Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Two theories presented here that ghosts aren't the spirits of dead people. I have my reservations. Many ghosts tend to hang around places of violent death and suffering. They seem connected to that event somehow. Then again I am familiar with the case in Canada where a group of seance attendees created a fictional ghost character and successfully interacted with it. So maybe they're onto something here..

https://merryghosthunter.wordpress.com/2...ly-ghosts/

Okay, just to wade briefly into the Richard Rorty approach of "You're not thinking hard enough to achieve freedom from _x_ convention, not trying hard enough to conceive alternatives to _x_ convention, not striving like a post-philosophy, post-naturalist neopragmatist to be liberated from a current era's school of interpretation..."

Quote:According to Hudson, the subconscious or, as he calls it, the subjective mind is capable of creating ghosts. Furthermore, the subjective mind of an entranced spiritualist medium can telepathically cooperate with another person to create an apparition. Don’t get the idea, though, that such apparitions are experienced only by the party or parties engaged in creating them.

Well, in this spin I'm going to assume they are confined just to the experiences of the novel group-entity.

There's the curious integration or emergence of individual psychology and behavior into collective psychological and behavioral processes. Whether mass hallucination, mass hysteria, or just the plain old mob wherein the lone person suddenly loses its own discipline and intelligence for the group's stupidity and atavistic motives.

Of course, the "crowd entity" and its powers can be explained in terms of natural relationships / mechanisms providing the mediation between the human components, with the internal structural properties of each receptive / emitting body providing the rest. But what if there are plural appearances sharing qualitative "space" with the usual "normal" appearance of "what's going on" and its functional connections? Rival appearances which cognition is only arbitrarily driven to access on rare occasions. To clarify...

"Physicalism is the thesis that [...] everything supervenes on the physical. [...] ‘physicalism’ is no doubt related to ‘physics’..."

"Everything supervening on the physical" would apparently include the [so-called] mind's parallel microcosm of familiar, phenomenal events supervening on distributed areas of the brain's shifting electrochemical activity. But given that there is at least this one astonishing everyday "reality" of visual, aural, and tactile manifestations which consciousness features... What if there were more, what if there was a multiplex of different, parallel ways of "show-interpreting" the stuff which physics (and biology) treats as the non-deceptive source, which was "riding" and intertwining along with the mundane, easily accessed version?

Plus, what if these alternative experiences -- including quite alien presentations other than the known visual, aural, and tactile ones -- actually outran brain cognition and this unique or near-magical ability of conjuring granted to matter as neural tissue? IOW, even the particle-mediated forces and interactions integrating humans into a crowd-psychology occurrence would have this multiplex of rival appearances of "what's going on" supervening on them.

In which case, orthodox and resistant Skeptic Guest doesn't perceive / feel any of the ghostly appearances in the room which the "paranormal hive-mind or mob" claims to, as well any unconventional "explanations" which might be ferreted out for such when those "funny folks" are consciously receptive to and exploring that particular "tuned-in" channel of the phenomenal multiplex.

- - - - - - - - -

"But wait a minute! Why all this paranoia? Isn't this regime wildly popular? Isn't Vladimir Putin's popularity close to 90 percent? Well, yes. But the Kremlin understands all too well that the sky-high public support is largely based on a collective hallucination -- a euphoric patriotic purple haze resulting from the annexation of Crimea and the illusion that Russia is again a superpower. And they understand that once everybody comes down from this television-induced acid trip and hungover Russians have a clear view of their new reality, there's gonna be hell to pay." http://www.rferl.org/content/the-end-of-...44789.html

I have no idea where the objective ends and the subjective begins. If somebody had told me when I was a teen that by the age of 50 I would be conversing nightly with objective persons that can only be heard from inside my own head and who are neither self-generated hallucinations nor spirit beings, I'd say you're crazy. To what extent am I myself just a brain construct inside my own head, acting and behaving as if I were some tangible irreducible being? Persons in the end are constructs of exchanged energy, objectified and consensually experienced according to the template of spoken words and interactive heartfelt empathy. If a person can reside in the brain matter inside our our skulls, what's to keep them from being projected over the cognitive schemata of our immediate world, not necessarily materially but as manipulators of energy? Stories of mind-spawned tulpas notwithstanding:

"Hehe, daddy taught me this one,” said Storm, a tulpa hosted by Ryan Painter from Oregon, who typed her words into an email for me. “Cogito Ergo Sum—I think therefore I am,” she continued. “I’m not totally independent, though; I have to use my host’s brainpower to think and we occasionally get jammed when we're trying to think at once.”

Tulpamancers note how their creations say unexpected things, recall forgotten memories and make them laugh. “I can recall any hidden or faded memory that [my host] has forgotten,” said KT, a tulpa hosted by Sam Isatis from Maryland. “I control a lot of her subconscious functions—as a joke I even made her yawn multiple times a few months back.”

....Back in Wrocław, Maciej is in his wonderland with Kitsune. She’s now over a month old. “Souls—we don't believe in such things,” Kitsune told me via Maciej’s email. “It's just an illusion that our minds create. Maciej and I are created from bunch of neurons; we live together and we die together.”
===http://www.vice.com/read/tulpamancy-inte...ulture-892

(Feb 10, 2016 01:12 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]. . . If a person can reside in the brain matter inside our our skulls, what's to keep them from being projected over the cognitive schemata of our immediate world, not necessarily materially but as manipulators of energy? Stories of mind-spawned tulpas notwithstanding:

Those who have tried their hand at writing fiction are often surprised at how the characters almost start producing their own dialogue and behavior independent of the author having to creatively think about it. Even to the point of changing some of the original plot or outline of the story due to their personalities and decisions developing in unexpected ways. Tales converted to memes might also infect others, to where a particular character's "program" is being run on numerous brains. That's how even a presumed mythical deity could exist as thought-virus "software" and be introducing events into the non-virtual world via both the good and evil deeds performed by its followers. Because it lacks a definite location in space (is distributed around), the information-deity might be considered a kind of disembodied, generalized or abstract pseudo-spirit.

The multiple realizability thesis of philosophy of mind, where different neural patterns could instantiate the same mental representation from person to person, invites its opposite of the same brain-state corresponding to different, multiple representations. Add to that the synchrony of them all being superposed on or correlating to that in-common electrochemical activity at the same time. But our embodied cognition / awareness only tending to choose or to be conscious of "living" in only one of those (usually the "mainstream" experiences we've been conditioned to or the worldview which Western secular culture has gradually crafted, so to speak).

That's the angle I was speculatively taking, combined with a pan-protopsychism that had such a "phenomenal multiplex" outrunning individual brains and supervening on all the global, fundamental substrate advocated by physicalism. ["All emergent stories and appearances -- no matter how wild -- correlate to some particular structure and dynamics involving the basic furniture of physics, similar to how the magical virtual reality of even a sorcery-fantasy game is ultimately grounded in the basics of a computer."]

So that even the particle and field relationships "out there" providing such and such explanation science-wise could be said to acquire different appearances and support different theories when a person's perceptions shift to an unconventional worldview in the phenomenal multiplex (i.e., becoming receptive to ghosts or whatever). Like that of a group of believers united into their paranormal crowd-psychology entity, who experienced a "mass hallucination" of spook-affairs that would then have more to it in terms of "realness" and the causes than what would otherwise be the case with skeptical, naturalist evaluations of what was going on. It seems kind of the essence of what some Wilfrid Sellars -inspired postmodernists like Rorty were handwaving ambiguously at, as an underlying reason (even in the context of physicalism) for the claim that "any culture's worldview is just as true as any other".

For the Australian aborigine, however, the ancient murky stage of Dreamtime where one could causally cross from _x_ alternate interpretation of reality to another has selectively pared itself down to the Western cosmos as the mainstay. A brief trip to trance or drug-induced Wonderlands are still possible, but the rigid standards and events of ScienceWorld will rudely jar the adventurer back to its domain.

"Consider the experimental findings of John Hutchison, the electromagnetics pioneer in British Columbia, Canada. After running his devices for a certain length of time, effects began to occur that were identical to what have come to be regarded as poltergeist phenomena. Paranormal researcher Albert Budden has asserted, "(Hutchison's) discovery reveals without a doubt that poltergeist activity is electromagnetic in nature."

Some of the documented Hutchison effects are; objects of various materials levitating into the air or moving about and then falling, fires appearing in unlikely places, and from a distance of 80 feet away, a mirror smashed. Solid metal also distorted, broke, or became white hot but didn't burn any surrounding materials, water swirled in containers and strange lights appeared in the air and suddenly vanished.

According to Albert Budden, "Everything that psychical researchers have been documenting for decades as poltergeist activity and that priests have been called in to exorcise, eventually turned up in the laboratory where John Hutchison's device operated. Although it was made up of different parts, it operated as a single entity, and phenomena occurred in the same unpredictable way as reported poltergeists: You could be there for days and nothing would happen, then suddenly coins would flip and fly, water would swirl and a transformer would blow."

There are of course skeptics and scientists who assert that all poltergeist activity that they can't prove as fraud, are either self-delusion or pseudo-psychic phenomena. For instance, under some circumstances they believe poltergeists are caused by scientifically explained obscure physical effects such as electromagnetic fields, static electricity, ionized air, abnormal air currents, underground tremors or infra and ultra-sound..."===http://www.ghoststudy.com/articles/lists...10008.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP9J4-uw0Wo

It's probably not a stretch to say that on some level we are basically electromagnetic entities. What we are seeing with our bodies is essentially the effect of a brain-internal electomagnetic field selectively guiding the synaptic firings to make us sense and move. All that is required to posit a ghost or a poltergeist is a field structure induced by a conglomerate of wood/rock/metal for such a proto intelligence to subsist and feed off atmospheric EMF and present brains. The intelligence might evolve in a self-organizing way, naturally selected towards personality by the rewarding emotional reactions of the persons present.