SwingingTheLamp

As others have said, you can’t change irrational beliefs with facts. This fact will become obvious if you change tacks and start asking this person pointed questions that highlight the contradictions in their belief.

If you do it well, they get enraged by their inability to come up with good answers, and abruptly stop talking to you about it (or stop talking to you at all).

(Also, you can often tell if their belief is rational by whether they ask you sincere questions seeking to understand why you think it’s real, in case they’re wrong.)

Good point!

Ditch the repeaters. Unless you have a mansion, or a bunker, that sounds like the effect of WiFi congestion rather than distance. Repeaters mean that each packet has to hit the air twice, or more, increasing congestion. Deploy multiple APs around the house, and run ethernet cabling to them from the ISP’s router. Configure all the APs with the same SSID, and security settings, and client devices can roam freely between them.

Does the book posit new laws of physics, or even call into question the current set? That’s what Gallileo did, but the promotional copy for the book doesn’t suggest that it does.

If a book claims something that’s fundamentally impossible by the laws of physics, I don’t need to read it to dismiss it.

With all due respect, you’ve latched onto 1. my introductory literary device for framing the argument, and 2. where I dismiss the book based on my argument, but missed my argument, which I would succinctly state as: By definition, we don’t know anything about the supernatural, but we know the natural world extremely well, and we can explain the way that it behaves fully and completely without supernatural influence. Not only do we lack evidence of the supernatural, the evidence that we do have rules it out.

That’s essentially a “god of the gaps” argument, i.e. if we cannot demonstrate it scientifically, therefore it must be God, or ghosts, or the Great Bacterial Collective Intelligence. But, in any case, turn that question around: do we have good reason to scientifically exclude the possibility of ghosts? And the answer there is a very strong ‘yes’.

Ryan North has a lot of Dinosaur Comics exploring concepts around ghosts, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one in which T-Rex muses about finding out what makes a poltergeist angry, triggering its ire constantly, and connecting the object(s) it manipulates to a generator in order to get infinite free energy.

Because, the physical world that we know and inhabit works on energy. For a ghost to interact with our world, it would simply have to inject energy into it. Sound, light, heat, et cetera, it’s energy. There’s no way around it. And we have laws of physics, like conservation of energy, which we very, very, very thoroughly tested at the scale, energy level, and relativistic velocities (that is, our human environment) at which ghosts would interact. In our natural world, we’d have to see macroscopic effects without causes, and energy entering or leaving the system. We’d be able to measure it, but we have not. E = mv², and the two sides of the equation balance, always.

More prosaically, another Dinosaur Comics strip posits that ghosts must be blind because they’re invisible. Invisibility means that all light passes through them, but if it doesn’t strike whatever ghosts use for photoreceptors, they’d by needs be blind. If their eyes did intercept light so that they were able to see, then if a ghost was watching you in a bright room, you’d at least see the faint shadows of its retinas. (Creepy!) In short, we don’t have to make any claims about the supernatural to say that if ghosts, or other supernatural phenomenon, interact with our natural world, we’d have to be able to see and measure the effect beyond subjective reports. However, we don’t, and there really just aren’t any gaps in the physics for ghosts to reside in.

As for the book, well, we all live inside these meat-based processors that are not exactly reliable in interpreting sensory input, or making narrative sense of it, and are well-known to just fabricate experiences and memories out of the ether when the sensory input is absent, scrambled, or just not interesting enough. It seems to me that the strongest likelihood is that brains did what brains habitually do (i.e. come up with fantastical stories), and that our theory of physics is pretty decent, since it has enabled us to create all sorts of technology.

No! Don’t do use dirty like this, posting a still image without an opossum wheel video. 😜