No Stupid Questions

Science has never in the history of science reliably shown a single interaction between physical entities and any sort of non-physical force. The only way ghosts could be real is if you redefined the term “ghost” to the point of breaking, like saying that the memory of a person is a ghost.

Plus, it fails the smell test in a million ways. What makes a ghost exist? Why aren’t we positively lousy with ghosts? Are there rules? What would they be and what mechanism is there to both quantify and effect them? Why do ghosts follow the rotation and revolution of the earth but otherwise aren’t physically bound? How can one have any sort of cognition? If a ghost does, how can it perceive anything without intercepting photons or other physical phenomena? If there are ghosts and somehow they have cognition and perception, are we obligated to leave Netflix on when we leave for work?

I'm now a manager, but I work in contract security, and have been in more buildings that were supposedly haunted than I care to count. Including buildings that have numerous stories of freaky shit happening.

Doors closing "randomly" or very-not-randomly. Spaces suddenly getting cold. puddles showing up in bathrooms that someone supposedly drowned in. Stairwells that sound like people walking down them at specific times of night.

odd noises. Freaky noises.

I have never once been in a building where I could not identify a perfectly natural cause. Here's a few incidents off the top of my mind that I remember very specifically. There are some few commonalities to people who see ghosts. or demons, or any other supernatural entity.

1. they're incurious and don't care to find out what really happened.
2. they're frequently (usually?) tired or otherwise in an altered state of mind. or incredibly bored.
3. They already believe in supernatural things.... and what they see generally conforms to their world view.

Ghost stories are perpetuated by the credulous, who find things that are decidedly weird, and then stop looking any further. or they hear a story- suicides, murders, etc- and attribute every weird little thing to that.

or they're told by straight up liars and ran with by people who would run with scissors and untied shoes. a lot of times, it's started by people who have an inability to admit they don't know something.

Regardless, if ghosts were real. if they were common, and if they interacted with the natural world, then we would have actual, tangible evidence for their existence. You'd be able to point at one and say 'aha! a ghost!' that doesn't happen.

These are just some of the examples of things I've heard about and found to be otherwise.

One example was a guy who claimed ghosts were always going around closing every fire door every night at 23:00. On the dot. Every night.

And yeah. doors were being closed as described. Guess what? All the doors had one thing in common.

They were being held open by magnetic door holders. they're fire doors. Building code here requires that they be self-closing in the event of a fire alarm to prevent the spread of fire. But that's really rather inconvenient in long hallways where people don't want to be opening big heavy doors everytime they're bringing a cart of shit through.

Thus, the electromagnetic door holders that turn off whenever a fire alarm goes off.

Well. if you guessed that the fire system had been programmed to turn off all the door holders at 23:00 each night, just long enough to let any being held open close... you'd be right. All it took to verify that was to send a five minute email to the facility engineer, who spent all of ten minutes checking settings on the fire alarm system and turned it off.

Another example of doorholder mayhem is one in which the doorholders were slowly going bad.

This was when I was a manager, and I was doing a sort of covert investigation where I go in and have them train me on the site. there were problems.

those problems all stemmed from a fundamental lack of curiosity. Which stemmed from a fervent belief in the supernatural. Voices in spaces that are supposed to be empty? they weren't teenagers smoking dope, it was spirits.

One example of spirits that loved to fuck with him? one hallway had firedoors that sectioned off a t-shaped hallway, that was lined with businesses (mostly offices.) he was supposed to go down the hallway, checking and locking all the doors and generally making sure everything was in good order. the firedoor in the middle of the hallway, kept closing on him.

Rather than looking into what the issue was, he wrote it off as demons fucking with him, specifically.

The reality was that the doorhoder was going bad (probably had been for a long time. as that happens their holding power gets weaker. this door holder's holding power was just strong enough to hold the door when it was static, but any kind of touch or slight pressure was enough for it to close.

Including changes in the air pressure as you walked past. When I pointed this out to him. Well. Lets just say he's no some other company's problem.

another example is voices in unusual places

Guess what? walls be thin, yo.

Frequently, office buildings with multiple tenants are remodeled in strange ways. especially if they're older- things get partitioned weierd. spaces get remodeled and lighting and power doesn't be as you'd expect.

In any case, in this particular building, the idiot in question didn't realize that the very short custodial closet didn't go all the way "back" from the hall- she should have, though. She'd also never gone into the space that wrapped around the maintenance closet to run beside the space that she kept hearing voices in "that shouldn't be there!"

Those voices were caused by people working late.

my personal favorite, ghost steps coming down stairs.

this particular building is historic- that is to say, it was a tire warehouse built in the 1890s. It's really quite a lovely building. Giant limestone block foundation, old tan brick. cedar beam construction.

one of two stairwells that hit ever floor has fire sprinkler stand pipes running through each landing. not surprising, considering. the building is old. It's drafty as fuck. And at night, in order to save energy, because it literally predates central air, they turn the system off at night (or run it to a lower set point.)

This results in a fairly consistent rate at which it cools off. the fire stand pipes cool off at a different rate, though, and clunk against the landings the pass through. They do so in a way that sounds like someone walking down the stairs.

Incurious guards just wrote it off as some ghost or something, but all of the long term tenants will tell a story about how there was a guy that died from a tractor tire falling on him. (didn't happen, by the way. Though numerous people did die here. mostly jumpers.)

Radiators make some creepy noises.

I mean. Seriously. gurrgle gurrgle. burble burble. Tickety tick.

still not ghosts.

big cats sound like screaming women.

yeap. okay, need to clarify, I mean, our local lynxes and bobcats, as well as the occasional mountain lion passing through.

If you ever saw Annihilation, with the "help me" bear. yeah. it's like that. Randomly. Out of the dark woods. and not coherent words so much as screams. (that account happened to border a large statepark that had some cats living in it.)

Sudden changes of temperature

So, most office building's HVACs work on positive pressure. This way, when a door gets opened, the hot air goes out rather than the cold air coming in. (or cold air going out, hot air coming in. Depends on where you are and the season.)

for whatever reason, one of the office spaces just had massive open vents (I personally suspect this was a remodel that got left in the wall. the vent just connected the main lobby/entryway to the space (above a plenum ceiling)

Another feature of building HVAC systems are the airlock doors as you come and go. Guess what happens when you open both airlock doors and have a window you're not supposed to have open, open?

All your air rushes out, getting replaced by cold air.

::: spoiler Puddles in Bathrooms Okay. so, water goes from high places to low places, and tends to follow the 'easiest' path, even if its somewhat convoluted. If you have an inexplicable puddle somewhere, you have a water leak somewhere.

what you don't have is some kind of poltergeist taking a bath. Doesn't matter if a person committed suicide in the bathroom, or rather, if you're told that's what happened. (it's not.)

Turns out that the rooftop had a leak, and that was travelling down through 8 floors to show up in a bathroom. because that's where the pipes the water was following kinda sorta came out.

lso, which requirements in terms of species are there for a haunting to commence? Can a horse become a ghost? What about a gorilla? Or a Neanderthal? Seems weird that only homo sapients ge

I mean, it sounds like your friend genuinely doesn't understand the scientific method. That doesn't necessarily make them unreasonable. It just means they had a sub-standard science education.

As a reasonable person, I can admit that it's always "possible" that ghosts exist. Meaning, that I am not 100% positive that they don't.

We have built systems that have detected:

• Black holes which collided 2000000000 lightyears away
• single photons
• neutrinos, particles that can pass through lightyears of lead
• concentrations of chemicals rated in picograms (0.000000000001g) per litre
• vibrations rated at 1/1000000 of a g

We have come into a world where people carry around, nearly 24/7, devices capable of recording high definition video, measuring variances in light, magnetism, vibration, storing time correlated data and even processing over it with enough proficiency to put digital bunny ears or makeup on you in real time.

Despite all this, we have no evidence and no mechanism by which we even might expect ghosts could exist. It's reasonable to say you can't be 100% certain they don't exist, but it is also wildly unreasonable to say they do.

It's not important that you believe in ghosts. It's only important that they believe in themselves.

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 not, why?

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"

The only evidence is anecdotal, there just happens to be a lot of it.

So no, I'd say it's unreasonable to believe in ghosts. (Though I do love ghost stories and folklore.)

Ghosts are fun to think about and make good stories, but there's never been one bit of reliable evidence. So no it's not reasonable to believe in something that isn't real.

He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence.

Big if true. He should send that to you instead of making memes.

For decades James Randi offered a million dollars for any evidence of supernatural shit that can be tested. Many people tried, but none were able to produce evidence to earn the money.

If ghosts were a very rare occurrence and only 0.00001% of all dead people produced ghosts we would still be completely overrun by ghosts everywhere, they would be mundane in how common they are. And that's not counting ghost animals, ghost dinosaurs, etc.

The impulse to believe in ghosts can be explained as well. For most of human evolutionary history we had predators (cats, bears, wolves, hyenas, etc). If you heard a noise in the bush and didn't assume it came from an agent you were more likely to be ambushed than if you assumed it was an agent even when it was just the wind. The survival trait biased us towards assuming agency even when it's not. When you hear a noise in your home at night your first though isn't settling foundations, it's intruder.

Dude just thinks he's special. There would be ANY evidence by now. The superiority of the meme is laughable. Your friend is a fool.

If you're willing to extend belief beyond what can be proven through science, sure.

From my perspective, ghosts are basically the result of...

1. Delirium / psychosis or similar mental illness.
2. Attention seeking.
3. People attempting to explain something they saw/heard/experienced but don't understand and aren't open minded or curious enough to explore real answers to.

Can a reasonable person believe regardless of evidence in ghosts, in deities and gods, in folklore, in aliens, in superstition, in the importance of themselves, in their culture or nation, in their position in society and their gender roles, in mums cooking being better, in bad luck treating them unfairly, in the importance of their habits and rituals, in sticking to how they've always done it, in any number of irrational things that they hold close to heart?

I'd say apparently they can. People are not logic processors. People are people.

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.

The bar for “convincing” is very low when you want to believe.

There is no reliable scientific proof. Thread/post end.

No. It's unreasonable. Tell your friend that I specifically said he's a twat

I knew an athiest who believed in ghosts. no idea how he squared that.

Can a person with reasonable beliefs have an irrational one? Certainly.

Can someone reasonably believe ghosts exist? No, it is a unreasonable belief.

If ghosts were real, then I can think of a few people throughout history who would have been swarmed by them. Adolf Hitler would have approximately 13 million spirits haunting him by the end. Something like 100,000,000,000 humans have ever lived, and somehow all the ghosts are from culturally relevant time frames? For all the US civil war ghosts people have seen, you'd think there'd be orders of magnitude more native Americans haunting this place. Did the European colonists just make sure to let the Indigenous peoples finish all their business before hunting them to near extinction?

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

Reason on its own doesn't bring enough to the table. Without critical thinking (and even with it) reason can lead to any conclusion.

If the data you reason on is flawed (and it is for everyone) then you'll end up with wrong conclusions no matter how reasonable you are.

The question's a little weird.

Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts? Yes, obviously, people do and many of them would be considered generally reasonable. They manage their lives okay, they make good decisions most of the time, they're not gibbering maniacs, they're reasonable people.

But: is it reasonable (meaning, grounded in good evidence) to believe in ghosts? I'd say it depends on what you and your friend specifically mean by "ghosts", but in general no. If ghosts were real, they'd be more observable.

And "Hitchens said so" is pretty weak sauce, so I hope that's an uncharitable summary of your argument.

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

What type are we talking about? Sexy?

Or scary?