No, they don’t exist. Brains are freaking weird and make up shit almost as often as LLMs do.
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.
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.
Wild to harken back to humans thinking a woman’s uterus traveling around her body messing with things is the reason they are so emotional (hystaria) in a post claiming something is 100% impossible because of our advanced understanding of the subject.
In today’s lesson, an always-seeking-something-to-be-offended-about ideologue learns about “linguistic drift”.
Or, more likely, doesn’t. But that’s par for the course for America’s so-called “left”. (You know, the “left” that the rest of the world considers “centre right”.)
Hysteria is in poor taste, and I’m sure the guy wasn’t thinking of a slithering uterus.
But Cluster B personality disorders are what some of the more justified instances of suspected hysteria would be called today. Some others would be stress, others healthy responses to bad situations, and I’m sure some would be willing to go into far more detail.
Yes. “Guy.” Even the American “left” can’t help but use the masculine-as-default.
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.
