|
| ||||||
Reply Subj: If ghosts exist ... Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 at 09:08:30 pm EST (Viewed 405 times) | |||||||
Quote: ... Then I suspect that they're affected greatly by both their perceptions and our own.That presupposes that gjosts are sentient, rather than recordings or telepathic transmissions or dimensional anomalies or whatever (see Vizh's list of hypotheses). I think there's rather less evidence for sentience in ghosts (excluding poltergeists) than for the occasional appearance of apparitions. There's very few accounts of ghosts actually doing a Hamlet's father or revealing the buried treasure etc. That said I love the story of the Cock Lane Ghost, a very old genuine English court case in which a man was tried for the murder of his vanished wife based upon the alleged haunting perceived by his next door neighbours in which the woman accused her husband of her death. Google the details sometime. Quote: Ghosts wearing clothing makes perfect sense to me, even though the spirit is stripped of its flesh, because if ghosts are real, then their spirits would, at least to some extent, be a reflection of how they see themselves, and nobody sees themselves as naked in their "default" self-image.That also accounts for the lack of death wounds on most ghosts (except the headless ones), and might explain why most ghosts are perceived repeating actions they did in life. Quote: As for why ghosts wouldn't see themselves wildly differently from how they appeared physically in life, I suspect that's where the observers of ghosts come into play, especially with the ghosts of those who are well-known. If Abraham Lincoln's ghost does exist, of course he's going to manifest in a stovepipe hat, because that's what our perceptions have turned him into. If he wants to manifest, then he's going to need to manifest in ways that people who are receptive to seeing him can handle. Thus, if you're a celebrity who dies an old woman, but was best known as a beautiful young thing, you're in luck. If you're Elvis, you've got about 50/50 odds of manifesting as handsome.The next logical step to that argument is that the ghost doesn't need to be the person at all, just a phenomenon that the human mind assigns an expected shape or form to; and that in turn opens up possibilities of explaining UFOs, fairies, and the blessed virgin Mary. | |||||||
