Writer's Block: Spirits

[packbat]

Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever encountered one? View other answers

First: "believe in" is the wrong phrase. I don't believe in torture, but it still exists.

Second: to my recollection, I have never encountered anything that appeared to be a ghost.

Finally: based on my knowledge of the sciences (from physics to biology to neuroscience to computer science), the existence of ghosts strikes me as not merely implausible, but downright ludicrous. fin.

Comments

[bourgeoisify.livejournal.com]

Comfort mechanism, maybe? Like religion in a sense. Believing your loved ones are there after they die, when most likely they just enter an eternal sleep.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I don't know that it's a comfort mechanism so much as naive dualist theories of the mind (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/) combined with hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis (http://skepdic.com/sleepparalysis.html), instinctive seeing of faces where there are none (http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html), and similar phenomena.

Edit: You may well be right, of course - stories about ghosts are old, and their origins could have been in anything for all I know.