Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: I am a Christian who does not believe in anything that is not physical. So do you believe in ghosts? And how do you define physical? http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=56485&PID=3386717#3386717 But if there is nothing besides the physical world, each person must be a physical entity that is either identical with his body or a constitutional part of it, right? So when the body ceases to exist, how can the person (or the soul) remain? If we assume that the soul is a part of physical body, why can't it be destroyed or taken apart by physical means like other physical objects? Or is it that there is some dimension of the physical body that we cannot see or touch and that already exists on a higher (eternal) dimension? You are your body- nothing more.  When you die, you return to the earth.  I do not believe people die and some immaterial part of them remains. You will find that I'm a somewhat peculiar Christian.  So you don't believe in the Resurrection or the Holy Spirit either? Yes I do. The Bible is very clear that resurrections are bodily resurrections (i.e., physical). As for the Holy Spirit, I believe that to be God's power personified (I'm, traditionally speaking, not a Trinitarian either- too much baggage with all those terms, plus the Bible doesn't teach it explicitly). I actually do not think spirit is the opposite of physical.  I could have sworn I've explained that somewhere around here before...*rummages through the threads* So what exactly happens in a physical resurrection?  Is it just another word for decomposition? When the dead (physical) person returns to the earth, will he remain a person even after he (the body) has turned into dirt? Is it really resurrection if the person doesn't exist as a one entity after death? I'm not smart enough to know the ins and outs of how this works (I don't have to be).  The Bible gives me clues (Ezekiel 37, John 11)- suffice it to say that if the God of the universe created man out of the dust of the Earth, it should be no difficult task for Him to reconstitute the human body for the resurrection. The Bible also talks about "glorified bodies" given to Christians after the resurrection. This is what Jesus had when he rose from the dead.  I take this to mean a body that exists in a higher dimension- thus able to pop in and out of "existence" in this dimension at will (this is exactly what Jesus did after his resurrection). I still think that a person has to be something more than just the physical body. What if, for example, person A dies and his body turns into dirt, and out of that dirt grows a plant that person B eats. Now, if a person was identical with his body, persons A and B would share some physical parts. So if B dies and both A and B are resurrected, the resurrected bodies cannot consist of the same matter as the mortal bodies. Thus it makes sense to assume that resurrected people were never identical with their bodies, but that they were either spiritual or abstract entities that were first given their mortal bodies and then their glorified bodies, neither of which they are identical with. You're drawing a conclusion based on my incomplete understanding of the mechanics of the resurrection- as I mentioned, I don't know how it all works out. Let's go another direction (since we're treading in the territory of "Who am I?")... Is your arm you or just a part of you? Let's see...an amputee may be missing an arm, but the amputee is still a person (I hope we'd agree). How many body parts can a person lose until he or she ceases to be a person?  Let's assume then that a person is just a brain in a vat- connected to a complex machine that facilitates "life" and stimulates the sensory nerves in such a way that this brain can see, hear, and be conscious.  Is that brain a person? Assuming we say yes, and later flip the switch so that the brain dies, gets thrown into the landfill and deteriorates completely (becoming nutrients for the soil, etc), is that entity still a person?  I think by this point most people would say no. The question then, becomes, "what is the eternal aspect of personality and consciousness?"  If you believe a person is "somehow" a person even without a body, then the burden of proof is on you to prove this.  I'd also want you to show how the non-physical personality interacts with the physical entity (this was Descartes' crushing problem- to facilitate Cartesian dualism, he postulated that this interaction took place in the pineal gland in the brain- despite the inability to scientifically demonstrate this).

Descartes placed quite a lot of weight on the belief that people are essentially thinking subjects, regardless of the fact that when we're asleep we don't think or feel attached to our bodies in the same way as when we are awake. (What seems incredibly strange to me is that every time I wake up I find myself with the same body.) There has to be something other than consciousness that's responsible for the person's identity through time, which leads me to believe that a person is an entity that exists "outside" the body with some kind of special relation to it.

Obviously I don't know the answer to Descartes' problem, but it would seem that one possible way to avoid it would be to assume that entities cannot be divided to physical and non-physical entities, but that materiality and spirituality are aspects that different entities have in various amounts, so that there is a continuum from things that are mostly material to things that are mostly spiritual. This would also apply to interaction between different entities, for example a hand pushing a table would be a more physical interaction than a magnet pulling a magnet or a soul interacting with a brain. (If we consider ghosts this would mean that we can see them and physically interact with them through our bodies because of their physical properties, and that we can sense them directly because of their spiritual properties.)


Edited by Vompatti - September 29 2009 at 10:56

Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: I am a Christian who does not believe in anything that is not physical. So do you believe in ghosts? And how do you define physical? http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=56485&PID=3386717#3386717 But if there is nothing besides the physical world, each person must be a physical entity that is either identical with his body or a constitutional part of it, right? So when the body ceases to exist, how can the person (or the soul) remain? If we assume that the soul is a part of physical body, why can't it be destroyed or taken apart by physical means like other physical objects? Or is it that there is some dimension of the physical body that we cannot see or touch and that already exists on a higher (eternal) dimension? You are your body- nothing more.  When you die, you return to the earth.  I do not believe people die and some immaterial part of them remains. You will find that I'm a somewhat peculiar Christian.  So you don't believe in the Resurrection or the Holy Spirit either? Yes I do. The Bible is very clear that resurrections are bodily resurrections (i.e., physical). As for the Holy Spirit, I believe that to be God's power personified (I'm, traditionally speaking, not a Trinitarian either- too much baggage with all those terms, plus the Bible doesn't teach it explicitly). I actually do not think spirit is the opposite of physical.  I could have sworn I've explained that somewhere around here before...*rummages through the threads* So what exactly happens in a physical resurrection?  Is it just another word for decomposition? When the dead (physical) person returns to the earth, will he remain a person even after he (the body) has turned into dirt? Is it really resurrection if the person doesn't exist as a one entity after death? I'm not smart enough to know the ins and outs of how this works (I don't have to be).  The Bible gives me clues (Ezekiel 37, John 11)- suffice it to say that if the God of the universe created man out of the dust of the Earth, it should be no difficult task for Him to reconstitute the human body for the resurrection. The Bible also talks about "glorified bodies" given to Christians after the resurrection. This is what Jesus had when he rose from the dead.  I take this to mean a body that exists in a higher dimension- thus able to pop in and out of "existence" in this dimension at will (this is exactly what Jesus did after his resurrection). I still think that a person has to be something more than just the physical body. What if, for example, person A dies and his body turns into dirt, and out of that dirt grows a plant that person B eats. Now, if a person was identical with his body, persons A and B would share some physical parts. So if B dies and both A and B are resurrected, the resurrected bodies cannot consist of the same matter as the mortal bodies. Thus it makes sense to assume that resurrected people were never identical with their bodies, but that they were either spiritual or abstract entities that were first given their mortal bodies and then their glorified bodies, neither of which they are identical with. You're drawing a conclusion based on my incomplete understanding of the mechanics of the resurrection- as I mentioned, I don't know how it all works out. Let's go another direction (since we're treading in the territory of "Who am I?")... Is your arm you or just a part of you? Let's see...an amputee may be missing an arm, but the amputee is still a person (I hope we'd agree). How many body parts can a person lose until he or she ceases to be a person?  Let's assume then that a person is just a brain in a vat- connected to a complex machine that facilitates "life" and stimulates the sensory nerves in such a way that this brain can see, hear, and be conscious.  Is that brain a person? Assuming we say yes, and later flip the switch so that the brain dies, gets thrown into the landfill and deteriorates completely (becoming nutrients for the soil, etc), is that entity still a person?  I think by this point most people would say no. The question then, becomes, "what is the eternal aspect of personality and consciousness?"  If you believe a person is "somehow" a person even without a body, then the burden of proof is on you to prove this.  I'd also want you to show how the non-physical personality interacts with the physical entity (this was Descartes' crushing problem- to facilitate Cartesian dualism, he postulated that this interaction took place in the pineal gland in the brain- despite the inability to scientifically demonstrate this). Descartes placed quite a lot of weight on the belief that people are essentially thinking subjects, regardless of the fact that when we're asleep we don't think or feel attached to our bodies in the same way as when we are awake. (What seems incredibly strange to me is that every time I wake up I find myself with the same body.) There has to be something other than consciousness that's responsible for the person's identity through time, which leads me to believe that a person is an entity that exists "outside" the body with some kind of special relation to it. Obviously I don't know the answer to Descartes' problem, but it would seem that one possible way to avoid it would be to assume that entities cannot be divided to physical and non-physical entities, but that materiality and spirituality are aspects that different entities have in various amounts, so that there is a continuum from things that are mostly material to things that are mostly spiritual. This would also apply to interaction between different entities, for example a hand pushing a table would be a more physical interaction than a magnet pulling a magnet or a soul interacting with a brain. (If we consider ghosts this would mean that we can see them and physically interact with them through our bodies because of their physical properties, and that we can sense them directly because of their spiritual properties.)

I would disagree there- magnetism is a totally physical phenomenon just as a hand pushing a table would be.

I would also ask why you think there "has to be" something else giving us an identity.

Also, you never wake up with the same body, technically speaking.  Your skin sheds, your hair falls out, new hair grows, nails grow, you've aged, you've gained (or loss) fat, etc.  Your body is like that river you can never step into twice. 

Edit: I said "skin shreds." 


Edited by Epignosis - September 29 2009 at 11:21

Vompatti wrote: ^ I think the quote pyramid is high enough now. I said there "has to be" something else besides consciousness giving us an identity because we are not conscious all the time, yet when we regain consciousness we feel we're still the same person. I guess memory could give us an identity, but I'm suspicious about this because I feel memory is something that we have, not something that we are. (A person who has lost his memory is still a person, and most people would even say that he's the same person he was before losing his memory.) It's true that we never wake up with the same body, but in most cases the body we wake up with is fairly similar to the body we had the night before, so I think we can call it the same body. If someone switched more than half of it in a surgical operation, I would still call it the "same" body because it would be the body of the same person. (But if the brain was switched I'm not sure what would happen.)

It's like the Darth Vader question- how many body parts can be replaced by a machine before a person is just a robot?

Of course...I would go so far as to say that a human is nothing more than a high-end, ingeniously-engineered machine...

...and some more ingeniously-engineered than others.

Vompatti wrote: Epignosis wrote: Vompatti wrote: ^ I think the quote pyramid is high enough now. I said there "has to be" something else besides consciousness giving us an identity because we are not conscious all the time, yet when we regain consciousness we feel we're still the same person. I guess memory could give us an identity, but I'm suspicious about this because I feel memory is something that we have, not something that we are. (A person who has lost his memory is still a person, and most people would even say that he's the same person he was before losing his memory.) It's true that we never wake up with the same body, but in most cases the body we wake up with is fairly similar to the body we had the night before, so I think we can call it the same body. If someone switched more than half of it in a surgical operation, I would still call it the "same" body because it would be the body of the same person. (But if the brain was switched I'm not sure what would happen.) It's like the Darth Vader question- how many body parts can be replaced by a machine before a person is just a robot? Of course...I would go so far as to say that a human is nothing more than a high-end, ingeniously-engineered machine... ...and some more ingeniously-engineered than others. So do some machines know they exist?

Tony R does.

^ 

I believe in the ghost of Patricy Swayze

Mr ProgFreak wrote: Epignosis wrote: For Lot to see these angels, the angels would have to have displaced / reflected light in order to be visible.  That means, then, that if someone sees a ghost, the ghost must somehow physically exist. I don't think this deduction is valid. If ghosts existed (which I don't believe at all) then that would imply the existence of things which our normal laws of physics don't apply to. Your idea of reflection of light is interesting, and yet another hint towards the non-existence of ghosts. BTW: They did have mushrooms and weeds back then ...

I thought I made it clear that I don't believe in ghosts. 

To be a big ninny, I will say that just because psychotropics are involved doesn't mean the involved aren't touching other dimensions. Many believe that these tools are required to open doors of perception.

Perhaps we could have done with a sitting on the fence option in this poll as I couldn't vote yes or no to be honest. While I'm not totally convinced of the existence of ghosts I feel there's too many sightings and experiences by people for there to be nothing in it.

LinusW wrote: I Would love to be wrong though. This world lacks some of that old-fashioned "magic".