Whichever way I read your message, an image still comes across vividly, that you are looking from a different viewpoint.

"Realises" is a word.

"Believes" is another word.

One looks at an incident and see it as a realisation.

Another looks at the same incident and believes.

The only difference is perspective, as the incident, and what taken place next, are all the same.

I thought ghosts, spirits etc......are just state of mind?

Thx, just like to throw in more ideas for further discussion

Believe both of us were referring to the same thing. Yes, I mentioned a lot about soul, however, if you read between the lines, those questions were indeed challenge the concept of soul rather than supporting it.

The dualism concept (body and soul separation) introduced more questions/challenges rather then solving the misery of existence itself.

What I tried to illustrate is, should the concept of soul fall, something new to think about and another direction may be needed to the idea of ghost existence.



Back to the topic again.

There is one logical thinking on reasoning, the Occam's razor. It sounds like this:

"when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better."

Or, the simpler explanation is always the better explanation to a problem.

In the quest of looking for why consciousness exist, there are a few theories:

A) Soul/Spirit drives the consciousness
- Like what mentioned in the previous post, to agree with the dualism concept (body and soul separation), one needs to believe that spirit/soul/ghost exists despite there are no hard evidences
- One needs to believe and rely in religion to answer the question (Where the soul comes from? Who supplies it? And also which religions?)
- There are a lot of questions remain unanswered to the idea of spirit (I posted some earlier), one needs to have faith to continue to believe that those questions were bounded by human limitation on comprehension of the real world, and religion is the only way to be taken as the highest priority

B) The sum of individual parts (the whole) is greater then the individual parts when there are separated
- Imagine a country flag made out of 5 thousand people hat in different colour. Individually there are just one person with a hat. However, when combine together, it became a country flag
- Music note when separated is merely a single note, when constructed into a melody and synergize using a ton of orchestra instrument, it becomes so emosionally touching
- A book is not just about a collection of words. With single word alone, it is not much impact. However, when group together became a book, it is so powerful and emotionally attached to the reader. A typical example is the holy book itself.

The list continues..

Examples above show that when a few components integrated together, it exhibits a new behavior/attribute that is unseen when the components are separated. When "combines together", it became "something else".

Using a baby as a more relevant example, as mentioned in previous post, when important part of the organs in the baby are developed in the mother, babies start to have consciousness.

Do we need the injection of soul/spirit to explain this consciousness behavior?

This is like an objective questions in primary school, choose between A or B above?

Another example that everyone here can relate to is the computer virus.

Although it is not an organic compound (cannot pee, pass motion, eat, no hydrogen atom and so on) it exhibits the following behaviors:
- Reproduction, trying to spread the species as wide as possible (aren't this look like living orgism?)
- Can wait and attack when env and time are suitable (looks like a real bacteria to me)
- Taking resources from the host, trying to take control to the host (like parasite)

One day, probably happened already, I don't know, a computer virus is telling the rest of it kinds:

Wow, our existence is unbelievable, we have so nice environment to live with. There must be a "virus soul" in each of us that drive our consciousness. Let's start up a post called "Can virus soul" be scientifically measured?" and asked our fellow forumer

Erm, what I meant in realisation is that the process/experiment can be repeated and certain observations can be made.
Perhaps this also falls under the category of 'Seeing is believing.'

One can observe the effect of gravity pretty clearly; Object falls. Period.
But the effect of ghost is not very much observable.

Hope you get what I meant

@nice.rider: Rather interesting ideas, but perhaps I'll discuss it later. Brain's still asleep; just woke up from nap *yawn*

Good day.

By the way, the sum is greater concept is not mine, I borrowed it from the professor Paul Davies, a scientist on physics and cosmology.

Seeing is not always believing. Sometimes your eyes can deceive you. There are rational explanations if you are willing to research about them.



This post has been edited by frags: Oct 9 2009, 05:59 PM

This is getting rather deep, I will try to take it from the beginning:

When that apple fell on Newton, what happened first?

Did Newton instantly realise that there is something that pulled the apple downwards, or did Newton arrive at the realisation later?

My personal view is that when that apple fell on Newton, he started a whole series of questions, and then he proceeded to search for answers for his questions, and in the process, he came to believe "something" is there, and the more he worked on finding that "something", the more he realised that that "something" might have to do much more than it had done to that apple, and ended up with the gravitation force in between the moon and the earth, between the Sun and earth and between the planets in the solar system.

Realisation does relate to believe, but if one has to choose in between those two, I think the "believe" stage comes first, and only after repeated positive results from the experiments, realisation follows.

Such as the topic of this thread. Can ghost be scientifically measured.

To talk about ghost in all seriousness takes belief. One has to believe that ghosts exist before one can think of "measuring" ghosts scientifically. Perhaps after repeated positive results, such as ghostly image captured on pictures, then one realise that, yes, indeed ghosts exist and might somehow be measurable and/or quantifiable.

This post has been edited by 4Atulan: Oct 9 2009, 07:00 PM

Likewise, the eyes might deceive one into thinking that what a ghost was seen


Ah.. I see what you're getting at now
Very nicely argued there, friend. So in order for us to define the existence of ghosts, we'd firstly have to believe they exists.
Am very sorry though, I'm unable to provide further material for this discussion

Perhaps my mind is still clogged with materials of a test for my stuides of which I have just taken ><

Trying to bring the Newton law as a contrast towards the spiritual world is absurb anyways.
Writing a whole length paragraph of philosophy or an essay wont change any fact. It all arrives into one conclusion, you are discussing something impossible or trying to prove that u are trying the "if" side of impossible.
If it can be experiment or measured, it could already be done thousand years ago. Let alone someone like us tryin to discuss the posibility of it now.
It's the truth that science is helpless towards the world of spiritual and it can never exceed it.
You can only believe that it existed and trying to go deep wont bring any result but just a waste of time.

I once read this... a scientist once take a dying man and put him on a super accurate emasuring device... say 0.0000001g accuracy..

after the dude gave his last breath, his weight drops instantly.. not much... but it do drops...

My bullshit meter is going off. Oh wait no, it's just my memory kicking in. That was a haphazardly designed experiment by a doctor, not a scientist, some hundred years back and has been thoroughly discredited. His conclusion was that the human's soul weighs 21 grams. And it wasn't a "super accurate measuring device". It was a weighing scale which I reckon would only be accurate up to, I dunno, half a gram at most? And modern research have yet to replicate his results.

Looks like you only got one point right in your post, and that is that he measured a drop in weight when one of his patients died. One out of SIX. How's that for statistical reliability? Two of his patients continued to lose weight over time (maybe they had multiple souls?), another lost some and then gained some (soul left, checked out heaven, decided he didn't like it and went back?). The results from the rest were discarded because they died while he was still calibrating the scale. So, really, there were only 4 data points. With wildly different results. Sounds like measurement errors, don't you think? It would do you good to do some research next time before regurgitating some highly decorated story based on dubious facts you read somewhere.

This post has been edited by pixelsheep: Oct 10 2009, 12:47 AM

Ooh my.. another kopitiam dude... this is a place where people gather, share information, discuss and debabte...

concrete evidence?? where on earth can you find concrete evidence for ghost?? now you tell me from your research wise guy

This post has been edited by Awakened_Angel: Oct 10 2009, 08:39 AM

You do have a point. The misery of existence itself/spirit may remains unanswered in our lifetime.

We are currently stuck in a wild goose chase, or an inter-deadlock between science and religion in the quest of answering the question on existence itself.

Instead of continue in banging the wall in the similar pattern, perhaps a "Leap Of Faith" is all we need, where a new paradigm shift on how we explain our world, rather that the current narrow tunnel vision view using our culture, supertition, religion and science.

Extract from a scientist:
"Are we heading into the right direction in trying to detect and measure the spirit existence? Where the so called spirit could be a bi-product and result from another outcome?"

Everyone can feel or witness ghost, when we sleep, our soul or somehow can communicate with them thru dream . is proven .

The choices of the words, Everyone and Proven were rather strong.

Please allow me to quote this again:

"A believer in the flat earth theory does not know whether the earth is flat, however he believes it is."

This is where you've flawed.

He argued on the level of the process of discovering something. Supportive arguments were given to relate the process of experimenting and discovering begins from believing its existence.

To a person of shallow argumentative mind, one can only look at the obvious.
Like duh! We all know there's no link between Newton's Law and ghost in any form!

Hmmm I'm afraid this thread has deviated a bit from its origin. This is a science thread. But discussion has gone into philosophical ideas. Please create a new thread(philosophy and not science).