Comment on Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

• WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Near death experiences are a tricky thing to study. There are physiological explanations for much of it, such as weird brain activity is likely to be interpreted as a weird experience.

  These people would have no way of having knowing this stuff unless they’ve seen it for themselves, which would have been physically impossible.

  The problem of this argument is confirmation bias. An anecdote of seeing information you couldn’t have seen and being right is going to be more memorable than seeing information and being wrong.

  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

  Nah I think statistics can very very easily explain several hundred apparent out-of-body near-death-experiences out of the millions or billions of people who would have had a chance to experience near-death over recent history.

  I did some googling of my own and found some studies on the topic from seemingly reputable sources that suggested physiological explanations might not be sufficient to explain the patterns they saw. Several of these had the same first author. I also found plenty of studies suggesting physiological explanations can be sufficient, as well as some specific criticisms of the couple studies that suggested they weren’t sufficient.

  It’s interesting for sure that there is a doctor or two who seem to believe in the supernatural. The topic of near death experience seems to be of research interest regardless of any supernatural theories because of what it tells us about the brain.

  It seems we will likely arrive at scientific consensus about near death experience in the future. I wouldn’t hold my breath that supernatural theories will survive that process.

  events that transpired when they had no brain activity.

  I think I saw the case this was talking about during my googling. It said “no suspected brain activity” which is not the same as confirmation of “no brain activity”.

  That’s the problem with a book like the one you are describing. It’s deliberately cherry picked, exaggerated, and biased to drive you to a certain conclusion.

  I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.

  Here’s a place to start.

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  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Thanks for your response. If you and I agree on anything it’s that we should do more science to understand this stuff better.

    The scientific method involves looking at both the cases where it seems like something happened and the cases where nothing happened (e.g. someone said they had an experience but it clearly didn’t match reality). If you cherry pick just the events that “showed” what you want, that’s confirmation bias.

    Confirmation bias is real, but this isn’t it. If I believe that all swans are white , and then I come across a black swan, should I just dismiss that data point because it would confirmation bias (perhaps people would accuse me of wanting this outcome)? No. Ignoring the black swan isn’t the way to go here. It wouldn’t be ridding ourselves of confirmation bias, it would be ridding ourselves of critical data that contradicts our starting hypothesis.

    Similarly: even if supernatural stuff that is hard to explain happens in only a percentage of cases, discarding that data isn’t ridding ourselves of confirmation bias; it’s simply choosing to ignore critical data. That’s not good science.

    I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.

    This is what I started with, so for the longest time I was very skeptical, just like most people in this thread. It is my belief that anyone with an open mind who takes in all the information on this topic (including the studies that suggest supernatural outcomes and those that don’t; the first-hand accounts and the skeptical rebuttals) will inevitably come to the same conclusion that I have. That was my experience, anyway. This is not a conclusion I was looking for; I was really stubbornly against this stuff for the longest time, but I was forced to change my mind.

    It’s also worth noting that the book talks about more than just near-death experiences; I just used them as an example.

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    • clean_anion@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      This can be verified by asking people who have had near-death experiences whether or not they experienced something correct in their near-death experiences. Obviously, such experiences are traumatic, and multiple studies show that people can hallucinate due to the release of various neurotransmitters associated with the same.

      We want to calculate the probability that someone manifested as a ghost given that they had an interesting near-death experience. We assume that anyone having a true supernatural experience experiences visions that are absolutely true. For each person, there are two possibilities (we’ll calculate the probability of each later).

      The first possibility is that a person, in fact, experienced hallucinations. The second possibility is that a person experienced a ghostly manifestation.

      Now, we further give people an objective multiple-choice quiz about the positions of various objects in an environment. To generate this quiz, we ask each person to choose the environment they believe themselves to have manifested in. We verify that they have never been to this environment before and did not have any method of knowing about this environment (e.g., if a subject saw a person going into a room and later gave an exact description of the person in the given room, it will be disregarded). We only test people who believe that they experienced a supernatural event. All options are framed in an equivalent manner and are presented in a randomized order to remove cognitive biases and implement double-blind protocols. We further use questions with non-obvious answers such that they differ from previous implementations (e.g., a vision of a surgery table with an overhead light is obvious, and by itself, not indicative of supernatural phenomena).

      If the subject hallucinated, we assume that they have a random chance of predicting the positions of various objects. We now repeat this quiz a large number of times in accordance with the law of large numbers. If, after many repetitions, we find a sufficient deviation from the expected result (e.g., if each question had one correct answer and three incorrect answers, with the observed rate of correct answers being 50% instead of 25%), then we would have evidence supporting the existence of ghosts.

      If, however, the results show no sufficient deviation from the expected results, then we would find that the probability of a perceived encounter being supernatural is approximately zero.

      In this way, we can use scientific methods to test claims of ghost-like phenomena.

      NOTE: If we only focus on the 25% of the cases as mentioned in the above example, we find that we are not focusing on the remaining 75% of the cases. Presenting only 25% of the cases, without giving any thought to the remaining 75% of the cases is an incorrect method of analysis as explained above.

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    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Confirmation bias is when the outcome could be adequately explained by luck.

      In the topic of near death experiences, if there are 1,000,000 near death experiences and 100 involve someone “knowing something they shouldn’t be able to”, those 100 cases are more likely to be remembered or recorded as significant than the other 900,000 cases. This can lead to an apparent statistical significance in correctly knowing “unknowable” information, when really it’s just people “guessing” correctly.

      The “black swan” scenario is a bit different but it would be something like if you are more likely to record a swan sighting if the swan is black, you will significantly overestimate the frequency of black swans.

      Im not saying the cases of apparent supernatural effects should be ignored, I’m saying they need to be taken in the context of all similar events, including the mundane, to understand if there even is an effect (knowing something that shouldn’t be possible) or if it’s just a handful of lucky guesses.

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      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        In the topic of near death experiences, if there are 1,000,000 near death experiences and 100 involve someone “knowing something they shouldn’t be able to”, those 100 cases are more likely to be remembered or recorded as significant than the other 900,000 cases

        These are nowhere near the real numbers. No one could realistically conduct a study on near death experiences that included 1,000,000 participants 

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• Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

  The power of the book is that it just inundates you with credible stories (and credible science!) from credible people

  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.

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  • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I would still believe in gravity.

    I believe in helium balloons too. Does that mean I don’t believe in gravity?

    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

    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.

    There’s simply no good reason for such “credible science” to go unnoticed.

    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.

    To be honest I’m still not sure why that convinced you.

    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.

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    • bunchberry@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.

      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 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.

      But there are also good reasons these days to consider putting the preferred foliation back in. 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.

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      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Thank you for this haha. Its very interesting and a nice break from arguing with everyone here

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    • Mrs_deWinter@feddit.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I believe in helium balloons too. Does that mean I don’t believe in gravity?

      Physics can explain helium balloons really well. There’s no mystery here. And they’re certainly not disproving gravity.

      Einstein didn’t even get a nobel prize for special relativity because it was considered too radical at the time.

      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 but the kind of reaearchers 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.

      And why do you assume this science has gone ‘unnoticed’? We’re talking about it, aren’t we?

      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: 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.

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      • ageedizzle@piefed.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        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

        Okay, I revise my request. Please just read the books bibliography and read the peer-reviewed research that it cites.

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• SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Dude…no one fact checks those books and bullshit sells.

  No one buys a book that says nothing happens when you die.

  No one comes back from clinical death unless the medical staff fucked up.

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