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Most people believe in ghosts, if you get them to be honest. Aliens probably aren't far from that. We're just kind of hard-wired to believe that the further you

Most people believe in ghosts, if you get them to be honest. Aliens probably aren't far from that. We're just kind of hard-wired to believe that the further you get from our day-to-day life, the more likely monsters are there.

slumberlust 2y ago
The ghost claim is interesting. I'd have thought most people would be honest about NOT believing in them.
riazrizvi 2y ago
You don’t know how many people believe in ghosts, and you don’t know what they’re thinking when they listen to a ghost story. I ‘believe in’ ghosts as a non-supernatural construct we use in literature. A technique to embody and externalize voices in people’s heads. It’s weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking for strangers so confidently.
mywittyname 2y ago
It's scientifically rational to believe in "aliens". There is plenty of evidence supporting a theory of abiogenesis. Even though we have not actually observed the process entirely, we are reasonably confident on some mechanisms by which it may occur. Ghosts, on the other hand, are pretty far out there. We have no evidence or even any working thesis of how the consciousness of individuals could persist in some ethereal form after death.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Ghosts as a phenomenon aren't really falsifiable, so there's not much point trying to make unequivocal scientific statements about them, if they exist. If there's something we can measure or some phenomenon that multiple people could elicit reliably then it would be an answerable question. But they're supernatural precisely because there is nothing to study scientifically. It's just some qualia that people interpret to be ghosts.
edm0nd 2y ago
I have always wondered what kind of overlap there is in between people who believe in things like ghosts and also people who believe in a God.
Jevon23 2y ago
Aliens are not woo. Life is a natural phenomenon that is very clearly possible within the known laws of physics. We know life can naturally occur in the universe, because it happened here. Why not somewhere else, too?

slumberlust 2y ago

The ghost claim is interesting. I'd have thought most people would be honest about NOT believing in them.

riazrizvi 2y ago

You don’t know how many people believe in ghosts, and you don’t know what they’re thinking when they listen to a ghost story. I ‘believe in’ ghosts as a non-supernatural construct we use in literature. A technique to embody and externalize voices in people’s heads. It’s weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking for strangers so confidently.

mywittyname 2y ago

It's scientifically rational to believe in "aliens". There is plenty of evidence supporting a theory of abiogenesis. Even though we have not actually observed the process entirely, we are reasonably confident on some mechanisms by which it may occur. Ghosts, on the other hand, are pretty far out there. We have no evidence or even any working thesis of how the consciousness of individuals could persist in some ethereal form after death.

throwway120385 2y ago
Ghosts as a phenomenon aren't really falsifiable, so there's not much point trying to make unequivocal scientific statements about them, if they exist. If there's something we can measure or some phenomenon that multiple people could elicit reliably then it would be an answerable question. But they're supernatural precisely because there is nothing to study scientifically. It's just some qualia that people interpret to be ghosts.

edm0nd 2y ago

I have always wondered what kind of overlap there is in between people who believe in things like ghosts and also people who believe in a God.

Jevon23 2y ago

Aliens are not woo. Life is a natural phenomenon that is very clearly possible within the known laws of physics. We know life can naturally occur in the universe, because it happened here. Why not somewhere else, too?