Nope, don't believe in ghosts, and by extension, I don't believe in an afterlife. I wish I could. I truly wish I could believe in something, but there's no evidence that an afterlife exists.
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No. We tend to think of of our eyes as cameras recording what's in front of them, but that's inaccurate. Everything we experience as sight is a construction of our brains, and our brains do that in two ways: predicting what we will see and interpreting visual signals. Those predictions and interpretations do not always reflect reality.
And indeed this mismatch between prediction and interpretation is the very foundation of things like sleight of hand tricks and even camouflage.
That's a really good explanation
Nope, don't believe. Where are all the ghosts from the 1990s dressed in shell-suits? Or the ones from the 2000s dressed in baggy pants and with frosted tips? Is haunting only a Victorian afterlife pastime?
Or the ghosts of other cultures, for that matter, in their own traditional costume.
Yep! Although tbf you hear of the odd native American one. Coincidentally native Americans are cool.
I don't believe in ghosts. I didn't even as a child, but when I found out that we can stimulate people into experiencing the sensations and visions of "hauntings" with focused magnetic fields that put the last knife into the concept for me, since now we have a line toward the cause.
Agreed, I don't really believe in them either.
I know for me, I've worked really hard to have a coherent working mental model of the world, and ghosts just don't fit in there, especially when you add things like how physically delicate/sensitive our external senses, our own need for post hoc reasoning, and our brains ability to literally just make stuff up when there's missing information. So for now my working model of the world does not include ghosts for similar reasons that it doesn't include omnipotent gods and other supernatural powers. KISS method!
I don't think I'm the smartest woman in the world or whatever, and I'm continually in the process of being wrong about things. But I've learned to trust some explanations more than others, the ones that "fit" with the rest, and I've learned how to revise my beliefs to be more self consistent. Which somehow feels very important to me.
Perhaps this is just a long way to explain my own neurospiciness 😅
I'm curious about this magnet thing now though! I thought I had heard something about it at one point, but now I'm having trouble finding it.
I think the term to search for might be something like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
Oh thank you! Now that you mention it, I do remember looking that up for other reasons, I'll look more into it 😀
What I vaguely remember is that when the TMS devices were tuned to ... I want to say the visual cortex? ... it caused people—fully conscious people!—to start experiencing all the symptoms of sleep paralysis and report sensations and visions that were fully in line with among other things certain kinds of "night hag" hauntings or even UFO abductions (informed by cultural upbringing).
And there's other research indicating that geomagnetic effects can impact sleep patterns and dreams.
I don't know if I do or not honestly. I've had experiences that I can't find a satisfactory explanation for without involving ghosts, but on the other hand if anyone was going to be a ghost and get up to all the typical ghostly shenanigans after they died it would have been my grandma, and her house genuinely never felt emptier than after she had died and there was never even a hint of ghostly activity as far as I know.