I suppose when starting this thread, my intent was to have a discussion around if ghosts could be real or if every claim is based on feelings, with no valid proof? (always and absolutely)
Ghosts
could be real, I suppose. The problem is that there's just no good evidence that they
are real.
If ghosts were real, don't you think that we'd have collected a fairly solid body of evidence for their existence by now? Bear in mind that self-declared "paranormal investigators" have supposedly been trying to collect reliable evidence of ghosts for decades at least, probably centuries. Yet there is no scientific consensus that ghosts exist. It's not a Grand Scientific Conspiracy; it's just science doing what science does: looking at the data and reaching tentative conclusions as to the best explanation(s).
What we
do know for sure is that people often misinterpret unusual experiences that they have, especially when they are scared and/or primed to interpret the experience in a particular (false) way. People can tend to jump to conclusions without examining evidence objectively. We see that all the time on this forum from believers in all kinds of paranormal stuff.
You mention feelings. We aren't always aware of the sources of our feelings. We can sometimes misinterpret feelings as having external causes, when the real causes are internal.
You also mention
claims. Lots of people have made lots of claims about ghosts. The "ghost studies" field has a long and ignominious history of deliberate fakery and lies, to the extent that it's hard to be taken seriously if you claim to have seen a ghost. Apart from that, there are a lot of "solved" ghost cases that have turned out not to be ghosts after all, even when the witnesses involved have been honest and have had good intentions. Also, a lot of the "best" evidence for ghosts is hopelessly ambiguous. A fuzzy thing in a photograph
might be a ghost, but then again it might be due to a camera defect, or a reflected light from some mundane object, or whatever. It's not always possible to tell. In such cases, all that can be said is that the evidence does not convincingly show a ghost.
You also need to apply some common sense when confronted by extraordinary claims. If ghosts are a real thing, then what
else does that imply about everything else we thought we knew up to the point where we decided ghosts are real? Are the ghosts
compatible with everything
else we know about our world? If not, we either need to revise some core ideas, or else use what we already know to invent a workable "theory of ghosts".
The last thing to say is that if we ever get to the point where there's actually good evidence for the existence of ghosts, that in itself might not bring us any closer to understanding what ghosts
are at a fundamental level. Showing that there
are ghosts would not be the end of a research programme, but the start of one. We're not even at square one, so far.
