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A friend and I are arguing over ghosts.
I think it’s akin to astrology, homeopathy and palm reading. He says there’s “convincing “ evidence for its existence. He also took up company time to make a meme to illustrate our relative positions. (See image)
(To be fair, I’m also on the clock right now)
What do you think?
Hi, I’m the friend. I don’t want to reveal too much about my identity here but my science education was actually very thorough (I know that sounds arrogant but I just wanted to defend my honour here). Let's not get bogged down with personal detail though like that though because ad hominems like this can often cause a conversation to unravel into personal attacks.
Regarding what my friend said about my views on the scientific method: This is a bit of a mischaracterization. I don’t have anything against the scientific method. I just think that the set of things we have reason to believe is larger than the set of things that we can provide evidence for scientifically. (Broadly speaking I think this is a fairly standard view of things.)
Another way to out this is this. The question is not 'is xyz scientific' but 'do we have reason to believe xyz'? It turns out that if we can demonstrate something scientifically it does give us reason to believe that thing. But there are some things we have reason to believe that we cannot demonstrate scientifically. For example I have good reason to believe solipsism is false, or that chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap, even though I cannot strictly speaking demonstrate these things scientifically (examples like this often have something to do with the subjectivity of the mind, which cannot be directly measured but is nonetheless very apparent to us).
For the ghost stuff, I think you actually could make a reasonable scientific case for the existence of ghosts (very hot take, I know), but that’s not my primary concern. What I’m worried about is do we have good reason to believe in ghosts? As it happens, I believe the answer to that is yes. The details here might be a bit out of scope for a c/nostupidquestions thread but I'm basing my thoughts here on the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane. I used to have a similar view as most people in this thread (that ghosts were irrational and unscientific etc) until I read this book and it forced me to change my mind. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic.
Edit: for grammar and typos
What was it that convinced you?
Basically, there are reliable, repeatable and measurable effects that are best explained by people ‘surviving’ their own death. A good example of this is near death experiences. People come back from having been clinically dead and can tell you things that they shouldn’t know. For example like where items are placed on the roof of the hospital or events that transpired when they had no brain activity. These people would have no way of having knowing this stuff unless they’ve seen it for themselves, which would have been physically impossible. So this makes their own fist-person accounts of what happened (“I was out of my body and literally floating around”) start to seem more credible.
The power of the book is the sheer volume of cases it presents for these sorts of events and other related phenomena. It shows you that events like these do occur reliably and repeatably and are quite literally scientific in that people can and do study them scientifically (and more of this study should occur, but that can only happen if we get past the current social stigma).
The power of the book is that it just inundates you with credible stories (and credible science!) from credible people, all of which is suggestive of the supernatural. It might be possible to talk yourself into dismissing one or two of these cases, but when you have several hundred of them compiled back-to-back-to-back it becomes harder and harder to find the willpower required to muster up a skeptical response. After a while you have to admit “okay, theres something more going on here, and I don’t understand it”. At least, thats what happened to me.
It’s a great book though, and I’m not doing it justice. I highly recommend giving it a read.
Thanks for explaining. To be honest I'm still not sure why that convinced you. If you wrote a book with a few hundred, even a few thousand anecdotes about people levitating I would still believe in gravity.
That is the part I doubt the most. Because if that was true, if this so called credible science in your book wasn't misinterpreted or simply faked, the scientists responsible would have gotten a nobel price and world wide recognition. But they didn't. If ghosts (or near death experiences, for that matter) were measurable in a repeatable or otherwise credible way it would be done on a wide scale. Scientists basically live for the chance to be the one who challenges a paradigm - and this one would shake everything we know about the material world, every scientific discipline, religions even.
There's simply no good reason for such "credible science" to go unnoticed. There is at least one very good reason for faking it: It makes money.
I believe in helium balloons too. Does that mean I don’t believe in gravity?
Why do you assume that these scientists would get nobel prizes? Science is still a cultural phenomenon and people have their prejudices. Stigmas exist (as this thread amply reveals). Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.
And why do you assume this science has gone ‘unnoticed’? We’re talking about it, aren’t we? People have spent their lives studying it, and an entire university department at Princeton is devoted to studying these sorts of things. This sort of stuff is frequently brought up and debated in reputable journals such as the Journal of Consciousness Studies (which recently devoted an entire issue to debating the topic of near death experiences iirc). That doesn’t sound very unnoticed to me. Controversial? Sure. But not unnoticed.
Well then you should read the book. Like I said I’m not doing it justice. If you’re actually interested in this topic, and not just interested in taking cheap shots on Lemmy, then read the book.
He shouldn't have gotten one for SR specifically anyways because Hendrik Lorentz had already developed a theory that was mathematically equivalent and presented a year prior to Einstein.
The speed of light can be derived from Maxwell's equations, which is weird to be able to derive a speed just by analyzing how electromagnetism works, because anyone in any reference frame would derive the same speed, which implies the existence of a universal speed. If the speed is universal, what it is universal relative to?
Physicists prior to Einstein believed there might be a universal reference frame which defines absolute time and absolute space, these days called a preferred foliation. The Michelson-Morley experiment was an attempt to measure the existence of this preferred foliation because most theories of how it worked would render it detectable in principle, but found no evidence for it.
Most physicists these days retell this experiment as having debunked the idea and led to its replacement with Einstein's special relativity. But the truth is more complicated than that, because Lorentz found you could patch the idea by just assuming objects physically contract based on their motion relative to preferred foliation. Lorentz's theory was presented in 1904, a year before Einstein, and was mathematically equivalent, so it makes all the same predictions, and so anything Einstein's theory would predict, his theory would've also predicted.
The reason Lorentz's theory fell by the wayside is because, by being able to explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment which was meant to detect the preferred foliation, it meant it was no longer detectable, and so people liked Einstein's theory more that threw out this undetectable aspect. But it would still be weird to give Einstein the Nobel prize for what is ultimately just a simplification of Lorentz's theory. (Einstein also already received one for something he did deserve anyways.)
But there are also good reasons these days to consider putting the preferred foliation back in and that Einstein was wrong. The Friedmann solution to Einstein's general relativity (the solution associated with the universe we actually live in) spontaneously gives rise to a preferred foliation which is actually empirically observable. You can measure your absolute motion relative to the universe by looking at the cosmic dipole in the cosmic background radiation. Since we know you can measure it now and have actually measured our absolute motion in the universe, the argument against Lorentz's theory is much weaker.
An even stronger argument, however, comes from quantum mechanics. A famous theorem by the physicist John Bell proves the impossibility of "local realism," and in this case locality means locality in terms of special relativity, and realism means belief that particles have real states in the real physical world independently of you looking at them (called the ontic states) which explain what shows up on your measurement device when you try to measure them. Since many physicists are committed to the idea of special relativity, they conclude that Bell's theorem must debunk realism, that objective reality does not exist independently of you looking at it, and devolve into bizarre quantum mysticism and weirdness.
But you can equally interpret this to mean that special relativity is wrong and that the preferred foliation needs to put back in. The physicist Hrvoje Nikolic for example published a paper titled "Relativistic QFT from a Bohmian perspective: A proof of concept" showing that you can fit quantum mechanics to a realist theory that reproduces the predictions of relativistic quantum mechanics if you add back in a preferred foliation.
Thank you for this haha. Its very interesting and a nice break from arguing with everyone here
Physics can explain helium balloons really well. There's no mystery here. And they're certainly not disproving gravity.
Einstein had no easily repeated experiments to show off. You're claiming ghosts are measurable in a repeatable way - simple enough to be explained in a book for laypeople . At least after the third or fourth study with robust methodology the scientific community would be talking about nothing else. And I know that because I am surrounded by the kind of researchers you're thinking of when you say "scientists". They're a bunch of nerds, they love that stuff. And they research ominous stuff all the time, a biology professor here spent 3 years studying healing crystals in drinking water. Disappointingly they found nothing.
Well to be fair we're talking about a claim that such research exist, which is miles off from discussing actual research, which would be done by scientists in order to validate it's operationalisation and discuss their findings.
The thing is: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A book simply isn't that. It's way too easily faked, isn't subject to the scientific method, peer review, any form of control or critical oversight and at the end of the day profits not from the truth but from being sold. And you are here doing advertising for them, so it seems like they are succeeding at that.
I'm not trying to persuade you. I believe that would be hard to do at this point. What I'm trying to say here, referring to the thread and OP's question: It's not unreasonable to think that you, and everyone else being convinced by a very entertaining and captivating book outside of the actual scientific method, are unreasonable.
One book simply shouldn't be this convincing.
Okay, I revise my request. Please just read the books bibliography and read the peer-reviewed research that it cites.
Out of curiosity I just checked if I could find it. I couldn't, which isn't surprising - a book isn't a scientific publication, so sources are rarely of great interest.
But in general: It would take hours, maybe days of work to cross reference the sources of a whole book with what the author claims they prove. Obviously I won't do that. How many papers from the bibliography have you read? If you own the book, at least you should have easy access to it's sources.
I am familiar with the sources, yes.
I’m not sure what you’re looking for here. Do you want me to send you links to some of the research from the bibliography? If so then I can do that when I get home from work
I'm trying to show you that your case isn't convincing.
If your book could logically prove something, or at least argue convincingly (logically!) in favor of it, maybe it would in fact be interesting. Then you could repeat the arguments here (and elsewhere, and scientists would be doing just that) and we'd actually have some kind of discussion with something to gain for both of us. Anecdotes are, scientifically speaking, basically worthless. At best they're used to create hypotheses, never to test them or to prove something. And even a great sum of them simply aren't science.
And I'm sorry to say but this very much reminds me of conspiracy theories, e.g. flat earth theory, were science is really clear about something while a few laypeople on youtube think to themselves "I bet all those researchers just didn't think of this, which to me on the other hand is completely obvious".
Your claim is absolutely extraordinary. You would have to present an absolutely powerful, convincing logical argument in order to even begin to support it. "Someone claimed it happened to them" simply isn't that, no matter how well it's written.
You seem to be mistaking a logical arguments for an empirical argument (you don’t “prove” things in science the same way you prove things in math or logic). I’m making an empirical argument, not a logical argument. But in order for an empirical argument to be convincing you need to actually look at the data. This seems to be something that you’re very adverse to doing. You don’t want to read the book. You don’t want to review its bibliography. And you turned down my offer for me to literally send you sources here in this chat for us to discuss. So I really don’t know how else I can help you at this point. If you’re really so sure that you can prove (logically?) that this data is not worth looking at then there is really nothing further for us to talk about.
Who's the one literally refusing to look at the data here? Me or you?
My patience with you here is running thin. I offering to send you peer-reviewed research and now you’re dismissing it all wholesale as just anecdotes? Note that (a) this is simply false and (b) case studies are an important part of all research in psychology and medicine (which are the subject matters we are dealing with here). I don’t have the patience to get into the weeds on this with you, so if you’re actually interested and not just trying to save face then please refer to this comment I made here.
Please do not respond to this message unless you have something actually intelligent to contribute to the conversation.