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Why Do People Believe in Ghosts?

Do you believe ghosts are real?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1 4.3%
  • No

    Votes: 13 56.5%
  • I'm not sure.

    Votes: 9 39.1%

  • Total voters
    23

Tellenbach

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Why Do People Believe in Ghosts?

A Harris poll from last year found that 42 percent of Americans say they believe in ghosts. The percentage is similar in the U.K., where 52 percent of respondents indicated that they believed in ghosts in a recent poll.

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I've never seen a ghost, but my sister claims she did when she was little. This is one of those "I have to see it myself" type of situations. I'm leaning towards them being real because hundreds of millions of people have seen ghosts according to various surveys and I do place some value on anecdotal evidence.
 

Lexicon

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I blame Harold Ramis.
 

chubber

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I just wish I could really sit down and have a conversation with one. You know what I mean?
 

Bush

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People like to have explanations for things.

More generally, people like comfort. Explanations are one of many things that can provide comfort, as there's often a fear of the unknown.
 

kyuuei

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Several reasons.

1. Because they saw one. If you all boil everything down everything is perception. You can SAY you had a girlfriend of 5 years... but maybe one day she decides to deny your relationship back then. She says it never happened, that he's delusional, etc. Does that make it fake? Because she said it doesn't exist? Certainly not... but things will get gray from there. She's in denial, maybe you thought the relationship was stronger than it was and you were living in a dead relationship, etc. etc. Perception, reality, and the way our experiences blend with those things influences heavily the way we do things. When we see something, and actively experience it, it is very hard to deny it exists. It's why many things exist, whether they're real or not: stereotypes, beauty, etc. Experiencing something is NOT objective truth in and of itself--but it is hard to argue with experience.. most of our basis for the way we do things comes from it.

2. We don't have a better explanation. Thousands of people, spanning all walks of life and culture, have some form of spirit, ghostly apparitions, energy fields, etc. Maybe it is ingrained in our biology to see these things, or think of these things... but whatever the reason, it's hard to argue with lots of people experiencing stuff all over the place. Die-hard people who believe NO no way there are ghosts are converted from one unexplained experience. And you gotta feel for the people who have been through things like poltergeists--how do you explain things like that? They didn't worship anything, or think about ghosts constantly... it just invaded their lives. And they had no way else to think about it and handle it. Science says there is no way there is a ghost pouring out your food and setting your house on fire... supernatural believers tell you its a ghost, cleanse your house, call a priest, move away... and at the end of the day, the supernatural people have a BETTER viable solution that tends to work. Science says it can't exist, therefore it doesn't, so just figure out who's doing it and fix that. It's hard to say, "there's no ghost.. but... move out of your house anyways. Your neighbors might we whack. I dunno." Until cool science stuff has something better... I wouldn't be so quick to judge and discredit either. Sure stuff on TV is fake and or made to entertain.. but some of it is people just saying what happened to them in the only way they know how.

3. It's not impossible yet. We don't have anything to truly, objectively 100% discredit things like supernatural activity. We just don't. We have theories, and plausible things, and the known unknown (like how we were pretty sure those desert rocks didn't move on their own but we didn't know why for like ever)... but as long as we don't have anything to for sure rule it out, people are going to believe more is there. And it's not unreasonable to believe that.. It takes a bit of faith and belief on both the spiritual/supernatural side and the science/better-explanation-here side to search for answers and find them.
 

Qlip

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I've had experiences that most people would chalk up to the existence of ghosts. I just prefer to acknowledge the event, but let the reasons be undetermined until I know more. Things like this are really difficult to know more about.
 

á´…eparted

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I've never seen a ghost, but my sister claims she did when she was little. This is one of those "I have to see it myself" type of situations. I'm leaning towards them being real because hundreds of millions of people have seen ghosts according to various surveys and I do place some value on anecdotal evidence.

First, I'll start by saying I do not believe in "ghosts" or anything that could be considered one. We would have to do lots of defining on what a ghost is to really sort out what people mean, but that's another discussion.

I find this interesting for you to say for two reasons. The first is that your taking into account a large group opinion (which I have seen you very often disregard), and it is also anecdotal. The latter part is a problem. As I have told you before I actually put a heavy weight on group opinions. This is one case though where group opinion shouldn't be considered. In particular because it's asking a general population, not a specific group.

Anecdotal evidence is widely regarded and known to be unreliable. While it can be used to infer things and lead us in a direction for further investigation, it's rare for it to be used for something iron clad. Especially for something as solid as proof of existence.

I actually believe the concepts of ghosts to be very similar to what microbial diseases used to be considered many centuries ago. In many communities it was thought to be due to possession, spells, etc. or some sort of magic. Part of this is because for the time the explaination was easy and made sense. Further, it could be expanded upon enough to create tools, rituals and whatnot to make it seem like something was being done to affect it. The affects were often minimal, but it was enough to offer some sort of apparent support of it. There was never anything solid about it. We now know definitively what was behind this: microbial diseases.

With ghosts and anything that can fall under that catagory, we really don't know what they are. That being said, it's extremely unlikely that they are as people assume them to be, even similarly to that. Why? Because there remains unexplored rational and solid causes behind many of these. The biggest likely culprit behind ghosts is the human brain. Hopefully this will be sorted out in the next several decades due to the BRAIN initiative. We know that psychology is incredibly complex and poorly understood because of how poorly understood the brain is. However, we do know that the brain can and does cause delusions, hallucinations, and other anomolies in people. Sometime rather healthy people as well (meaning they don't have to have some sort of ailment or psychological disease). Based on this, it stands to reason that ghosts could in reality be a complex interplay between the brain, how it processes information from the environment, and the circumstances around the person at the moment. There could be external environmental factors as well. Also, ghosts often impart emotion, and very strong emotions at that in individuals experiencing them. They are very often negative emotions, but can be positive. Either way, emotions are powerful and illogical influencers.

The fact of the matter is that ghosts, spirits, etc. don't have any solid evidence to support their existence as they are commonly defined by people. The major lynchpin being that they are assumed sentient in some manner. It's rather illogical to take this poor assumption as opposed to investigating or regarding possibilites that have solid backing in reality. This is quite similar to occam's razor which state that, in the absence of a proveable answer, the correct one is often the simplest based upon what we know. This is how science often begins and works through solving problems.
 
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Scaring yourself is fun.

And the mind is incredibly powerful at playing tricks on itself.

In fact, approximately 100% of humans believe in something that isn't true whatsoever, not even close.

2 examples of about 3 billion: "I'm WAY less cool than I am" "I'm WAY MORE cool than I am."
 

Magic Poriferan

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People don't like feeling that they don't know things and can't influence things.

The true answer to things is often complicated and requires a high investment for comprehension.

Ghosts imitate concepts people already know and play into cognitive biases like false positive bias and anthropomorphic bias, etc...

EDIT: I should add that ghosts are an ancient idea (probably due to us not having a realistic idea of much of anything back in the day) and have remained a failure popular one. That means it is also an inherited idea. People don't just invent the idea of ghosts on their own, the draw it from the culture, the culture keeps it alive.
 

indra

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When a bird flies on my approach, what does the object of their fear appear as?

We believe in ghosts much the same - there is an abstraction from the objective stimulus that exists in our minds as a conglomeration from all we should fear (or hold dear).
 

Tellenbach

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Hard said:
The biggest likely culprit behind ghosts is the human brain.

Or they could be holographic projections from an advanced but mischievous alien intelligence.

Hard said:
Anecdotal evidence is widely regarded and known to be unreliable.

I've also seen non-anecdotal evidence of ghosts.

chubber said:
I just wish I could really sit down and have a conversation with one. You know what I mean?

Play around with a ouija board and let us know if it works.
[MENTION=4939]kyuuei[/MENTION] great post but do you believe in ghosts?
 

á´…eparted

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Or they could be holographic projections from an advanced but mischievous alien intelligence.

This is exactly what I was trying to make a distinction about in regards to Occam's razor. Which of these is more likely? We have seen no evidence so far that alien races exist, just the remote possibility that they do. Granted, it's almost a given that life exists outside our planet with recent research combined with the vastness of space. Intelligent life though, we know little on the likelyhood. The fact of the matter is, that scenario has just so much complexity, and so many assumptions that it's simply not worth regarding with much weight.

However, we DO know far more about what the human brain is capable of. For this reason this is the much more logical conclusion to think that this is the result of the mind, and this is what should be investigated. Weight needs to be given to each scenario based on its impact. Knowing this, it's actually illogical to consider it's a holographic projection.

I've also seen non-anecdotal evidence of ghosts.

You mean personally? Such as?
 

Tellenbach

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Tellenbach

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Something is amiss here. We know that roughly 40% of Americans believe in ghosts and while I know that this forum isn't exactly representative of the general population, I still expect a couple of "yes" responses to the poll (especially given the greater proportion of INFJs here). I suspect that many are afraid to admit they believe in ghosts for fear of ridicule. It's a private poll; don't be scared.
 

LonestarCowgirl

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I'm not scared. I believe. By the authority of the one true almighty God, Lord Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, I command them to go. That sends them packing back to outer darkness. It works.
 

kyuuei

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great post but do you believe in ghosts?

I haven't been given much reason to or not to.. I'd like to think they exist, because it validates a lot of things in our lives.. I'm not positive I know for sure, and I don't pretend to know for sure either way. I haven't seen one, but I've had strange things happen, so the short answer is "Yes" but with a "kind of" disclaimer.
 

toluene

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didn't they just make a movie about that study you linked? saving to read for later, thanks for sharing.

i think most people who believe in ghosts do it for reasons kyuuei described, which end up being acceptably credible and logically consistent within their own framework/situation.
  i haven’t read this particular study and can’t make claims about their methodological strength but i’ve seen a couple studies on this topic recently and think they are very cool.
    The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour
 
 basically, superstitions and superstitious behavior look like just another form of pattern recognizing behavior with an evolutionary payout, similar in their own way to rationality and other exclusive systems of thought, and are most likely something we would see in any organism with selection pressure in this area.
 

Tellenbach

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toluene said:
didn't they just make a movie about that study you linked?

I'm not aware of any movie made on that subject, but "The Conjuring" is supposed to be based on a true story. I haven't seen it but if I see talking dolls or rocking chairs rocking by themselves, I can imagine that it'd change my world view.
 
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