Ghosts? Anyone Ever Experience Unexplained Things?

I've seen several passing members of my family in a dream the night before they passed. Mostly younger images not previously seen. I've had several dreams of my brother passing whom I don't speak with anymore, but have stopped calling to find out (not drug/felony related...just an argument we never got over).

Lived in a "shotgun" house....some of you older folks may know the description. Sounds of walking across that OLD timber flooring is not to be mistaken. Apparently even wood was hard as nails back then...no clue how that even happened (wood getting weaker). Was sitting at a small desk playing an Atari and ball-point pen that was sitting on the desk next to me was picked up and thrown against the wall about 3 feet to my left. The kicker that I play out in my head head is that:
a. Both of my hands were on the controller and on my lap (so it wasn't my hands)
b. No one else was in the house (no possibility of familial interaction)
c. There were no fans, wind movement to cause such action.
d. The action against the object (ball-point pen) created a trajectory that increased its relative elevation.

In other words, I was being a dumb kid playing an outdated game system and this pen, for no reason, literally went from the desk (which was sitting at about 4 feet high) and hit the wall on my left side at about 6 feet. No clue, but I left the room.

I have shit-tons other experiences that have baffled me like this, but several others that I personally debunked.

Either something is there or I'm psychologically off...either are worthy explanations.
 
Hey, @Muad'zin,

I agree with 90% of what you say, here...

...but I hope you won't be offended if I push for additional information, or minor corrections, on two points?

(WARNING: I'm about to be pedantic. Probably nobody here gives as much of a crap about this as I do, since it's sort of a hobby. Anyone who is bored by history should just skip this and go to the next-posted ghost story.)

Re: "A thousand years ago lightning, famine, war, pestilence was all caused by divine intervention.": We want to be careful that we don't attribute beliefs to our recent ancestors that were only held by our extremely distant ancestors. What you say is likely true ten thousand years ago, or five. But a thousand years ago the standard astronomy textbook for the educated in Europe was Ptolemy's Almagest (which correctly describes the distance of the spherical earth to the stars as being "so vast as to make the earth itself seem a mathematical point of no size"), and various Bestiaries (like that describing the rhinoceros of India, from which the Greek "mono-ceros" was translated to the Latin "uni-cornos," birthing the medieval unicorn tapestries), and the Code of Justinian (with its trial-by-jury and legal proceduralism still referenced in the Napoleonic code and thence to today's European courts). All these were legacies of the Roman era widely consulted in Charlemagne's push for literacy in the 800's. Before that, even in the era of pagan Rome, you'd have had guys like Marcus Aurelius and the neo-Platonists attributing all of the above to natural forces. The neo-Platonists were Classical Theists, and saw God (singular) as the ultimate cause for the ability of natural forces to -- sorry to use philosophical jargon, but if I'm pushing for accuracy I have to say things accurately -- instantiate the Platonic forms of their substantial types, but that's a rather more abstract kind of causation than the more cartoonish Zeus hurling thunderbolts! Then of course Christianity is legalized by Constantine, and 75 years later, made official under Theodosius. That brings in the Genesis 1 Judaic notion that the natural visible world is just stuff, rather than gods: The sun and moon aren't divine, but are merely "lights" to be hung in the sky by God for the convenience of illuminating the day and the night. By the time Augustine of Hippo, a former neo-Platonist, is writing on such things around 400 A.D., the view that every lightning-strike is the capricious act of an individual deity is culturally gone, especially from the educated class, except as a mock-superstitious joke or a legacy of earlier pagan etymologies. Of course everyone in that period thinks that God can intervene in nature to smack someone with lightning, but they presume that normally He just grants natural forces their intrinsic natures, and they do what they normally do by carrying out what is natural to them.

Sorry, that's a lot of detail! ...but my reason for raising it is that so many folks believe a sort of historicist Urban Legend about the medievals: That they thought the earth was flat, didn't know the size of the universe, and perceived nature as non-intelligible. But not only were they not like that, but they actually made that same criticism of the barbarians who'd been invading them for the previous 500 years! It's one of the things they considered "barbaric" about them.

Re: "And the other part being that we hope they exist. Because sheer random chance being more scary then no afterlife, or no gods nor conspiracies pulling our strings.": First, of course I recognize the paraphrase of Rush's "Freewill" ;) ...but I'm not sure the attitude you describe is psychologically accurate of people "a thousand years ago" or more. In fact that notion of what's more scary (or less scary) is mostly American, and less than 150 years old. If one presumes a sort of non-judging "grandfather in Heaven" (as is popular in modern "Moral Therapeutic Deism," to use Christian Smith's term for it), then the existence of God becomes merely comforting, full-stop. But that's not the idea that was common from 400 A.D. to 1000 A.D., at all! The God of the "patristic era" is the "righteous judge" of the Psalms and of Jesus' preaching on Gehenna, bringing with Him a crushing weight of moral obligation: "Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." Folks in that era thought sheer random chance, and oblivion instead of an afterlife, would be far less scary than hell (!), and the segment of the population who took religion seriously (never 100%) thought going to hell was a realistic possibility. So we don't want to ascribe the attitudes of 20th/21st century post-Christian North American youth culture to the Roman, Byzantine, and Carolingian eras. Before that, of course, was the era of Greek, and then Roman, polytheism. Their "afterlife" was a dusky amnesiac Hades; and the interaction of the gods with men was largely capricious. To the degree they believed in nature being predictable, that brought them hope; for apart from that, nature could be viewed only as a meaningless and unjust threat from the gods. The sheer arbitrariness of the gods' behavior left them looking over their shoulders all the time, periodically sacrificially appeasing the gods like a woman trying to placate an abusive boyfriend. That's why Owen Barfield and G.K. Chesterton describe the whole attitude of classical literature towards "life and the cosmos" as a sort of "resigned pessimism": There's no point to it, it usually sucks for no reason, and then you die.

...

None of that is to deny your basic premise, @Muad'zin. :) Yes, we're pattern-recognition creatures. Yes, we sometimes psychologically prime ourselves for wish-fulfillment (or, fear-fulfillment). Yes, we can assume that most reports of spooky goings-on are going to turn out (if it were possible to examine them adequately) to have resulted from imagination, or prevarication, or self-deception, or misunderstanding. And if you replace "most" with "all," I won't get persnickety about that (even if I think I have good reasons to disagree).

It's really more the Urban Legends about history you were using as supporting evidence -- the popular notions about how people felt about topics like God/gods and nature, and what kinds of views brought them hope or fear, in previous centuries -- that I was keen to push back on. If you read what they said for themselves, it turns out they were quite reasonable, and far less superstitious than pop-culture caricatures give them credit for. They lacked the technology for investigating certain things, of course! ...but they did as well as anybody could expect with the tools they had available, and it looks very much like they'd have thought about the natural world much as we do, if only high-powered telescopes and microscopes had existed at the time.

Okay. Done now. Sorry for the length.
I took no offense at all and thank you for your attempt to spread some enlightenment. I agree that our medieval ancestors were not as primitive as later generations have made them out to be. This is one of the reasons I love to watch Shadiversity's youtube channel, who has tackled literacy in medieval times and shown that while most people couldn't read or write latin, they could still al too often read or write in their own language.
 
@BrienHBrown:

All cool Doc, but do you believe in ghosts? :)

Hmm.

Yes, and No, and Sort Of. Let me explain...

(Once again: most folk will want to skip this, it'll probably be boring. But, you asked. So, if anyone's actually interested, here you go...)

My view is my own, but falls under the overall category of Aristotelianism/Thomism. The A-T view stands in opposition to the more well-known (and widely assumed in our culture) view called "Cartesian Dualism" after the early modern philosopher Rene Descartes. Followers of Descartes would treat a "soul" as some non-material mysterious or etherial substance, but nevertheless a complete thing in itself, by virtue of which a thinking entity can think and decide, which (arguably) is also the thing by which a thinking organism has memories, feelings, continuity, and identity. This idea means that if you think a tree or a pig has some spiritual aspect, then you think the tree or pig have "souls," but if they're no more than the matter they're made of, then you think they "don't have souls." Either way, the Cartesian says that "spirit" and "soul" mean roughly the same thing. When "eliminative materialist" philosophers (e.g. Alex Rosenberg) raise the "interaction problem" to deny the existence of anything spiritual, it is the Cartesian view they're generally pushing against.

The A-T view starts more modestly than the Cartesians, defining "soul" (anima) to mean just "whatever happens to be the principle according to which a particular organism is alive." That means that if a thing is alive, it has a soul (is animated), but this makes no supernatural claim: If the principle by which a holly-bush is alive is purely material principle which makes it grow, you say "it has a vegetative soul," without thereby making the claim that it goes to heaven when it dies! Likewise with animals: The principle by which my dog is alive causes her to "talk" at me (she's a husky) when she wants to go for a walk, and to shed a lot (husky, again), and to gnaw bones and leave "pee-mails" on every passing mailbox. These are very finite operations, very material and bodily in their nature: There's nothing necessarily spiritual about her "soul" (but she's a very good dog and I love her).

But the A-T view notes that certain operations of living humans seem not to be confinable to anything quantitative and finite. The classic examples are Qualia (non-quantitative aspects to experiences) and Reasoning About Universals (e.g. the syllogistic logic by which a finite thing can symbolize an infinitely applicable "form"), and also Exercise of Will (wherein a person makes a choice which is neither mechanistically forced on them from instinct or circumstances, nor intrinsically random, but which they do, and by doing it make something different of themselves than they were before, as if their very nature or identity was a cumulative outcome of their choices). These three things transcend the finite and quantitative aspect of reality and cannot, even in principle, be reduced to it or be an emergent property of it. (If anything it would have to be the other way 'round.)

The A-T view says that these transcendent things cannot even in principle be purely material; or else, that if they could, it would mean that all matter has something intrinsically transcendent about it. (A panentheist might perk up at this point.) That is: If your view of matter is positivistic, wherein you insist that matter is no more than the quantifiable, measurable things we bounce photons off, then certain operations of humans can't logically be material. In that case, something supernatural or subnatural or metanatural is real, and really affects the world, and human personhood somehow incorporates it. (This probably means humans have spiritual souls.) Contrariwise, if you allow that our limited apparatus for investigating matter might be insufficient to investigate all aspects of reality, then anything that seems to experience (Qualia), reason (Universals), and decide (Freewill) might be revealing that its "matter" is somehow spiritual matter. (Eliminative materialists are thereby put on the horns of a dilemma.)

BTW, you may have previously heard of "Beauty, Truth, and Goodness" referred to as "The Three Transcendentals." You can see how this corresponds roughly to Qualia, Reasoning, and Decision.

Sorry, I know that's a lot of set-up...hang on, we're almost there....

(continued in Part 2, below)
 
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(continuing from Part 1, above)

The Aristotelian-Thomist view says that "for a living organism, the soul is the form (not shape, but form in the philosophical sense) of the body." A-T affirms the human person as a body-soul composite, in which the soul is the "form" and the body is the "matter." It denies the Cartesian view in which your soul sort of "rides around" in a body the way you might drive a car (homunculism). By doing so, it overcomes the "interaction problem," but it comes at a price: It means that you are not just your soul. You also are your body. If someone punches you in the face, they've punched you. Just as a triangle drawn in crayon isn't just the wax by itself (the matter), nor just the idea of three lines forming a polygon (the form), but is the two things together (molecules of wax arranged into three lines joined at vertices); so, too, you aren't just the principle by which you're alive (soul), nor the $15.75 of chemicals that make up your body (the matter), but all of the above, together, so that that body is alive.

Now, the A-T view says that the principle by which a person is alive (their soul) clearly has material aspects: The blood is flowing, the brain is processing rather than decaying, et cetera. But it also says that a person's exercise of transcendentals points to operations of the soul which are non-material and non-composed. (The "non-composed" part is important, but take it on faith that there are good reasons to include it; I don't want to take the time to state them here.) That which is non-composed cannot, by definition, de-compose: It is not made of parts, so its parts can't "fall apart." (Remember, we're talking about something immaterial and non-spatial, here, so "parts" doesn't mean gears and cogs, it means something abstract like "distinct principles unified by some additional principle of union.")

The upshot is that your soul is both material (and composed on some external principle of unity) and immaterial (thus non-composed, not needing any further principle to be unified). Therefore, at the death of the body, your body decomposes because it loses the material principle of its being alive, BUT, some incomplete aspect of you -- whatever it is about you that reasons, experiences qualia, and formed your own character through your free decisions -- does NOT decompose. In fact it can't decompose, because it isn't composed to start with. This immaterial aspect is by definition, naturally, immortal. (There are thousands of pages written to further defend this view, but if you follow the logic, then you don't need to "believe" that you have an immortal soul; you can actually see that you do, logically, by careful reasoning alone.)

So: In my view, if there are "ghosts," then they are THAT: That immortal (willing, reasoning, experiencing) remnant of what is now an incomplete person (because it lacks the body, like a crayon triangle without the wax).

You can see that this is very different from the Cartesian view. In the Cartesian view this thing that experiences, reasons, and wills could potentially "hop into" other bodies, and is, moreover, still a complete thing without any body. On the Cartesian understanding, a "soul" might reasonably be experienced as a glowing orb that a body could lose and later regain (you may have seen this depicted in movies). Not so, with the A-T view.

On the A-T view, a body without a soul is a corpse, and a soul without a body is an immortal abstraction which may later become complete again if the body is either revivified (as in a Near Death Experience, or the biblical story of Lazarus), or (to kick it up a notch) actually Resurrected in a qualitatively different way, such that the new body becomes an ongoing perfect expression of the will, and thus the identity, of the soul whose body it is. Such a resurrected body would, as an expression of will, be exactly as immortal as the will generating it. This is depicted in a sci-fi way by the character of Dr. Manhattan in The Watchmen. In actual human history, there's only one reported example.

On this view, what are we to make of hauntings and apparitions and such-like?

Well, I think I would first have to deny the whole premise of the movie Ghostbusters, which I hate doing, because I thought it was a great, hilarious movie. (I'm referring purely to the first one, and prescinding entirely from gooey Statues of Liberty and later recastings.) You can't zap an immaterial thing with lasers or nuclear accelerators. You might just as well try to eliminate all pairs of things in the universe, all at once, by launching a nuclear missile at the Platonic Form Of Twoness. Gozer the Gozerian, either with the flat-top or in marshmallow form, is not a ghost or a spirit (or a "god," either, except perhaps in the Thor-being-a-powerful-alien-from-Asgard sense of the term).

But it's clear that this Qualia-Experiencing, Symbolically-Reasoning, and Freely-Acting aspect of the human person does interact somehow with matter. ("Interact" is the wrong term, since it takes us back into Cartesianism, but there's no good word in English for "uniting as the form of," since the word "inform" means something entirely different.) Also it seems that the brain is specifically involved. What then?

My guess -- and it's only that -- is that if the souls of the deceased have any power to interact with (inform) matter other than their own (now decomposed, and thus nonexistent) bodies, it is mostly at the point of affecting someone's brain by directly manipulating the matter associated with neurons.

And this is where I worry there might be a hole in my view. Most of the experiences traditionally associated with "ghosts" could be explained that way, but not all. Experiences of dread, suddenly-felt coldness: It's easy to see that these could be induced on a person by messing with their brains. But what're we to make of hauntings where the chair slides across the floor, the vase levitates and then smashes to earth, et cetera?

Well, I could write just those stories off as nonsense, because it doesn't fit my model. But that seems dishonest! To say: "I'll only allow such reports which provide evidence of my worldview, and exclude those which create problems for my worldview" is a pretty cheesy and dishonest approach!

I mentioned in a previous post that someone I know had been part of a sort of exorcism, but of a place rather than a person. It was a dorm room, in fact, where various objects would move and rattle, and it had the clichés of people getting chills and feelings of dread, and the lights flickering when other rooms were unaffected...all the usual tropes. If someone less reliable than this person had told me about it, I'd have been more skeptical; but I believe my friend (and anyway there were other witnesses).

If I bend my view of the spiritual soul a little bit, I could argue that if a spiritual soul can temporarily inform neuron-matter so as to induce hallucinatory experiences, it could also interact with less-suitable bits of matter, but only crudely, because those bits weren't properly-suited to manipulation by a soul.

Going out on a limb, I suggest that a "ghost" could therefore do these vaguely-telekinetic things, to get the attention from a living human, when they couldn't get their attention by inducing chills and goosebumps and the like.

But that's all guessing. Whereas I am logically convinced by the Aristotelian and Thomist reasoning for the stuff I said earlier, I'm much iffier when I try to reconcile it with particular ghost stories! ...and I don't even know which of the stories are fake, so I dare not modify my metaphysics too quickly. (I might be misled if I tried to reconcile my metaphysics with a story that never actually happened!)

...

Do I believe in ghosts? No, Yes, and Sort Of.

No, to the pop-culture Cartesian homunculus view, and No, to the Ghostbusters blobs that you can zap with technology, and I'm suspicious and skeptical of most individual reports.

Yes, to the idea that there is something about the human person which is non-material and does not de-compose, and thus survives death, and gives the living human his power to experience Qualia, to reason about Universals, and to exercise Will independent of biological determinism...and which might somehow interact with matter other than the now-decomposed body, after death.

Sort Of, in the sense that my metaphysics fits reasonably well with certain reports about hauntings, but less-well with other reports...and I'm open to the idea that my metaphysics needs correction, but it's pretty well-reasoned and I'm not going to toss all of it overboard on the basis of reports which might be fake or imagined or misunderstood.

Fair enough?
 
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I took no offense at all and thank you for your attempt to spread some enlightenment. I agree that our medieval ancestors were not as primitive as later generations have made them out to be. This is one of the reasons I love to watch Shadiversity's youtube channel, who has tackled literacy in medieval times and shown that while most people couldn't read or write latin, they could still al too often read or write in their own language.

Cool! I like Shadiversity, too. 👍
 
Yes, to the idea that there is something about the human person which is non-material and does not de-compose, and thus survives death, and gives the living human his power to experience Qualia, to reason about Universals, and to exercise Will independent of biological determinism...and which might somehow interact with matter other than the now-decomposed body, after death.


Fair enough?

Fair enough, thanks for the dialogue! I'm far too mentally lazy to respond with an equal amount of detail, but I think your summary paragraph above resonates most strongly with the various philosophies I find most appealing to me personally. I'm not well versed on the A-T view, does it provide any commentary on the relationship of 'consciousness/immaterialism/The Three Transcendentals' to 'materialism' in regard to which is more "fundamental"? Based upon your statements, it certainly seems to take more of an "idealism" stance vs "materialism" (in that particular dimension of philosophical "buckets of thought"), but does it regard consciousness as "more fundamental" than materialism or are they simply complementary to each other? The A-T view is obviously NOT materialism, and I've never met a materialist that believes in ghosts in a yes/sort-of kind of way, it's typically a definite NO! I'm sure there was a reason that you didn't use the term "consciousness" anywhere in your explanation above, and I also realize a few paragraphs on philosophy in a guitar gear forum cannot come close to do any of this justice. I'm just having fun, thanks for your entertaining responses! I'm also definitely going to have to check out Shadiversity, I'm not familiar with it.
 
As an atheist myself I was discussing with a close friend of mine who's super religious about this gray area between Science & Religion, either way, we agreed upon how fascinating it is and somehow a fun thing to think about (until you experience some weird shit for yourself, LOL).

Personally, I've never "seen" a ghost or any physical manifestation of sorts. But "seen" is the keyword here...

When I was in high school we did a field trip to Chiapas, one region from Mexico where there are lots of native, indigenous population whose culture involves lots of mysticism. We stayed at one town surrounded by mountains and rain forest, and there's a legend from the Mayans that there are some sort of elves or goblins called "Aluxes" who are either benevolent or mischief makers. Anyway... the people of the hotel we stayed in told us this story of "Diego", an Aluxe who lives there and how he's a good "dude" but can be naughty from time to time, you know the classic banter they gave to tourists. Long story short, my girlfriend at the time and her friends came out of their room screaming because they saw something and the hair dryer in the bathroom suddenly started working, lights flipping... all classic b-movie shit, LOL. Sure thing I was amused and started swearing and taunting at the so-called goblin, cracking myself.

But I kid you not, I SWEAR for anything that later that night I was already sleeping in my room when I felt something pulling me off the bed and woke up to find myself half-way through the edge of the bed. Immediately turned the lights on and was expecting my friends shitting their pants in laughter at the prank they've just pulled on me, but they were dead on sleep, and I know them well enough to know they won't be capable of contain their laughter.

To this day, they won't believe me, but that's the most fucked up thing that has happened to me...

Around that time, my grandfather passed away and several family friends told us how they saw him walking down the street or in a park nearby right before they even knew of his passing. We have a country house where our neighbors told us they saw him smoking in the garden, again, without knowing of his passing...

The last supernatural event I remember is as a teen, being in my room way late at night chatting via MSN Messenger and hearing like someone was dragging a rock or something in the rooftop. The next night, same thing... so I told my dad about it and he didn't gave any importance until one night he actually heard it too and a loud "thud" in our garden. Now, we have dogs, and they're the kind of dogs that just bark for literally anything. That night they were totally silent, and that was the most bizarre thing about the whole incident. We checked our rooftop, the garden, the whole house to find what it was and nothing... The "dragging a rock on the rooftop" thing happened another 3 or 4 times, always late at night and never found what the hell that was.

I know that some people are more "sensitive" to that kind of stuff, my mom has told me about the many times she's saw a shadow passing by outside the backyard window. A close friend's mom also has her own stories of seeing weird shit in their house.
 
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This thread is fascinating. I have a few stories to share, and will do so. First, I'd like to get a sense from this group of our collective willingness to suspend disbelief, and what would constitute "sufficient evidence" (not "proof", as that's probably impossible) ?
 
This thread is fascinating. I have a few stories to share, and will do so. First, I'd like to get a sense from this group of our collective willingness to suspend disbelief, and what would constitute "sufficient evidence" (not "proof", as that's probably impossible) ?

I think the nature of the scientific method makes evidence of any kind impossible to verify. I mean, how do you peer review something like that? Just from my super limited experiences, it seems even two people witnessing the same "event" will experience it differently, or one experience it and the other not at all. There's no way to control or repeat those kind of variables.

Personally, I don't think there's any question there are non-physical, sentient entities interacting with our world. But, I only think that cause I've seen stuff. I would not expect most educated, reasonable people to believe any of this kind of paranormal stuff until they've seen it, and seen it more than once. The prevailing wisdom makes way more sense... but it's absolutely wrong.
 
When I was in college, I had a dream about a guy I knew from high school. I hadn't seen him in years but he drank a lot, and word was he was drinking too much in college out west.

The dream started with an image of a car on the side of the road, burned and black, with a feeling of death filtering out of the ruin.

Then the dream flashed to me looking down from the ceiling at a table with a map on it. Gathered around the map was the guy and some friends. It was a map of Boston, and he was all excited, pointing to locations where he was going to interview for jobs after college like he was driving out there or something.

Then I was back at the Black Death car on the side of the road. I saw the road was on the rolling plains. The car was pointing west. The feeling of death rose up like a tsunami and became so intense it woke me up, and it stayed with me; I couldn't shake it. It still haunted me three days later.

So I called a girl who was a friend of his. I asked if he was still drinking too much. She said, "he's gotten better but yea, he's still drinking." I told her about the dream -- she freaked out.

"Oh my god," she gasped, "He's driving to Boston in 3 days for a bunch of job interviews. He's really excited. He's been running around telling everyone about it."

Go figure...that had never happened to me before or since, but it happened. And she told him. He's still around.
 
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Personally, I do believe there is more to our existence than these meat suits we are in now, but I'm also very much a dyed in the wool skeptic of a great many things people swear by like claims of paranormal events, extrasensory perception, psychic abilities, etc. I know how easily our senses can be tricked and how easily our minds can be influenced or misled. That said, I also know that no matter how logical and science driven my thinking may be, there are MANY things in this world that we do not fully understand and likely even more that we haven't even discovered yet. So I find myself perched right here on the fence, skeptical but always willing and in some cases eager to be proven wrong.

On a similar note, I was always a fan of James Randi. His long career of debunking BS claims and exposing fraudsters in their acts is both impressive and entertaining. Sadly, he passed away last year, so he never got to see his long standing $1 million prize claimed for proof of anything psychic or paranormal. Hopefully others will keep up his work of seeking the unexplained and exposing those who try to falsely profit from it.
 
OK I'm with mr_fender with "perched right here on the fence, skeptical but always willing and in some cases eager to be proven wrong." There was however something I witnessed that I just can't explain. About 5 years ago I was in hospital thanks to a kidney stone. Had an operation and was back in my room for an overnight stay. I was reading a book quite late at night and out of the corner of my eye noticed a plate moving across the table. You know those hospital tables designed to wheel under the bed? Anyway, whatever.

Then it moved again - like it slid across the table about an inch. Thought I was seeing things so got my phone out and filmed it. It's totally legit. Caught on camera. Table is dead level and it's dead quiet late at night in a hospital. Awesome thing is that there was a glass jug of water on the table and the water level does not budge as the plate moved. It slid maybe 4 or 5 times all up about an inch a time until it got close to the edge. I finished filming. Pushed it back and it never moved again. Went back to my book. I've only shown that video to a select few who were all blown away. I've never uploaded or shared it. In fact, this is the first time I've felt right to write about it. Weird.
 
I tried to resist jumping in, but couldn't :). Using some quotes from mr_fender's post as a starting point:
That said, I also know that no matter how logical and science driven my thinking may be, there are MANY things in this world that we do not fully understand and likely even more that we haven't even discovered yet
This is of course completely true, but at the same time it doesn't make the existence of supernatural phenomena any more likely. People often confuse "unexplained" with "inexplicable." I might say that the fact there is so much we don't understand (yet) is the very reason that science exists and what makes its practice so fascinating. If we already knew everything then the world would be a boring place, at least for scientists...
On a similar note, I was always a fan of James Randi.
Likewise! We shouldn't underestimate how much public benefit has come from his work exposing a long list of charlatans. On top of that it was always incredibly impressive and entertaining to see him at work. Interestingly, Randi was living proof that while the scientific method is our most effective way to increase our understanding of reality, scientists are not necessarily very good at exposing deceit.

Although I'm clearly very much in the skeptic camp on this topic I realize that many people have had "experiences" that feel very real to them. There are many reasonable explanations for this, some of which were already mentioned in this thread, for example the brain's incredible capacity to fill in gaps in information or even to alter information that doesn't fit its internalized patterns. Add to this the fact that humans are generally very uncomfortable with things they can't explain, to the point that we sometimes are more ready to accept a fantastical explanation than to accept the reality that we simply don't have enough information or knowledge or creativity to come up with a more reasonable one.

Because this is how all our brains work it also means that people who relate such experiences are not just delusional or somehow less smart or that they are all charlatans (proven counter examples notwithstanding). However, it also means that such anecdotal experiences don't constitute evidence by themselves. I particularly like the way this notion was captured by the philosopher David Hume, in Hume's maxim:
"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."
 
Fair enough, thanks for the dialogue!
Thanks for your kind reply. :)

I'm not well versed on the A-T view, does it provide any commentary on the relationship of 'consciousness/immaterialism/The Three Transcendentals' to 'materialism' in regard to which is more "fundamental"?
The best modern intro source on A-T thinking is probably the philosopher Edward Feser, who's a professor at some college in California, and has written a lot of books on various philosophical topics from the A-T perspective. Since "Thomist" (in reference to Thomas Aquinas) is the "T" in A-T (the "A" being "Aristotelian"), one of the best introductions is Feser's Aquinas, A Beginner's Guide. He's also written a pair of excellent books called Scholastic Metaphysics and Aristotle's Revenge, and another on Philosophy of Mind. Another good read is David Oderberg's Real Essentialism. Going through those will give you a solid introduction to how Aristotelian metaphysics (including the 4 "causes," hylomorphism, and telos) grew as a response to deficiencies in the pre-Socratic or "peripatetic" philosophical traditions in ancient Greece, (e.g. Zeno). It'll also help avoid some popular errors or misconceptions about Aristotelian metaphysics. (E.g., some say that, because Aristotle liked to use examples from his Earth/Air/Fire/Water notions of physics, to illustrate metaphysics, his metaphysics can be rejected now that we reject that physics. It's actually the other way 'round: Aristotle's metaphysics is separable from his (outdated) physics examples, but modern physics seems, especially in the quantum theory, to have given new support to Aristotle's metaphysics.)

Based upon your statements, it certainly seems to take more of an "idealism" stance vs "materialism" (in that particular dimension of philosophical "buckets of thought"), but does it regard consciousness as "more fundamental" than materialism or are they simply complementary to each other?
The Aristotelian analysis doesn't start out with quite those categories, but it eventually draws conclusions on those topics....

Sigh. I've actually tried to write a decent reply to that question four times now, and I suspect I can't do it in anything less than twenty longish paragraphs, and even then I won't be satisfied that I said it sufficiently clearly!

So, I'm going to answer this way: I'm going to list some things that the A-T analysis concludes...and I am stressing the word "concludes" because it gets there slowly, via careful reasoning, from premises that everyone agrees with, like the premise that "sometimes, changes happen."

Also, I'm going to use A-T terms-of-art which you will learn if you read the Ed Feser books I listed above; BUT, I'm not going to take the time to define them and defend the definitions offered. WARNING: This is really not fair, on my part: I'm giving you conclusions without the arguments that led to them, and words without definitions or even reasons for accepting those definitions! My only excuse is lack of space and time! :)

Anyhow, the A-T analysis, after many steps, arrives at the following conclusions:
  • Actuality means that which is; Potency or Potentiality means that which could be; change happens when something that potentially could be gets "actualized" so that it becomes Actual; and these Potencies (or, powers-to-change) exist in things which already are Actual;
  • All really existent things fall into one of two categories: Either they are Purely Actual, having no unrealized Potencies; or else, they are composed of a mix of Actuality and Potency as intrinsic principles, and thus, to the extent that they have Potencies, they can potentially change;
  • Change in the world, contra Zeno of Elea, is a real feature of reality, and consists of potential-states-of-being (or "Potencies") in Actual things being actualized by some other, already-actual, thing (and this includes the potency to come into existence, or to cease existing);
  • Setting aside the Aristotelian causes of form, matter, and telos, even efficient causation (the kind discussed in high-school physics) requires both temporal analysis (first this happened, then it caused that) and also simultaneous analysis of sustained causation (situation X only persists because it is contingent on situation Y, and will cease as soon as Y ceases). This causation through a relation-of-contingency is necessary for any complete description of causation, and this dependency-relation ("contingency") is one kind of Potentiality being Actualized;
  • Most things of our experience are contingent in an ongoing way on other things, which are in turn contingent on other things...but because this chain of contingency is simultaneous and hierarchical in nature, it cannot logically be of infinite length, nor can the chain consist solely of contingent things;
  • Therefore, in any simultaneous/sustaining chain of causation of contingent things, there is a final link in the causative/actualizing chain which is neither Composed, nor Contingent, nor containing any unfulfilled Potencies, but which is Purely Actual and Non-Contingent;
  • Since there can be no differentiating principle between multiple instances of anything which is Non-Composed or Purely Actual, this means there can logically be only one thing which is Purely Actual (it's like Highlander: "There can only be one.");
  • Therefore all simultaneous/sustaining chains of causation terminate in the same Purely Actual cause, which means that when you trace down any chain of explanation for the ongoing existence of any state-of-affairs in the whole universe, the final link in that chain will always be the same Purely Actual, Non-Composed, Non-Contingent Reality;
  • This Purely Actual cause, since it has no unfulfilled Potencies, is unchanging and stands in relation to any principle of change as a cause to an effect...but time, itself, is the intrinsic principle of any change, so the Purely Actual is (among other things) the Cause of Time and is, itself, atemporal;
  • Likewise, being Non-Composed, this Purely Actual cause will be non-material, inasmuch as all material things are composed of matter and energy, present by a mode of relative position and extension, in space and time;

...and that gets us to the answer to your question.

In the A-T method, all metaphysical argument should start from widely-agreed-upon premises, and then proceed by means of extremely small and syllogistic steps without any speculative overreach, towards whatever conclusions can be drawn.

Following this method, the Aristotelian/Thomist concludes, after hundreds of pages (including time to eliminate red herrings and misunderstandings), that all of reality proceeds, at its most fundamental level and in an ongoing, sustaining way, from a single transcendent foundational principle (where "principle" is defined as broadly as possible, to mean "that from which something else proceeds"). This transcendent foundational principle is extra-temporal (a traditionalist might say "eternal"), extra-spatial (not relatively positioned or extended, but sustaining in all other things the ability for them to be relatively positioned or extended in space or time), non-material, and unchanging (having no potentialities needing to be actualized by an outside actualizer, and thus Purely Actual). This transcendent foundational principle is also non-composed (and thus has no parts and is not contingent on some outside unifying principle to maintain its unity) and non-contingent (having no exterior principle upon which its existence depends). All material things are dependent on ("contingent" on) this foundational principle in an ongoing way: If it ceased to exist, they would. Indeed, that statement is a bit too weak: Since material things are temporal and time itself depends on this foundational principle, the correct way to say it is that if this foundational principle ever ceased to continuously actualize potentials in all other things, then all other things including time would cease to have ever existed.

So that's definitely not a merely-materialist position, to start with. It holds matter in high esteem, and derives knowledge of non-material principles from careful observations of things which are material, and says that material things really exist; they aren't phantasms. But, it insists that logically, the things we perceive by our senses "can't be the whole show," and (if the reasoning succeeds) it proves that whatever material things depend upon for their ongoing existence is necessarily non-material.

I don't think it's fair to call it idealist, though, certainly not in a Berkeleyan kind of way. The chain of reasoning by which the A-T thinker arrives at his conclusions doesn't allow abstractions in-and-of-themselves to be independently causative. In fact, that's an area where Aristotle differs from his teacher, Plato: Whereas Plato posits a "third realm" of the "forms" wherein the abstractions which individual entities instantiate are eternally present, Aristotle holds that such forms would have no direct interaction with the physical objects they "in-form" (the "interaction problem"). Aristotle takes a more moderate position wherein forms exist either in the instances they instantiate, or in minds, which abstract the forms by comprehension.

...continued in next post...
 
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...continued from preceding post...

Now, as I said at the outset, the "T" in A-T stands for "Thomist," as in Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican friar; that is, a Catholic Christian. So, when he arrived at the end of all these steps proving various attributes of the Purely Actual principle from which all things proceed, he would commonly add one additional statement: "And this, all people call God."

For some folk (including most, but not all, Theists), this will be a welcome addition. For other folk, a negative (cool, or even hostile) reaction is anticipated, depending on what cultural or personal associations they may have with that Anglo-Saxon monosyllable, "God." But it is vital that we not assign to someone else's use of that monosyllable a definition (or any emotional associations) that they themselves rejected (for that would be the fallacy of equivocation).

Thomas was explicitly not saying that Aristotle's metaphysical reasoning arrived at every attribute that he himself, as a Christian, held to be true about God. Of course, he doesn't think any of them are incompatible (or else he'd have either given up being an Aristotelian, or given up being a Christian). But he dedicates many pages to saying that there are some things which one can conclude "on the basis of natural reasoning alone, apart from revelation," and other things "which cannot be arrived at by natural reason premised on that subset of reality which men may observe, which only God may, at His own discretion, communicate to men to permit them to know that which they could not otherwise know." Thomas then goes on to say that reason has a role in identifying what constitutes a legit (or false) "divine revelation" by examination of the "motives of credibility" for any putative "revealed truth."

Still, when we look at Aristotle's "Actus Purus" (the purely actual, non-composed, non-contingent principle from which all other things proceed), we, in fairness, ought to admit what Thomas noticed: That its attributes look like a pretty big slice of what the monotheist religions call "God." It's an eternal, unchanging, not-depending-on-anything-else, sustaining cause of all other things, which, by means of actualizing potentials in all other things, literally can do anything; that is, is omnipotent. And even that's not the end of the list of Aristotelian-derived attributes: By (many many pages of) further reasoning, Aristotle (and Thomas) find that Actus Purus has something in it which is analogous to experience, something in it which is analogous to knowledge, and something in it which is analogous to will or intention. (Here come the Three Transcendentals, again.) Anything else which the Actus Purus sustains in being is (by logical necessity) something that the Actus Purus "experiences," not by passively having sensory perceptions of it, but by actively granting it the actualization of its (otherwise potential) existence. Anything else which the Actus Purus sustains in being is (by logical necessity) something that Actus Purus knows the "form" (type/genus) of, not by passively comprehending what it is, but by actively "informing" it, granting it the substantial form which makes it the kind of thing it is. And, anything else which the Actus Purus sustains in being is (by logical necessity) something that Actus Purus has intentions towards, not because it passively reacts to it, but actively intends the chain of actualization-of-potentials by which the thing remains actual. So it appears that what we experience as "Beauty, Truth, Goodness" is our passive reception (appropriate to beings who're composed of Potentiality and Actuality) of something that is doled out to us actively by the Non-Composed Pure-Actuality which is actualizing existence in us.

Dangit, that was still nearly twenty paragraphs. Oh, well.

The A-T view is obviously NOT materialism, and I've never met a materialist that believes in ghosts in a yes/sort-of kind of way, it's typically a definite NO! I'm sure there was a reason that you didn't use the term "consciousness" anywhere in your explanation above, and I also realize a few paragraphs on philosophy in a guitar gear forum cannot come close to do any of this justice. I'm just having fun, thanks for your entertaining responses!

Yes. It's not materialism. (I didn't use "consciousness" but I could have; I did mention Qualia; but people mix various things under the heading of "consciousness" and I was trying to be more specific.) I think pure "eliminative" materialism is usually based on a faulty epistemology (some variation of positivism or verificationism, which both sound good until you realize that they're self-refuting)...and I fear sometimes it's based on a kind of unsupported mere assertion, wherein a confident or contemptuous tone-of-voice substitutes for argument. (I don't mean to imply that all pure-materialists do that. But, as with all things, the Internet tends to amplify the Dunning-Kruger effect and bring out the least-charitable interlocutors from every camp. One reason I appreciate this forum is because there's so little of that. Around here, I think a Thomist can converse or even debate with a pure-materialist and usually both will come away without bad feelings...probably because we're all united by a common love of really good tone. :cool:)

Welp, that was long again. But hopefully it was still entertaining!

Cordially, Dr. D
 
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I've had perhaps too many disturbing experiences. It Is also a family thing, the line of my mother. I did not make it a matter for most of my life, also I find very difficult to talk about with people because I know either they would not have any interest on it (why should they have it) or they would think I am out of my mind.

For the most part of my life I just thought it was everything in my head. Until some years ago, when the by then my wife, shared exactly the same experience with me. By sharing I mean we saw / felt the same in the very same moment. I had never talked to her about it before.

That was a turning point for me.

Since then I have had two or three really scary episodes, my encounters with the unknown are not pleasant, unfortunately.

I am agnostic, and also think all I have lived maybe was just product of particular circumstances or complex psychological processes, but also think it could be just exactly what it looked like: a terrible, unforgiving, and beyond our understanding reality.
 
Re: "No ghosts. There, it's all settled.":

There's a lot of sketchy crypto-zoology and ufology out there, as well. Sure, people say they've seen Bigfoot (or the Yeti, or whatever) but there's still no captured specimen after all this time. (And the films and reports can all be otherwise explained.) People say that they've been abducted by aliens, but after all this time we still don't have a single nasal implant bearing "For Relief From Seasonal Allergies" in some alien alphabet, so, what're the odds?

And it gets sketchier: People say they've interacted with a Fractal-using guitar player who goes by the name "steadystate," but what do we really know? The Internet is anonymous and full of imposters and bad information. It could be the NSA trying to infiltrate communities of freedom-loving musicians; it could be a Russian bot; it could be a 52-year-old guy in a tank T-shirt trying to lure unsuspecting innocent young Telecaster collectors to a private meet. And some have even said: No "steadystate," it's all settled.

As for me, I'm open to the existence of Unidentified Strumming Objects, but I won't commit to any particular theory until all the evidence is in. ;)
 
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