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One interesting thing that happened in that era was the unlikely friendship that developed between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.[1][2] Doyle was a true

One interesting thing that happened in that era was the unlikely friendship that developed between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.[1][2] Doyle was a true believer in spiritualism while Houdini was a debunker of it. They became friends despite this conflict of views, but later had a falling out over it when Doyle arranged for a seance for Houdini where Houdini's dead mother allegedly appeared. [1] - https://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2016/04/the-real-story-of-houdini-doyle.html https://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2016/04/the-real-story-of-h... [2] - https://medium.com/picture-palace/harry-houdinis-spiritual-feud-with-arthur-conan-doyle-702eca2f16ee https://medium.com/picture-palace/harry-houdinis-spiritual-f...

darkhorse22 5y ago
> Houdini was immediately suspicious. The message was written in English and his mother only spoke German. At the top of each page was a cross. His mother was the wife of a rabbi and devoutly Jewish. There is no way she would have drawn a cross. Finally, the day of the séance was her birthday. Why didn’t she mention this?
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  This would probably sound laughable for anybody who has basic idea of extrasensory practice. Even assuming ghosts exist, you really can't contact them directly as if they were on a telephone/fax. That only works this way in cartoons. The only slightly realistic scenario is them channeling pure meanings/thoughts into a medium's mind. The medium then interprets them and turns them into words/drawings in accordance with habits of his own mind. For example some times I (not a medium, I mean in ordinary life) really know what do I want to say and that is a simple one-word concept but I have hard time recalling the word in ANY of the languages I speak, I only have a pure meaning experience without a verbal representation to express. If I somehow could pass this sense to someone else telepathically they would still probably misinterpret it, e.g. because they have a different context in their minds. And I would hardly waste time/traffic mentioning my birthday if I were talking to my son through an unreliable inter-dimensional telepathical connection.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Have you considered how you would distinguish this from ghosts simply not existing? It seems like what you're describing is merely a means by which a non-existent phenomenon may seem plausible.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      It seems obvious they probably don't exist and it's hardly possible to prove they do. But if they did (proving they don't exist seems equally impossible to me), I could only imagine they would communicate the way I describe. Nevertheless it indeed seems a curious exercise to invent a framework for meaningful communication to be logically possible over a channel of such a nature keeping its fuzziness in mind.
      - mjburgess 5y ago
        Yes, but the only reason you can imagine it this way is that the many other possible ways are ruled out by the fact we do not observe them. There is no purely logical reason the universe couldn't be such that a person's soul is capable of moving the air, such that they can actually speak.
        qwerty456127 5y ago
        I instinctively try to make the least bald assumption possible. Of course, as we exercise unconstrained imagination, we could imagine a ghost being so mighty it would materialize beautiful LaTeX documents right on our hard drives manipulating magnetic particles on them. Nevertheless, if I forget about the doubt in ghosts existing at all for sake of fun or whatever, the next doubt I have is they can manipulate the matters of material world with ease and precision - even if they could manifest a blow of a wind it would probably be hard for them to manipulate it precisely enough to produce continuous ineligible speech.
marcodiego 5y ago
Conan Doyle and the Wright family helped propagating the Cottingley Fairies. Sometimes I get impressed by how much the western developed world was still so mystical by the begining of the 20th century... then I see people mixing religion and politics and I see how we haven't advanced so much in this area.

darkhorse22 5y ago

> Houdini was immediately suspicious. The message was written in English and his mother only spoke German. At the top of each page was a cross. His mother was the wife of a rabbi and devoutly Jewish. There is no way she would have drawn a cross. Finally, the day of the séance was her birthday. Why didn’t she mention this?

qwerty456127 5y ago
This would probably sound laughable for anybody who has basic idea of extrasensory practice. Even assuming ghosts exist, you really can't contact them directly as if they were on a telephone/fax. That only works this way in cartoons. The only slightly realistic scenario is them channeling pure meanings/thoughts into a medium's mind. The medium then interprets them and turns them into words/drawings in accordance with habits of his own mind. For example some times I (not a medium, I mean in ordinary life) really know what do I want to say and that is a simple one-word concept but I have hard time recalling the word in ANY of the languages I speak, I only have a pure meaning experience without a verbal representation to express. If I somehow could pass this sense to someone else telepathically they would still probably misinterpret it, e.g. because they have a different context in their minds. And I would hardly waste time/traffic mentioning my birthday if I were talking to my son through an unreliable inter-dimensional telepathical connection.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Have you considered how you would distinguish this from ghosts simply not existing? It seems like what you're describing is merely a means by which a non-existent phenomenon may seem plausible.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    It seems obvious they probably don't exist and it's hardly possible to prove they do. But if they did (proving they don't exist seems equally impossible to me), I could only imagine they would communicate the way I describe. Nevertheless it indeed seems a curious exercise to invent a framework for meaningful communication to be logically possible over a channel of such a nature keeping its fuzziness in mind.
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      Yes, but the only reason you can imagine it this way is that the many other possible ways are ruled out by the fact we do not observe them. There is no purely logical reason the universe couldn't be such that a person's soul is capable of moving the air, such that they can actually speak.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        I instinctively try to make the least bald assumption possible. Of course, as we exercise unconstrained imagination, we could imagine a ghost being so mighty it would materialize beautiful LaTeX documents right on our hard drives manipulating magnetic particles on them. Nevertheless, if I forget about the doubt in ghosts existing at all for sake of fun or whatever, the next doubt I have is they can manipulate the matters of material world with ease and precision - even if they could manifest a blow of a wind it would probably be hard for them to manipulate it precisely enough to produce continuous ineligible speech.

marcodiego 5y ago

Conan Doyle and the Wright family helped propagating the Cottingley Fairies. Sometimes I get impressed by how much the western developed world was still so mystical by the begining of the 20th century... then I see people mixing religion and politics and I see how we haven't advanced so much in this area.