It's easy to solve the problem of science ignoring the ghosts and visions. All you need is a good experiment. Preferably something reproducible like saying "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice". An alternative is something that can convince Randi, but a lot of people will claim he sell out.
My favorite example is high temperature superconductivity. In 1970 if you claim that you have a high temperature superconductor people will dismiss you. It was not theoretically impossible, but all tries had failed and there was no theoretical support to expect one. But one day, someone made a high temperature superconductor and published a difficult to follow recipe, and then someone else published an easy to follow recipe, and now everyone with a good lab can make a high temperature superconductor.
There are degrees of "wrongness" or likelihood. Pseudo-sciences exists practically as long as there have been sciences. With no evidence, and not for lack of trying. People really like to believe in that stuff. But with that track-record, it is on the rather wrong end of wrongness. Might be true, but on the likelihood of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, yes, a reproducible experiment by an independent party would be the way to go,
On the other hand, the discovery of existence of high temperature superconductors while certainly baffling and had people scrambling to explain it, is exactly how science works.
It was not completely out of the blue, we had a reasonable understanding of electromagnetism. But that "detail" didn't fit. It was just one more puzzle to solve, and it didn't invalidate everything we knew before.
Also, there were gradual steps of increases of temperature of achieving high temperature supra conductivity. So, not "theoretically impossible", but rather "practically rather unlikely". A different ball-park then ghosts and visions.
The healthy skepticism to high temperature supra-conductivity (and low temperature fusion) comes from the mantra "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (Sagan), and a lot of pseudo-science people came with the claims for supra-conductivity but without the evidence.
The problem's been solved. Every supernatural claim that can be tested has been tested, and every conceivable experiment done, the data collected, and the results are in... ghosts and other paranormal phenomena aren't real.
What if ghost only realiablily appear when someone dies and there is a big neutrino flux? Have someone build a room for dying people in the path of a big neutrino beam?
What if neutrinos push ghost, so they are pushed to deep space by the neutrinos of the Sun? I guess the best place to put a ghost detector is at the top of a hospital and try to measure a passing ghost at midnight.
I obviously don't expect neither of these scenarios to be real, but I guess nobody had measured them.
Going back to my superconductor example, let's imagine that you go back in time to 1950 and say that the best superconductor is a ceramic, but you don't remember the exact formula. Hey, you don't even remember the formula of any ceramic material. They will think you are nut. Someone will even try with the wrong ceramic. Or with the wrong composition. Or let it catch some humidity and ruin the sample. Everyone will get convinced that all the conceivable ceramic are tested and it is impossible. They are not even conductors!
Your story about the superconductor shows how pseudo-science is different from science in practicality every step, despite trying to pose as it.
- Ghost potentially exist, we have uncountable "theories" that could explain how, we just have to find the evidence to prove that what we want to be true actually is.
Versus:
- As we understand current theories based on the existing evidence, high temperature super-conductors are unlikely to exist. Let's spend a huge amount of effort and resources to prove that our understanding is incomplete. Ups, someone accidentally stumbled upon something that doesn't fit, and now we have to go to great lengths to actually formulate a hypothesis that fits the unexpected new evidence, and then we have to go to even more effort to test those hypothesises so maybe one stands the test of time to become a theory. Until we hopefully find something else that doesn't fit.
>And boom, suddenly it hasn’t all been disproven :)
It still has been, because none of the claims made about ghosts can be explained by the known properties of dark matter (whatever it is.)
For example, people claim to see ghosts, but dark matter doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. You can't see something that doesn't reflect light.
Cameras can't see anything that doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, but most people see things that don't physically exist from time to time; they're called dreams or hallucinations, depending on context.
That’s my point though - so far dark matter only exists in equations (and our imagination) and isn’t real (that we’ve been able to prove). It’s got as much proof as ghosts. That will surely change but we’re not there now.
> so far dark matter only exists in equations (and our imagination) and isn’t real (that we’ve been able to prove). It’s got as much proof as ghosts.
Incorrect... there is plenty of evidence for dark matter beyond "equations and our imaginations[0,1]," and certainly more evidence for dark matter than for ghosts.
Physics doesn’t have exclusive domain over the term “real.” Dreams and hallucinations belong primarily to Psychology, but they are real phenomena that we can and do study.
At the risk of drawing an inordinate volume of fire and critique, I’m going to be candid and state openly that there’s no way ai could possibly integrate this kind of material into my world view and therefore it stays on the cutting room floor.
I’m so utterly materialist and rationalistic that the lack of plausible mechanisms by which any of this might occur leads me to (arguably ‘unscientifically’) dismiss it out of hand.
Not can I support the idea that promoting a benevolent fiction can in any way be positive. After all, one could always hew to honesty (as indeed this piede does) by arguing that benefits can accrue from believing in something irrespective of its veracity, without directly engaging with the truthfulness of the beneficial statement itself.
> the lack of plausible mechanisms by which any of this might occur
But some of the mechanisms themselves are already reasonably well known. We can already make light points appear to another person via electric signals in spite of the fact no such light points actually exist in front of that person's eyes. So it's not a question of whether these phenomena exist or not, but rather how exactly they are related to the brain.
I’m not sure I really needed “fart” to be censored to “f——“. Am I out of touch with how acceptable it is to use the word fart? Am I going to accidentally offend someone?
In the same sentence but before the quote it is not censored. I'm guessing that the censorship was part of the original quote. Given that Kant wrote in the 1700s I could see it being considered impolite at the time.
My favorite example is high temperature superconductivity. In 1970 if you claim that you have a high temperature superconductor people will dismiss you. It was not theoretically impossible, but all tries had failed and there was no theoretical support to expect one. But one day, someone made a high temperature superconductor and published a difficult to follow recipe, and then someone else published an easy to follow recipe, and now everyone with a good lab can make a high temperature superconductor.