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Paranormal Investigations and Belief in Ghosts
Esther Schindler writes "Sure, everyone uses technology on the job. But you may not have contemplated the tools used by paranormal investigators (at least, not until you began thinking about Halloween) who look for the truth in ghosts and other things that go Bump in the Night. In Paranormal Investigations and Technology: Where Ghosts and Gadgets Meet, CIO's Al Sacco writes about the most unusual of tool chests, with everything from thermometers to blimp cams." You want spooky? An anonymous reader passed a link to a survey that says a third of Americans believe in ghosts. Who you gonna call?
First Ghost!
captcha: fainted
...so what's the big deal? Ever read "The Bible" or other associated works? They're full of as much fantastic nonsense as any ghost-spotting con artist could ever dream up.
Don't cross the streams. That would be bad.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not knocking the religious, just saying that 1/3 of Americans believing in the supernatural should not surprise anyone.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
So this fellow with pictures was fiddling the film?
He was probably sincere, but ghost hunters are infamous for seeing ghosts in everything, especially from photographic effects. Google for ghosts and "orbs", as one example. It's a well-known flash effect from dust, but a lot of ghost hunters believe that they're paranormal.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Science can't prove that ANYTHING doesn't exist... I mean, science can't prove that giant pink whistling bears don't exist... so while you ARE indeed correct, it is -no more- a faith statement than saying "Giant pink whistling bears don't exist". The burden of proof lies on the side of people asserting something non-obvious is true/valid/exists/whatever, not the other way around, and it has little to do with it being about god or anything else.
People had to prove that the earth was round, because with my own two eyes, without knowing which signs to look for (even though in this day and age they are extremely obvious, but weren't always so), it looks flat. Therefore, its flat until someone proves its not. Someone proved it wasn't, therefore it isn't, until someone proves otherwise, and so on. No faith about it, its a methodology. Saying "there is no god!" is just short for "There is no solid evidence there is a god, thus by applying the commonly accepted scientific methodologies, we can say there is no god until proven otherwise". Thats just a bit long to say everytime, and people with scientific background, or who follows in standard science footstep just shortens, since they'll understand each other.
Then there are the morons who think they understand what science is but don't, and don't quite get that EVERYTHING in science is "theories until a better theory comes up", and use the words the wrong way. Can't help those.
I mean, now science says the earth is round. Sometime in the future we most likely will prove something similar to string theory (or some such), and realise that there were obvious signs around us that after all, earth isn't round, its in 1 dimention and our one dimentional human brain just interprete that 1 dimention as a sphere based on other inputs. Then scientists of the time will make jokes about "lol the earth is round rofl!". But we know that. Thats as opposed to people asserting something is true as if it was a fact, without evidence. There's a freagin big difference between "it doesn't exist until you prove it does", and "it exists until you prove it doesn't".
"Then, of course, there is faith in science itself."
Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
No faith needed.
"Everyone has something they believe in that they can't prove," unless taken to an absurd level, that is not true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Are angels in the same class as ghosts?
Yes. Superstition comes in many forms.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In my experience, though, most of the people involved have no clue what they are talking about. They want to see a ghost and prove their existence so badly that they see them anywhere. They also do not understand the technology they are using.
The fools in this article seem to be the same... at least one of them, who talks of photographing ghost orbs. Ghost orbs are the most ridiculous load of crap. You know what else causes those orbs? Dust in the air. Moisture in the air because you're outside at night when the temps are changing (I've got just such a picture about with hundreds of "ghosts"). That streetlight off in the distance that you didn't notice while just standing there because it's just a streetlight (I've seen this from a local ghost hunting group with pictures of a place that was maybe 10 minutes from where I lived at the time). Reflections off of shiny polished headstones. About a billion other things.
I think the following quote sums up nicely exactly what the problem with the whole paranormal investigation field is, why it gets no respect, and why it deserves no respect.
To paraphrase, "I can't tell what it is in this picture, so it must be a ghost." That's their most solid evidence is a picture that they're not sure what it is. What the hell is a "reverse shadow" anyway? Light?
Fascinating. If that was me I wouldn't be trying to photograph them. I'd be trying to run a heat engine off them. You've got an object here that's going to be consistently cooler than ambient temperatures? That's a perpetual motion machine right there.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Hey, atheists would have us believe in a bunch of secular stupidity as well. This mystical belief is at the heart of the environmental movement, and its utterly ridiculous. First and foremost is this notion that if we are nice to the earth, the earth will be mean to us. The earth is a fricking rock. It has no brain. You can't make deals with it.
This seems like a rather stupid argument, unless I'm missing something.
The earth is our environment. We live in it. If we don't treat it right, it won't treat us right; is has nothing to do with deals or brains, it's just simple physics and biology.
Would you take a shit on your dinner plate and eat it? Of course not. You'd get sick. Would you eat toxic wastes? Of course not; you'd get sick, and probable die. Polluting the earth is the same thing, only in smaller concentrations, and usually the concentrations are higher around people with less money. The toxins make people sick, and they die sometimes. These toxins don't just stay where we put them; as humans, we're dependent on air and water, which come from the earth. Pollute the air, and you're going to breathe it. Pollute the water, and you're going to drink it (at least water can be filtered; no one walks around with gas masks on, yet). Even worse, the food grown in fields for us to eat uses air and water. It's all a big cycle, so if you screw with it, it's going to come back and bite you in the ass most likely.
There's nothing mystical about this, and any idiot should be able understand it. Anyone who thinks it's ok to just pollute willy-nilly is either completely selfish (only cares about short-term consequences and not long-term), astoundingly stupid, or has some irrational belief that it won't affect them and others.
Then, of course, there is faith in science itself. It is an act of faith...
This is a rather stupid statement. Science doesn't require any faith at all; it's just a method for gaining knowledge where models are created and tested using evidence, and thrown out if contradicted by evidence. Do you have a better method?
I just finished college, and I am currently (until the 10 Nov.) on a bit of a hiatus from doing any work that remotely requires the use of my brain. For the past couple months I have been working at a small breakfast cafe that operates out of a house built around 1900.
As old as the house is, it has slightly unnerving properties: the floors creak, drafts blow napkins and receipts, etc.. I find it very easy to come up with reasonable naturalistic explanations for what my co-workers consider paranormal. All of the servers at this restaurant believe that it is inhabited by a ghost -- one that interacts with the world we experience. A poltergeist.
Most also believe in astrology and homeopathy. One server recently paid ~ $15 for a chalk tablet cold remedy. No matter how hard I try to dispel these harmful beliefs, I am (ironically) met with skepticism. For instance, today someone told me that they believed in symbols foretelling the future. I suggested that any notion of psychic ability is likely due to confirmation bias -- we are more likely to remember when our intuition was correct than when it had failed us. I also told this person about the JREF/Randi Prize.
At this point in most of my conversations with my mystically inclined associates, some "scientific explanation" is offered dealing with photons, leptons, "we're all made of light," and other new-agey pseudo-quantum-physics.
I am at the point where I have almost given up, except to always ask people to examine how they know what they proclaim to know without resorting to their feelings. I find it very hard to not come across as condescending when having these conversations.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
You are welcome on my lawn.
About a year or so ago, I wrote myself some notes about a possible short story, and had a premise very similar to what you mention. The gist of it was that "souls" (for lack of a better word) were proven to exist, and then promptly exploited for the special properties they exhibited, creating a clean, limitless energy source. The downside? To the "souls" being used in this manner, the process was basically hell--fire, brimstone, unending torment, etc.
Hmm. Maybe I'll work on that now, since you've brought it back to mind... thanks!
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
>>Science is a method, it requires no faith. In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
Slow down there, cowboy. Nothing proves itself -- you always start with a certain set of axioms.
While it is indeed one of the great tools for knowing things that we have, it is certainly not the only way things become known. We can learn certain things through reason alone (such as math), and many things can only be learned through word of mouth (Sally said that Harry said that...). Statistics is one of the fundamental answers to epistemology (how can I know something), but ultimately we only can learn things at certain (not very high) confidence levels. While a p-value of 0.05 or 0.01 might sound pretty impressive (and are the standard rules of thumb for statistical 'proofs'), they represent 1-out-of-20 and 1-out-of-100 studies' results being nothing more than the result of random chance. If you have, say, 10,000 papers published a year, 500 or 100 of them will be wrong.
Given how often scientific answers have indeed been found to be wrong, especially in epidemiological studies (which is a sort of scientific wishful thinking), it hardly proves itself to be true (which can't be done anyway). A better way of putting it is, "It's the best method we have of figuring out empirical truths about nature."
There are very major limits on science and the scientific method. Notably:
1) Singular events. Science can't handle singular events very well, or not at all. For example, suppose the people that claimed they had seen cold fusion back in '89 really did see Cold Fusion. Perhaps a gamma ray hit something at just the right time, or maybe it required high altitude, or something. But when researchers tried to duplicate it, they couldn't and so the guys were branded as frauds. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't... but they could actually have made an honest empirical observation, and then branded as frauds as a result of it.
2) Trust. The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullis in Verba" ("On the words of no one") In other words, don't believe what people say, but only trust in reproducible experiments. The trouble with this is, of course, that no one can come close to reproducing all of the empirical experiments needed for a full understanding of modern science, and so it always boils down to trusting what other people say. If a car full of scientists drove through a mountain pass and saw a white substance outside, they could send one of their members out to report if it was sand or snow... without accomplishing anything. The friend could be playing a practical joke on them, after all. All of them would need to go outside and make an empirical observation of the substance themselves in order to be satisfied. This is a very fundamental flaw in the system, which only works since malicious papers (as far as I know) are not inserted into the literature like viruses.
3) The old induction problem / uncertainty. Science is based on inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning from empirical events can't actually prove anything. We can make certain claims, but not proofs in the sense that logical or mathematical statements can be proven true. "The sun will rise tomorrow" is a scientific claim, but it cannot be proven to be true. The fundamental problem is that what is true in the past might not be true in the future. Since certain things like universal constants are likely to stay the same (though some have theorized they have not in the past!), it can be answered by simply stipulating "If things stay like they are now..." but this is still not the same level of proof as people deal with in logic and math. All scientific knowledge, ultimately, is uncertain.
4) Heretics. The heretics of science have always received rough treatment. Most of the time it is deserved (there are a lot of nutcases out there), but sometimes people have followed the scientific method but had their papers rejected because the reviewers assume their preconceived conclusion. The guys
I don't disagree with all of your points, but I disagree with the conclusion you seem to be drawing. You state all these things that you call limitations of science and the scientific method, but as a practicing scientist, I see them more as fundamental limitations of reality. In other words, I believe that science (in its ideal form) is not only the best method we've found so far, but the best method there could possibly be.
1. It's true that experiments are bad at dealing with rare events (I'm generalizing your statement by substituting rare for singular). The challenge, as a scientist, is to come up with a situation where you can study the same underlying phenomena in a system or regime where those rare events become more common. It's true that there are situations where this can be difficult or impossible, but saying that's a limitation of the scientific method is somewhat trivial. Science is dependent on observation, and you're saying that it doesn't work when you can't observe something. More on that below...
2. Trust is less of a problem in science than any other human activity because science builds cumulatively on science done before. Despite what you suggest, direct reproduction is actually not even close to being the primary mechanism for validating past results. The truth is that new experiments are based on models constrained by old experiments, even if the new experiment is not a direct duplication of the old experiment. For example, your computer wouldn't work if all those experiments on electrons and whatever done in the 1950s were wrong. So old results, at least the ones that matter, are tested and retested every day as the findings are incorporated into the models.
3. You seem to imply that it's possible to "prove" things in the real world, but I would argue that it simply is not, through science or any other method. You can prove things in math because math is all made up. Sevens don't actually "exist." Those of us who operate in reality don't have it quite so easy. The type of "proof" you're talking about is not only impossible, but more importantly, completely unnecessary. We risk our lives every day wearing shoes we can't prove won't explode, using keyboards we can't prove won't electrocute us, confident that gravity will not fail us and fling us off the face of the earth. The level of certainty science can provide is sufficient.
4. It is simply untrue that "heretics have always received rough treatment" in science. Look at Einstein, the most famous scientist of the 20th Century. Your example of the discovery of the role of H. pylori is more an indictment of the medical establishment, which at the time was very dogma-driven and insufficiently scientific in its thought (and remains so today). Also, those guys eventually won the Nobel, if you forget--hardly the Galileo treatment.
I think the biggest problem with your understanding of science is that you seem to think that the sole activity of science is in providing "facts" and studying "events." I would argue that the main activity of science is in creating models based on observations, then refining those models. You make a lot of the idea that science rejects unique events, but I would argue that the very idea of truly unique events is fundamentally incompatible with the model of the universe that science has provided (i.e. we're all made out of the same atoms, those atoms all move around according to the same rules, etc.). Science seeks not to collect random facts, but to discover the general underlying principles of reality (which you refer to as "the natural world," as if to imply there is another).