ghosts?

[JuggernautJon]

The subject says it all. Ghosts. Believe in them? Seen them? Heard them? I have seen and heard some pretty weird shit, but I'm not sure if I believe. If I'm not sure about humans having souls, or if there is an after life, I'm not sure if I can bring myself to believing in ghosts. In my opinion, with the brain being a very powerful and mysterious thing, it surely has the power to play "tricks" on us. I'm having trouble trying to articulate what I'm trying to say here. But you get the idea, right?

[Cite134]

Nah, don't buy it. I like that one film with Patrick Swayze, though I forget the title

[The Magic Pudding]

It's easier to credit human gullibility than ghostly ability.

[JuggernautJon]

It's easier to credit human gullibility than ghostly ability.

Yeah! That!

[Ulver]

Nope, not a believer in ghosts. I think it's often just that human tendency to create the most dramatic explanations possible for events they can't immediately explain.

[februarystars]

Ha my roommate just can't understand how I can go with her to see movies like Paranormal Activity, then get back to the apartment and say "ok, good night, see you tomorrow." She's like "how can you sleep after that??" ends up leaving her light on all night and not getting any sleep at all.

[fester30]

Yeah that's a big negatory.  Most ghost stories are easily explained away either by science or by pointing out what someone has to gain by perpetrating the ghost story.

[Melmoth]

I believe in ghosts - poetically. It's always creepy, for instance, when people die off stage. It doesn't give you that visual confirmation, and from then on, though you know they're dead on an intellectual level, some more primative part of your brain still feels that they're alive.

After WWI there was a huge upsurge of ghost stories, as so many bodies were left unfound, assumed to be dead but never confirmed. Ghosts were in fashion then.

Sinking ships are kind of eerie too because death, for most of the people on board, happens somewhere down there in the deep unknown - we never get to visualise it properly. Another example, if anyone's read the Harry Potter books, is the way Sirius Black dies: he justs drifts off through a curtain, and you're left with this strange, uncanny feeling for a while afterwards.

So yeah, I believe in ghosts, in the sense that death is not a definite thing. It can be ambiguous, however 'rational' you consider yourself to be, and where this happens it's always unsettling. I don't think it's our irrational, superstitious imagination that creates a ghost so much as that ambiguity.

[Twentythree]

http://www3.amherst.edu/~jrfriedman/NYT ... anics.html

Great little article that describes superposition in pretty easy to read layman terms and shows the limitation in quantum understanding. As it pertains to "ghosts" however, it is quite possible for stuff to exist simultaneously in more than one place on this plane of space time. Who is to say what is possibly on multiple space time planes or even what exists just outside our capabilities of perception. Depending on how broadly you define ghost

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ghost

It is very possible that physicists have already answered this question.

[proudfootz]

Don't think I really believe in them.

But I probably could be persuaded in the middle of the night...  

[YaarghMatey487]

I thought I did. But I was five...and I carried my "memory" of a green goblin thing wearing overalls as proof of having seen a ghost. Sorry, ghosties. I'm willing to entertain the idea of parallel dimensions accidentally crossing over. I'm speaking purely from a physics perspective here (Michio Kaku, ftw).