Do you believe ghosts are possible? If not, what do you think people's experiences of ghosts actually are?

I was looking for a clip from an audio book I listened to a long time ago but search engines suck these days so I'll try to explain it from memory.

Imagine two of our ancestors in the jungle. They hear a rustling in the bushes or see some movement in the trees. One ancestor's brain recognizes the shape of a leopard and flees. The other ancestor assumes it's just the wind or a trick of the light.

If the first ancestor was right, the second ancestor may have been attacked by the predator and not survived that moment. If the second ancestor was right, barring extreme circumstances, both are likely to have survived that moment. Type 1 errors (false positives, the sign of predator is perceived when one isn't there) are less detrimental to survival than type 2 errors (false negatives, the sign of a predator is not recognized when one is there).

Humans are extremely accomplished pattern recognition machines. As a creature that evolved and had to survive in dangerous environments, it has been a benefit to error on the side of false positives when perceiving threats and making split second, life or death decisions.

pareidolia

This has also led us to presume agency, that we perceive a being like a predator or another person, as that would again be beneficial to presume incorrectly than incorrectly not perceive.

Many paranormal experiences are perceived as dangers or at least trigger a similar fear response. We're recognizing patterns that may or may not be there and, as we have evolved to be better safe than sorry, we attribute that recognition to mean there is something, likely a being of some sort, causing that pattern.

This even extends to the random occurrences of everyday life. Coincidences become good luck or act of a benevolent or malevolent spirit or God. Someone keeps having bad things happen to them? Someone must have curses them. Someone is in a hurry, needs to stop by the shop to get a gift or something, and just as they drive by a car leaves a parking spot right at the front of the store - God be praised, he's looking to for me today!

In a "possible world" ghosts could exist. In the world we happen to inhabit, I firmly believe they don't.

People's "experiences" with ghosts are everything ranging from misinterpretations of things they've seen to hysteria to hallucinations to outright fraud. (All the "ghost hunter" types, no exceptions, fall into the last camp.)

I'm open to evidence to the contrary, of course, but this is a very large claim so it's going to need a mountain of solid evidence.

Supernatural encounters within homes have often been associated with carbon monoxide poisoning.

If ghosts were real, they would already have been studied and commodified in some way.

Lies, hysteria and confusion, in that order.

No, there’s lots of reason people can experience things that aren’t there. It’s extremely common in fact. Full hallucinations aren’t even a sign of mental illness on their own, many people experience them. And then there’s stuff like mind altering substances, random events that your mind associates with a non-existent pattern (like the constellations), and other phenomena. None of which requires anything supernatural to be happening.

But I get it. Ghosts are kinda fun. Sometimes I like to pretend.

I'm the kind of paranormal fan that wants to believe, but I also want compelling evidence, something that really kicks me right in the ass and makes me say "holy shit, wow!" I actually enjoy debunking paranormal claims, and the harder time I have debunking a claim, the more excited I get. Don't get me wrong, I love a good, shitty, no-evidence ghost story or YouTube clip just for grins, but nothing gets my blood pumping quite like someone who took the time and care to try and carefully document what was happening. So, that's the context in which I say this:

99% of ghost experiences, including my own, are probably bullshit, in that there's likely some mundane explanation. Probably 100% or very very nearly so of TV ghost shit is not only bullshit but people actively bullshitting you to try and keep their shit from getting cancelled. I do believe that it IS entirely possible that there are non-corporeal entities or some type of non-corporeal phenomena that are unpredictable and thus very difficult to gather evidence on. I like chewing on the question of how a scientist might prove the existence of a non-corporeal phenomena, which is only observable by its acting on the environment in an unpredictable fashion according to its own rules or volition. I don't think it's achievable, because at the end of the day, any test I could come up with could plausibly be replicated by a magician or an effects artist. My closest approach, at least imo, is to simply put a marble, any marble, James Randi can choose, into a bowl, any old mundane bowl, and just leave it there and watch it. We know what a marble in a bowl should do: it's going to remain at the lowest PE location unless it's acted upon by some outside force. Glass is inert to many concerns, be they chemical, electric, etc. and a glass, wood, or stainless steel bowl would also be likely to be sufficiently inert with regard to the test environment. If the marble suddenly takes off or jumps out of the bowl or something, that should be a pretty good indicator that something worth investigating just happened. Again, though, I'm sure it's nothing a magician or effects artist couldn't replicate.

Anyway, why I believe is a mix of being a paranormal enjoyer, being raised by people who believed in it, being a Buddhist (Buddhist cosmology accepts ghosts as something you can be reborn as), and personal experiences that are probably bullshit but certainly felt convincing enough. And as for what other people are experiencing: it seems likely to me that infra sound plays a big part of creating the spooky context in which people interpret mundane phenomenon as scary.

I see things flicker in the corner of my eye too, but I don't attribute it immediately to "ghosts". Occam's razor is a ghosts' biggest enemy.

Once you learn what all the weird sounds are that you hear at night other people's ghost stories all start to make a lot more sense.

Every single personal story about ghosts I've heard can be explained with science.

I'm open to being wrong about it as I am with most things, but scientifically there doesn't appear to be any water held up in that one.

Dimensions bleeding into other dimensions.

No. It would be neat, but there is no evidence for it. I say this as someone who used to believe and made a website in ~2001 about haunted locations, our visits to some, etc.

As for what people see, it really depends. Pareidolia is a thing, so humans, I think, often see things not exactly as they are, especially if it's something in the vision for a very brief amount of time.

I know somebody who used to assist an exorcist for the Catholic Church. This person is very close to me. They have told me stories that are undeniably supernatural.

I also had a coworker, a very honest and good man. He and his wife witnessed a hairbrush fly across their room and hit a wall after she voiced that she thought their home was haunted. That hairbrush is why they sold that house.

Both sources described incidents with multiple witnesses that defied physical explanations. I trust both sources.

From what I can tell, the location matters. Certain elements and rituals can trigger responses. Other than that, I don't know anything.

Probably hallucinations and something similar to delusional parasitosis, a little schizophrenia

I've experienced multiple paranormal events in my life that I, or my family, were never able to explain. However I don't think they were "ghosts" in a sense that they are spirits of the dead walking around my house. My best guess is that paranormal activity is just a phenomenon that occurs when thin spots in the space/time fabric show up and cause multiple realties to exist in the same spot simultaneously. So what you are seeing is other people, or even yourself, in another reality or time. Then similar to a bad TV signal you sometimes get a crystal clear picture with sound, and other times it's all broken up and you have to interpret it through the static.

How do these things spots show up? No clue. But in a universe where black holes, and other similar things, are possible it is a lot more believable to me than ghosts or demons being the culprit.

So we're all just energy right? Like, literally.

And do y'all remember those clay pots that recorded voices from hundreds of years ago accidentally while the potter was making some grooves? The ones where scientists could play the clay pots like a record?

I think ghosts might be energy recordings in a place. They're not thinking or feeling. They don't have agency. It's just energy recordings left behind.

I dunno, just a thought I've been noodling for a while.

I want to believe in ghosts, because of the broader implication that there is something beyond this life, but I have not seen any credible evidence of ghosts. As for people's ghostly experiences, I think that the vast majority of it is obvious bullshit that people invent to make their lives seem more interesting than they really are.

I've been to lots of allegedly haunted places; graveyards, houses, prisons, asylums, castles, battlefields, etc, and never once saw or experienced anything ghostly or even ghost adjacent. Without fail, there has always been at least one believer who told me that I need to believe in ghosts in order to see them, which is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. They also seem to believe, for reasons that escape me, that ghosts speak and understand modern English, regardless of what era or region the ghosts are supposed to be from. I just can't wrap my head around the logic that once you die, you magically know all languages, past and future.

If someone tells me they've seen a ghost, I'll take them at their word. I won't call them a liar, because maybe they did see something, and "ghost" is just the best explanation they have. But in order for me to believe it, I need more than eyewitness testimony, and in this digital age of easily accessible high quality special effects, a shaky low resolution out-of-focus 5 second video of "orbs" just won't cut it.

I hate sounding like such a downer, because I know a lot of people truly believe in ghosts, but the paranormal community is just so full of hucksters and suckers that it's exhausting to sift through all the blatantly fake crap in search of some truly compelling evidence.

I believe they're possible. My thinking with afterlife etc is that I'm not gonna mess around with it just incase there is one, so I'd never do a ouija board or anything.

That being said, I think most people's experiences are tricks of the mind, wishful thinking, made up etc.

Thinking about it, I think I've got two different kinds or tiers of 'belief'. There's science and realism and shit in the main, serious tier. Core beliefs, I guess. Then there's the magical, fun tier. I like a little magic and see no harm in it (as long as that magic doesn't have anything to do with in and out crowds and finger pointing and judgement). This tier is for ghosts and the metaphysical and tarot and old gods etc. Stuff that I don't necessarily believe believe but find enriching anyway. I haven't nurtured this tier for a long time myself though.

That said. I've definitely had one or two weird experiences in life, although also more when I was younger and more open to it. So I'm not going to rule it out. But I'm also just as open to there always being some 'real' explanation.

its mainly prior suggestion, followed by the brain filling in gaps of unknowns with that suggestion.

As a little kid I thought our house was haunted numerous times because of hearing weird noises and whatnot that I couldn't identify at night and just not having the life experience to account for it. Not once have I experienced anything like that since I was teenaged and up. I think adults experiencing things like that just never grew all the way out of that stage.