in life after death.
So, I'd rather assume hallucination for anything I can't actually examine, because even if I stipulate that level headed people are "strong evidence" that there is something
paranormal out there, those "level-headed people are hardly in a position to know if what they saw was a ghost of a dead person or a Greek Eudemon. As soon as they say "ghost" they have jumped to a conclusion, even within the paranormal framework.
You know these subjects always attracts me.Although I don't believe in ghosts at all.I think ghoasts and things like that are created because people are always interested to think of things which are out of humans' hands and his knowledge.and maybe they like to be afraid of imaginary things or whatever...
