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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
Question: Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not?
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Nate Bastian answered on 16 Jun 2014:
No, I do not. There is very little evidence for ghosts, especially now that (almost) everyone has a camera (on their phone) with them all the time, we should expect to see hundreds of ghosts every day. More likely, people report seeing ghosts when they see something that they are not expecting, especially when they believe in ghosts to begin with. This is the great thing of science, that proof is need for claims. To believe in ghosts, we should require evidence, much more than someone simply saying that they saw one.
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Sarah Casewell answered on 16 Jun 2014:
I don’t know. In the past things we couldn’t explain were put down to ghosts, or the paranormal or witchcraft. As we’ve learned more about the world around us, we’ve explained more things. “Magic” or the paranormal is just things we can’t explain yet.
The human brain is also quite easily tricked – we quite often remember what we think people have said or remember what we expected to see, not what actually happened.
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Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:
It depends what you think ghosts are! People’s consciousness, or minds, are very strange things which we don’t understand well, so we can’t be totally sure that they just disappear when we die, but I think it’s very unlikely and there’s no good evidence at all of ghosts existing, as Nate says.
My favourite scientific explanation for ghosts is that they are actually beings from higher dimensions! If you imagine we lived in a two-dimensional universe (which is flat, like a sheet of paper), instead of three-dimensional, then a three dimensional person could go above or below the sheet, but you couldn’t, because you’re stuck on the sheet. If the three-dimensional person went through the sheet, you’d be able to see them, but as seen as they’d been through it they’d disappear again! So if there was say a four-dimensional person passing through our three-dimensional world it could appear an disappear! Unfortunately, there’s not much evidence for a fourth dimension we can’t see, so it’s probably not true.
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Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:
I don’t know. It is very hard to explain the ‘science’ behind ghosts if they exist, which makes it very hard for scientists to “believe” in them. It is a nice idea that perhaps there is something more to life than what we presently perceive, but as others have already said, it is very easy for the human mind to be tricked into thinking it has seen something that wasn’t really there. Perhaps ‘ghosts’ are people wanting to see something so allowing themselves to be convinced that it/they are actually present, despite there being no evidence for them at all. If the idea of ghosts makes people feel better when they are dealing with loss and grief, however, I have no problem with them believing in them.
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Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:
I can believe that some people have experienced something that they think of as “ghosts” — but perhaps those can be tricks of the mind: we know very little about how our brain and consciousness operate, and it’s quite possible that people are just fooling themselves when they “see” ghosts.
That doesn’t make it less real to them, but it wouldn’t be real in the scientific sense. There is no scientific evidence that I know of that says that ghosts really exist.
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