This is turned into a fascinating discussion.
Unfortunately, I'm sitting in the same building as Joe, where we study science with rational, logical thought.
But, "ghost stories" have always been fascinating to me... hearing things that cannot be explained with our laws of physics, ect. I don't believe they are caused by ghosts, but it is interesting to see/hear about the unexplained.
Like the infamous video of the supposed "hitchhiker ghost" on youtube. The "ghost" girl did actually die as the story says (there is evidence that the accident happened, and the girl died), but the characters in the video did not, because no one else died on that stretch of road since, according to police and insurance reports around the time the video claims to have taken place. When two people die in a car crash and someone is there to witness it, it doesn't not go unreported in 1st world countries.
The mysterious girl in the mexican graveyard with the glowing eyes could have easily been a setup... but its nonetheless disturbing to watch.
Scientists have been trying to find proof of ghosts; by trying to detect changes in radiation, varying magnetic fields, changes in static electricity... ect, ect. But there have been no conclusive evidence ever found. We have the technology to find/detect any physical law that has been established, or it would not be a scientific law.
So, all these stories, cannot be explained at this time (with our current technology) or cannot be explained with science. If the latter is the correct assumption; phsycology must be the next step:
The human brain is a wildly complex computer. Our imaginations are far, far beyond our own control... Dreams can be so real that we think it's reality, and the mind is well known for playing tricks on its owner. Take the rotating hollow mask example; a mask that is a face on one side and a hollow (thus inverted) face on the other. When the human brain sees the full side (positive side) it sees a normal face, rotating. When the inverted side comes into view however, it too also appears as a face as well, but the human eye sees details that appear to be a face, but not enough information to confirm it... the brain creates a model of a face (which is a well known and farmilair model) by interpreting the scant details of the inverted mask... but the only way to show this model is to have the mask rotate the opposite direction. So it appears the mask thusly rotates back and forth, not around 360 degrees. This effect can be observed with rotating radar (?) dishes at airports... they appear to be going back and forth, but actually rotate all the way around.
It's our brain not being able to make sense of what we're seeing, and interpreting it wrong. So, what we see and hear isn't the same as what we think we see and hear. Sounds of the wind howling through a opening shaped in such a way to creat a sound, that the brain cannot make sense of, may to us, sound like voices in the distance, because the closest model the brain can find is voices... so it fills in the blanks. We're hardwired to use our knowledge to make better sense of the world around us, the above is examples of exactly that. Our brains take what we know and apply it to what it cannot explain. Sometimes the result is boldfaced lies.
So, can the above explain the experiences people have shared in this thread? Maybe, maybe not. But until I see conclusive evidence of ghosts, I will not believe in them... but the stories about them I will always find fascinating.
And lastly, while I'm thinking about it... saying that we know more about space than we do our own oceans is rediculous. This statement is developed from people who know nothing about what they're talking about; going around flapping thier uninformed trap and turning others into uninformed people with them (see thread "things people do that piss you off").
The ocean has water, and rocks and sand. The ocean exists because it's a low point and water flows to the lowest point while under gravitional influence. Pretty simple. The life at the bottom of the ocean is constantly being discovered, yes, but we know how to study it, catalogue it, and we have a defined space to research.
Space is, as far as we know, infinite. But we cannot go there and look at the things we wish to study. We can't pull a star out of the sky and put it on a table and dissect it. Science has devised clever ways to study what a star is comprised of, it's lifespan, ect. But, in reality, we are seeing things that happened years or centuries ago. We're just beginning to understand how gravity warps the dimensional planes that we call up/down, forward/back, left and right. Large gravitational sources actually bend the dimensional planes of time and space around them. For instance, there is an astronaught that is almost a second younger than he should be, for he has the most orbits of earth out of anyone else in history. This happens because he was travelling fast enough for long enough to actually slow time down ever so slightly that the accumilated effect of his space travels actually made him younger... or everyone else older (brain... hurting...). I don't remember which way this works, but gravity also slows/speeds up time... Someone on the top of a mountain will experience time at a different rate than someone at the bottom of the ocean.
Space is not black and white: there are not just stars and planets and nebulas. There's strange things beyond our comprehension that we're just beginning to grasp. The oceans... yeah, there's water, and the deeper you go, there's more pressure. Stuff lives there. It's not the fringes of cutting edge science. All that's required to study it is to point a deep sea camera at it, click, then study and catalogue the results. Just like biology has been doing for a very long time. Do we learn alot from the oceans? Hell yeah, no doubt about that, I believe it is very important to know. Study of our oceans is more about pushing the boundries of pressure engineering than anything else.
Wow, omg novel. I don't have time to edit out type-o's and my bad habit of comma splicing.
