How can we know if a spirit world exists?

sleepy

The only way we as humans can examine the universe is through our brains.
There’s nothing we can do about it. All senses and experiences are taken in by or bodies and interpreted in our minds. We can not know of anything that our minds can't take in.
For example if we were all blind and no humans had eyes and the part of the brain that interprets vision we would have no concept of seeing or even the existence of light.

This creates a problem, how can we know whether things exist outside of our senses. We are not talking of ultra sonic sound or x-ray vision as we can detect these using instruments than measure them and convert them into properties that we can personally measure so you for example have a display on a screen .
But are there properties of nature that are unknown and cant presently be measured.

So could such things as a spirit world exist and just be outside of our present detection abilities?
How could we establish its existence? Why should we try?
Well significant numbers of people have claimed to have been contacted by the spirit world. By God , angels , spirits , ghosts and other phenomenon.
The number of people involved and it effects on the world (Christianity etc) suggest that we should at least take these claims seriously.( not that we should believe them just at least take them into account)

Can we then establish whether these people are lying or they are misinterpreting normal events.
To know whether they are lying we could subject them to a lie detector test.
I whish this could be arranged but some such as Jesus and Moses are long dead.
To find if they are misinterpreting events we could try to find if whether a certain part of the brain is stimulated a human will experience visions , this would give evidence that a brain malfunction could give rise to visions in normal people and should not be interpreted as anything unusual.
This has been done and a certain part at the front of the Brain can when stimulated give rise to “religious euphoria” (Phantoms in the Brain by V.S.Ramachandran)
The trouble is that even if a part of the brain does this that does not mean a vision had to be a malfunction of the brain. Why?
Well we all dream at night the fact that we can see things in our head does not mean our vision when awake is not real. Also how would we know that visitors from a spirit world do not use this part of the brain in order to communicate?

Perhaps then we should just use or knowledge of how the known universe works and see if we need unknown forces to explain events.
Well this would suggest that a God isn’t needed to make animals and planets as this can be explained by known mechanisms. But it still doesn’t tell us whether any sprit world exists only that we don’t “need” it to explain life on this earth.
Maybe we will never be able to prove or disprove the existences of spirits and ghosts.
Perhaps the only people who know are those that have seen them.
But can we trust them?

So is there a fail safe way of knowing whether people who claim visits from spirits are telling the truth and have understood what has happened to them correctly?

ballistic

I find this a very interesting subject. There was a small news item on the other day about some research being done to explain many psychic phenomena. It is based on the idea that an energy force flows through all things including humans and over years of evolution, our brain has started to tap into this energy, although not presenting this ability as one of the other senses. Some people are more able than others to feel or interpret this energy flow. What it basically does is provide the means whereby part of our brains have access to information which cannot normally be explained such as is found in divination, remote viewing, mind reading and various other new age sciences.
This energy field would fit your criteria for something we cannot "see" and a sense we have not fully developed or can explain.

cynicus

FYI: The James Randi Educational Foundation has a prize of over 1 million dollars available for the first person who can prove anything 'paranormal' --- the existence of spirits, or other occult business included. The prize hasn't been collected for more than 10 years now.

http://www.randi.org/research/index.html

one

a good starting point would be CIA OR KGB files, if you can.

Deep topics are rarely replied on this board, maybe we are all "brain dead"

we have a limited processing power

we even burn out if we don't switch off 8 hour of the 24 it takes the globe to make a turn.
what a waste!

and to stay up the other 16 hours we need to supply ourselves with solid and liquid fuel, you know.
What can you spect from such inefficient machine?

one

one million?

i wonder why the wt has not applied, they can try to show the ability to predict future events

i predict i will be drinking coffe in 5 minutes, let see what happens

Satanus

Good thoughts and questions sleepy

Studies have been done since the last 200 yrs. The problem is this field is subject to so much quakery and fakery. Another problem is that religion gets involved. Religion can attempt to force its dogmas on any results. Results can also be a threat to religion, and so it is much safer and easier to stop, discredit or condemn all inquiry.

Monroe institute has done some studies, setting them in a totally nonreligious background. See . http://www.monroeinstitute.org/ . http://www.afterlife-knowledge.com/

Instruments having the capability to measure spiritual phenomana would be nessesary. Spiritual instruments?? Anyway, i have a theory that the brain acts like a valve to regulate the input of reality. An example would be a perceptive person seeing and taking note of a lot more than a stressed preoccupied person. If this is true, then experiments where 'spititual' phenomena are elicited by stimulating certain parts of the brain are merely opening a gate to let that part of reality register in the conscioussness.

At present, it is accepted that the 5 senses we have can be generally trusted. In my opinion, i don't see why there may not be 6th, 7th or even other senses latent in our psyches, or to be developed in future generations.

SS

avengers

Wonder if there's a spirit world for this shark?

"Few are they that look through their own eyes and feel with their own heart"
A Einstein

Nathan Natas

While it is true that man has developed instruments to measure fields undetectable to the senses, we should remember that before these instruments were built, the NEED for such instuments was suggested by observable, repeatable EFFECTS.

Primitive man may not have known what exactly the wind was, but he could see and feel the effects.

The gravitational field of pluto (yuggoth) caused disturbances in the orbit of nearby planets. It was the realization that these orbits were disturbed that caused scientists to seek an answer; the existence of a new planet was postulated, the orbit of the unseen planet was calculated, and when scientists looked at the piece of sky in which pluto was predicted to lie, there it was!

Before we can build any GhostBuster-like etherial containment fields, we first need to see EVIDENCE of the existence of something previously unknown. As has already been explained, claims of paranormal activity fall into two categories: 1) non-reproducable or 2) fraudulent.

A couple of years ago cryptozoologists were fascinated by reports of a new invisible life-form that came to be known as "Rods". After a few months of serious inquiry it was demonstrated that these "rods" were the product of the ideosyncracies of video cameras and the motion of moths in flight. The "rods" were ordinary moths imaged on video.

Personally, I believe there are things we don't know about the world we live in. The coelacanth is a fish once thought to be extinct, until one was caught in a fisherman's net: now we have videos of them in their native environment. No one has ever seen a giant squid alive in it's native environment; yet the existence of dead giant squids suggests strongly that there must be live ones somewhere. There are lifeforms living near deep sea thermal vents that use electron transport mechanisms (energy systems) very different from ours.

Something new will be discovered tomorrow, but given that there is no evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm, I doubt that it will be one of those discoveries. Fakes and frauds playing on our emotions and dreams will continue to be exposed, however.

Siddhashunyata

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do youexpect to find it?

SixofNine

This picture is on the front page at CNN right now. I was a skeptic, but I see a man flying on a broom in this picture.

How can we know if a spirit world exists?

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