We Live In A Haunted House

[Mr Spinkles]

How the heck can you relate ghosts to that? No offense, but I'm genuinely puzzled...

Creativity, my friend. Creativity. Nobody really knows what ghosts are, so why not?

Yes.....and maybe if you believe hard enough, it will actually come true. :lol:

Come on people! Is this the 21st century or what? I thought we rational, modern humans had got past ghosts and other mythical lore. Sure, ghosts might exist--and I have an enchanted jockstrap.

 

[Runt]

LOL, I imagine while performing in your experiment I would walk into the room and point out that it is warmer than the room I left. If I looked logically at the fact that the airconditioning is off and you were standing in the room, all alone, with the door closed, I would come to the conclusion that the warmth came from the body of a living human being and that there was nothing supernatural about this. If I did not know that you'd been in there, I might try to attribute the heat to bad ventillation if I was logical and the presense of "ghosts" if I was more uneducated or more into the metaphysical.

All I'm saying is that people can believe that they have encountered a ghost after encountering perfectly natural phenomonen that they are unable to understand.

As for auras... if you didn't learn about them in regular biology then wait for cell biology. It goes deeply into the exchange of molecules between organisms and their environments (deeply, as in the equations for these interactions, rather than just the mere description of interactions). Such chemical reactions release energy... heat, in our case. Emotions DO affect how much heat is coming off you... if you are sad, you tend to get colder... if you are angry, warmer. Then your physiological condition affects how much heat is coming off you. You're sick, you might have a fever = more heat. You're tired = less heat. You just woke up = less heat. You just worked out = more heat.

I doubt there is anything metaphysical about "auras". I think they exist, but they are purely scientific and kinda irrelevent. You can find out how a person is feeling just as easily by asking them as by "looking at their aura" (which I'm not even sure is really possible... I think cameras can see it, since we CAN take pictures of heat that show up in different colors... but as for being able to see them with the naked eye... well, I haven't seen one, nor really felt one, but those chemical reactions are still occuring and releasing heat, whether or not I can actually see it happening).

 

[Runt]

Alright, how about this Mr_Spinkles... why is it that several houses that are supposedly haunted get weird readings on scientific instruments? I'm not talking about photographs or videos, which, as everyone will agree, are easy to fake with today's technology. But other stuff has been picked up. Scientifically. Whether or not they are "ghosts" or "souls" or "spirits" is unknown... but there is definitely SOMETHING there.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

LOL, I imagine while performing in your experiment I would walk into the room and point out that it is warmer than the room I left. If I looked logically at the fact that the airconditioning is off and you were standing in the room, all alone, with the door closed, I would come to the conclusion that the warmth came from the body of a living human being and that there was nothing supernatural about this. If I did not know that you'd been in there, I might try to attribute the heat to bad ventillation if I was logical and the presense of "ghosts" if I was more uneducated or more into the metaphysical.

The purpose of the experiment would be to discover if people can 'feel' the heat of another human being long after they are gone from a place. Unless it is an extremely small room, and I do some exercise in it to raise the temperature, and it is not already warm outside, you are not going to be able to detect the heat. The fact is, people who think they can 'feel' the ghosts of long dead relatives are not feeling the heat of the person...they are experiencing emotions and imagining things. Come on, Runt, you're smarter than this...

All I'm saying is that people can believe that they have encountered a ghost after encountering perfectly natural phenomonen that they are unable to understand.

I agree. What I don't agree with is that the natural phenomenon they experience is the literal body heat of a dead human being....I think emotions and imagination and wishing that someone was still alive are the natural phenomena that people are more likely experiencing.

Here's another experiment to test your theory. We'll go to a hospital where there are dying patients (morbid though it would be). We will take and record the temperature of the room before and after a patient dies in it. If the temperature remains roughly the same, we know that any heat energy from the dead person anyone would claim to feel is purely imagined. As a follow up, we could even test human capacity to feel temperature change. My prediction is people can't tell the difference between anything less than a couple of degrees of change.

Forgive me Runt, but I really think that this whole people feeling the heat energy of of dead family in the house long after they are gone theory is silly...if the thermostat is set for 72 degrees, that's what it's going to be...if the weather is warm, the house will be warm...the idea that the temperature continues to be affected in any detectable way even a day later is, well, I already said it...silly...

As for auras... if you didn't learn about them in regular biology then wait for cell biology. It goes deeply into the exchange of molecules between organisms and their environments (deeply, as in the equations for these interactions, rather than just the mere description of interactions). Such chemical reactions release energy... heat, in our case. Emotions DO affect how much heat is coming off you... if you are sad, you tend to get colder... if you are angry, warmer. Then your physiological condition affects how much heat is coming off you. You're sick, you might have a fever = more heat. You're tired = less heat. You just woke up = less heat. You just worked out = more heat.

I don't see what that has to do with biology or poorly-developed photographs....the website said auras are around 'all animate objects' but not all living things have emotions. Sounds like 'aura' = fancy new-age lingo for plain ol' thermal energy.

I doubt there is anything metaphysical about "auras". I think they exist, but they are purely scientific and kinda irrelevent. You can find out how a person is feeling just as easily by asking them as by "looking at their aura" (which I'm not even sure is really possible... I think cameras can see it, since we CAN take pictures of heat that show up in different colors... but as for being able to see them with the naked eye... well, I haven't seen one, nor really felt one, but those chemical reactions are still occuring and releasing heat, whether or not I can actually see it happening).

If you take a picture with an infrared camera, yes you can detect heat. But not with a normal camera...any 'aura' on a normal camera would just be badly developed film. I agree that this is irrelevant...the body maintains a constant temperature at any rate, and any shift due to emotions would be so miniscule that no one could detect it anyway.

 

[Runt]

Yeah, yeah, I know!

I was not saying that people mistake year/month/day/hour-old lingering body heat for ghosts! I used heat as an EXAMPLE, because when I said people believing they have encountered ghosts may be really sensing lingering energy and mistaking it as a soul, you suggested two things: that energy does not linger and that we cannot sense it. So I used heat and static electricity as examples of energy that DOES linger and can be sensed, or that simply can be sensed (in the case of static electricty).

My main point: There is stuff out there that the average human being does not understand. If one encounters something they don't understand or don't expect, they will generally try to explain it in any way that they can. Therefore people might mistake general natural phenomonen for ghosts. It doesn't mean they sensed a ghost, but it also does not mean that they are just crazy and making things up.

I can feel a draft and think it is a ghost and be wrong, but being wrong about the ghost does not mean that the draft does not exist. I think instead of trying to look at ghost stories and other things from a deconstructionist point of view (by trying to prove why ghosts don't exist, can't exist, etc), we should instead try to explain what people REALLY sensed. In some cases it may be nothing-- It might be a good story that they made up because it is just that; a good story. It might be someone simply seeing things because they are tired, or seeing things because they WANT to see things (ever go to a location that is supposed to be haunted in hopes of seeing something? Ever think you might have seen something... even if you don't REALLY believe in ghosts?)

Whether entering part of a room that is drafty, somehow sensing the "piezoelectric effects of quartzite", getting shocked by static electricity, or feeling body heat in a chair, people are easily deceived, and if they are not expecting something or don't take the time to look at other possibilities, they may just write the experience off as "ghosts".

As for auras... yeah, we have energy around us. It is not important. It just isn't... people just like to talk about auras because they sound metaphysical and interesting, but they are probably just a mixture of body heat and static electricity. As for aura cameras, I'm not sure how they work but I KNOW that they are not normal cameras... I think they do take pictures of heat... kind of like in the science museum here in town kids can get in front of these big cameras and dance around and see their thermal pictures moving with them, and I know from seeing that that we are all different heats... though under roughly the same, of course. That kind of thing is amusing, but pointless. What can you do with that? Hang it on your wall and say "Oh look, it's my thermal picture/aura photograph?"

However, whether auras are important or are associated with all the stuff metaphysical people say they are associated with (healing, for example)...or NOT... there is still SOMETHING around the body, and some people might call it an aura and assign all kinds of attributes to it. The attributes might be incorrect, but that SOMETHING still exists.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Whether it's heat, static electricity, 'auras'--whatever--the fact remains that we can set up experiments to test and see if humans are able to detect any energy left behind from other humans. We can test to see whether or not humans can sense static electricity, heat, etc and how well they can sense it. We can test to see how energy changes and how energy remains the same after a person leaves a room. We could even control heat and all other known forms of energy to test whether or not humans are able to sense some sort of as-yet-undiscovered energy.

If we performed these experiments, I doubt it would take many trials for us to come to the conclusion that humans cannot 'sense' departed human beings any more accurately than they can guess at random. I agree with you that we can sense things like seeing a shadow or feeling a draft and think it's a ghost....my point is that dead people do not leave behind energies in their former residences that other people can detect and misinterpret for ghosts.

 

[keevelish]

Ha ha isn't it funny that the same people who scoff at these "apparitions" being demons are insistant that they have "negative energy" in their houses or that the apparitions are reminiscent of a dead human. What the heck is negative energy? Much less positive energy- is this like anions and cations?

 

[Sam Bloom]

Good grief. I think some of you are going off the deep end. Just because something goes bump in the night, does not mean that there is some kind of Casper floating around. You've been watching way too much TV.

There is not one bit of credible evidence that ghosts exist. And the reason that there isn't is most likely there are no ghost! There I said it.

Yep, phenomena such as this do have rational explanatioins, and are not gremlins in the closet.

One of my friends who I saw a couple of months ago, told me a strange story about how he had wandered out into a field on his way to California and saw Aliens disemboweling cows.

Now, do I believe that he believed that he did? Yes. Do I believe that he really saw such a thing? Of course not. The guy had been driving for too long, and ran off the road, and pretty much hallucinated it. Now that is a rational and a much more believable explanaion, than some Alien coming fifty zillion miles to cut a cows stomach open.
But what amazed me is that he did not seem to look for a rational explanation, but yet chose to believe the fantastic. Why? Who knows.

Use logic. It is fun to tell ghost stories. But you just need to remember. "There ain't no such thing as ghost! Get a grip.

 

[Master Vigil]

Sometimes the truth is not rational, and sometimes logic seems illogical. There are spirits, loosen up.

 

[Ardhanariswar]

"One of my friends who I saw a couple of months ago, told me a strange story about how he had wandered out into a field on his way to California and saw Aliens disemboweling cows."

god, i saw a documentary about that. it sickened me. omg. either it was really aliens who like milk or guys who are mentally challeneged. it was so distrubing.

 

[Mr Spinkles]

Master Vigil-- When is the truth not rational?