Do You Believe in Ghosts?

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 ...

Seriously, no- I don't believe we are at the level of sophistication to make a robot self-aware. 

Doesn't mean it can't happen (especially if its true that the brain is a complex, albeit biological computer anyway).

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?

^ 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.)


Edited by Vompatti - September 29 2009 at 11:37

YtseBen wrote: I've believed in them for my whole life.

deleted

Edited by Snow Dog - September 29 2009 at 11:15

Wow, I hadn't bothered before to look up with that actually was, that's pretty damn stupid.

There's much more than a surrounding world withing our perception, and science is still clueless about many things about matter, energy and information. But ghosts - unsettled human souls wondering around halls and eventually popping on photos with their living relatives - do not exist.

Here's a little math.

Each human while alive consists of matter, occupies a certain amount of space, moves from point A to point B, waves a hand, goes to a shop, chews food.

Dogs too. They run, chase a stick, live their dog lives.

So, if a human being got  something, call it "force", "soul", "freedom of choice", anything un-material that differs us from a brick wall, we can apply the same to dogs, cats and mollusks, do we agree?

Okay. Now. There are more than six billion humans alive right now. There were between 60 to 100 billion people since the dawn of the human kind (scientific estimation). Which means, each of us is surrounded with 10 to 15 ghosts right now.

Even if "the doors" between "our world" and the "other world" are opened only occasionally, we should all be flooded with photos of human ghosts. As well as dogs. And mollusks. And (trillions of) ants. And a plethora of other evidence. There would be no watchable TV program, because it would be polluted with annoying poltergeists every few seconds.

And why my Australopithecus Africanus grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grandfather from Tanzania was never caught on film? Because he doesn't know how to use a camera?





Edited by clarke2001 - September 29 2009 at 09:36

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).