Forget the whole philosophy and meta side of this. If the events you describe really happened, then there is a sneaky, insane and probably dangerous human around. If this were a B-movie horror, you would search the house alone and unarmed, find a concealed door in the "alien geometry" basement room, open it and be ambushed. Tread carefully. If a key goes missing and then reappears, it has been copied. If a previous occupant's possessions turn up mysteriously, then the lurker has been around for awhile. Hidden cameras are a useful tool. In any case, it is dangerous to tip him off that you know, unless you are ready to act (as in, bring in police, conduct a thorough search with special equipment, and change all locks) immediately.
Either that or maybe either OrphanWilde or his sister or someone else close to him really enjoys messing with everyone and making it seem that the house is haunted.
Heh. There -was- a semi-hidden door in the "alien geometries" room going outside, actually, although it had been boarded up from the other side, and I've since replaced it with well-reinforced masonry. And the original door was spray-painted in red with bizarre symbols. (I'm not making that up. Seriously, imagine this: First, there's a room that doesn't seem to join together properly. Now there's this apparent wooden wall, in a room mostly made of cinderblock walls, covered in weird symbols in red spray paint. The wall swings open if you can get a fingertip grip on the edges of the wood - into a featureless wooden wall behind it. -Nobody- liked going into that room.)
The only way a key retrieval would have been possible is if the sneaky person had reached out from a heating duct and grabbed it. Which is conceivably possible - the ductwork is loose and could be pulled down from the basement.
...considering my girlfriend refused to be in the house for more than a month after I showed her a haiku inspired by the noises inside the walls as being rats with broken necks being thrown down from the attic by a creature living there (the house was -awesome- writing inspiration), I don't think I'll relate that particular explanation.
You should assign a much higher probability to your being a victim of gaslighting than to your having experienced supernatural events.
How likely of an explanation is that, really? How often does this happen? I feel like giving this phenomenon a name and a wiki page has artificially increased your probability of it. If you had just said "this could easily be explained by someone having a powerful grudge on you, sneaking into your house and waging a several month long campaign of psychological warfare on you", that would sound absurd.
If either a ghost or sociopath could have caused an event I would give vastly more weight to the likelihood if it having been done by a sociopath.
It sounds like an old house, based on the structural abnormalities. Is it possible that there is a gas leak? One prime candidate for the "haunted house" phenomenon is hallucinations brought on by exposure to carbon monoxide.
I think it worth pointing out that it's very difficult to remove selective perception and confirmation bias here. For example, if I experienced the "dropped key" scenario you described, I would simply assume that the key had slid or been kicked out of the room, and then someone else had later found it and set it down somewhere off the ground. However, if I believed that I lived in a Haunted House, the first hypothesis that would spring to mind would be that the key's teleportation was part of the haunting. So when you say such incidents have not occurred since you lived in that house, I believe that you think that, but it's likely that you just don't view incidents outside the house as existing in the same magisterium, in some sense.
Additionally, I happened to be pondering today why people seem to take Aumann's Agreement Theorem so literally around here. It is a mathematical idealization. We're not talking about the mathematics of particle physics, we're talking about the cognition and interactions of humans, who only barely do reasoning in the first place and barely succeed in communicating even the simplest concepts without signal loss.
(Commenters: talking about the 'supernatural' in terms of metaphysics is metaphysically interesting but phenomenologically speaking it just clouds the issue unnecessarily. The way most people actually use the concept is just 'weird things happening that would require human or transhuman agency, in situations where there's no good reason to suspect human agency'. Talking about reductionism &c. is missing the point---it doesn't matter whether the agency comes from an engineered superintelligence or an "ontologically fundamental" god, what matters is there's non-human agency around. Note that all reports of supernatural phenomena can be explained "naturally" by superintelligences, simulators, highly advanced aliens, &c., all of which seem not-unlikely in a big universe. The improbability stems from the necessity of their having seemingly bizarre motivations; the mechanisms themselves, however, aren't fantastically improbable.)
If this were a mystery story, the prime suspects would be the people who helped you search for the key :)
If you have a spare computer and some spare time, you could surreptitiously set up a few sneaky cameras. Just don't tell those people. If you think this is supernatural with, say, p>10%, this sounds like a fun thing to investigate. Well, fun now that you're out of a house that was for one reason or another correlated with you having night terrors.
I used to experience periodic attacks of sleep paralysis. The first few times it happened to me I had no idea what was happening; I had vivid auditory hallucinations as well as the strong sensation that someone else was in my bedroom. Occasionally I would feel an enormous pressure on my chest.
I later learned that sleep paralysis may have inspired a lot of folklore, e.g. incubi. If a thousand years ago I reported these symptoms and someone told me "a demon is sitting on you," I would have been hard-pressed to come up with a better hypothesis.
The cameras should see each other (so a person cannot manipulate one camera from its dead angle without being seen by another camera), and should upload their data to the cloud in real time.
Woah woah woah, back up here. Why would you want to move out of this goldmine? Lets assume that you're correct and it's a real haunted house and not schizophrenia/people-in-the-walls/mental-abuse-by-your-sister.
You were in a house where objects were repeatedly, purposefully moved without human intervention. Just take a look at the incident where key lime juice got into the oven: either the haunted house teleported it from your fridge to your oven, or the haunting house generated action-without-reaction and floated it from the fridge to the oven.
[*] In case A, you've just broken the Theory of Relativity and can help humans colonize the stars with instant teleportation. Please collect your 100 nobel prizes, 100 billion dollars, and knowledge that you've protected all of humanity from any possible existential risk.
[*] In case B, you've just broken the Laws of Thermodynamics and can help humanity defeat entropy itself. Please collect your 200 nobel prizes, 500 billion dollars, and the knowledge that you've literally saved all of existence for all time.
You've gotten the most valuable thing that has ever existed on this planet living in your house, and you want to give up ownership.
Either that or your sister is crazy and hates key lime juice. 50/50 equally likely.
What if the house merely floated the thing over there with reaction (pushing back on the floors/walls), and its floor rotted slightly (accumulating entropy, losing chemical energy) in proportion to the necessary force? In that case, he's only discovered ghostly energy transfer at small distances, which may be completely impractical (only one or two Nobels).
The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is.
So, it seems like there's a strong and weak interpretation of this sentence.
The weak interpretation (that I endorse) is "reported physical evidence is often physical"- crop circles aren't photoshopped, they're actually there in the fields. Throwing out the evidence with the interpretation is rarely wise. Talking with someone who believes in alien abduction reports, I get the sense that there are a number of them where it's reasonable to believe that weird things were really noticed (like someone's lawn having an abnormal amount of radiation, or so on). Under this interpretation, you probably ought to move out of the house / set up hidden cameras / etc.; if any of these are the result of hallucinations or the actions of others or the unremembered actions of yourself, then setting up systems to counteract that is a good idea.
In this interpretation, a "superstition" is more of a "unarticulated causal model." It isn't that "ghosts live in the house, and move objects around,"...
Aumann was, in short, wrong, because Aumann Updating is based on the belief that two individuals -can- share evidence. Evidence is incompletely transferable.
I don't care to respond to the rest of your post, but I feel I should point out that saying a theorem is wrong because the hypotheses are not true is bad logic.
I'm interested in whether the axioms or theorem are even wrong in this case.
Why isn't this covered under the general observation "your observations [of haunting] are very little information and move a outsider's beliefs by [very small amount], and if your own beliefs don't converge, you're just demonstrating your irrationality by overweighting your experience and ignoring how many thousands of people throughout history have felt equally freaked out by 'haunted houses' only for detailed investigation to find nothing."?
I'm curious now whether and how the agreement theorem holds in cases where the environment includes agents that are selectively presenting different evidence to different rational observers. You'd think that'd ruin the result along the same lines as the no free lunch theorems.
Objectively, no; as previously mentioned, it shouldn't surprise us that somebody won the lottery. Subjectively, yes; I would certainly update my odds that something other than pure chance is at work if I happened to win the lottery.
Again, why? Suppose we are comparing two models: in one world, there are 1000 haunted houses which are all explained by gaslamping and sleepwalking etc; in the second world, there are 1000 haunted houses and they are all supernatural etc. Upon encountering a haunted house, would you update in favor of 'I am in world two and houses are supernatural'? Would someone reading your experience update? I propose that neither would update, because the evidence is equally consistent with both worlds; so far so good.
Now, if in world 1 there are 1000 frightening houses with the mundane explanations mentioned, and in world 2 there are 1000 frightening houses with the mundane explanations (human biology and mentality and the laws of probability etc having not changed) plus 1000 frightening houses due to supernatural influences, upon encountering a frightening house would you update?
Of course; in world 2 there are more frightening houses and you have encountered a f...
Have you checked the house for mold? The night terrors seem pretty well-explained by mycotoxins and the odds of the other weirdness also go up if something is screwing with your biochemistry.
Since no one mentioned this famous excerpt from Feynman's bio yet:
He was at work in the computing room when the call came from Albuquerque that Arline was dying. He had arranged to borrow Klaus Fuchs’s car. When he reached her room she was still. Her eyes barely followed him as he moved. He sat with her for hours, aware of the minutes passing on her clock, aware of something momentous that he could not quite feel. He heard her breaths stop and start, heard her efforts to swallow, and tried to think about the science of it, the individual cells starved of a...
Okay, I'll bite the lottery bullet. If I happen to win the lottery, then this does not make it more likely that something unusual happened (e.g. the lottery being rigged). The hypothesis that I naturally won the lottery is unlikely, true; but the hypothesis that the lottery was rigged so that I would win is equally unlikely for the exact same reasons: why was it rigged for me to win, and not someone else?
Similarly, in the haunted house situation, you should in fact consider it unlikely that these events would happen to you. However, this penalty should app...
This is a textbook example of getting carried away with irrational fascination, and letting one's beliefs drift along lines defined by no more than a disorienting attempt to jam defunct terminology into a new situation. It's reminiscent of when notable academics profess their 'belief in God' by reference to plausibly scientifically defensible positions concerning possible alien intelligences, potential future singularity states, etc. That's not what they meant by "God"!
Why call it "superstition"? Why refer to this as an instance of you ...
Interestingly, my father, a moderately respected scientist, has cited similar reasoning to me when discussing why he believes in supernatural phenomena. He believes he has encountered overwhelmingly convincing evidence, but says he understands that I shouldn't necessarily believe him. This is... a pleasant way to deal with disagreement, if not faultless reasoning.
After reading your thread with gwern, I think you and he are probably wrong about this reasoning in general, and you are probably wrong in your case specifically.
I think it should be possible to e...
"A stone cannot fall from the sky - there ARE no stones in the sky." -- Lavoisier (quote found at the link above)
When you hear something really weird from a number of independent sources, what can you conclude?
This should have been two posts. First, "My house is spooking me, what's up with that? Spooky things, amirite?". Second, "There's some distinct information content between experiencing an event and being told about someone else experiencing that event. Therefore AAT doesn't work, amirite?"
To the second point, I haven't read any write-ups of AAT. Does it say you have to speak messages that have the same evidential impact to others as your accumulated experience does to you? That sounds like a pretty terrible theorem. I thought there was ...
I've had many similar experiences. You might want to search for J. E. Kennedy, capricious psi. And keep in mind it's dangerous to be around human or transhuman intelligences with unknown motivations. Also, yay updating on evidence! Whether the explanation is supernatural or not, the important thing is to keep many hypotheses in mind and not disregard evidence or hypotheses just because they're uncomfortable.
my priors for "weird geographically located feelings and occurrences happen" is a lot higher (as it should be obviously but it's worth stating) than for any of the possible explanations put forward for it. I think EMF like reasons are the most plausible, though. Tricks on memory and feelings seem pretty plausible, eg you didn't actually lose the key except in your pocket, and then dropped it later than you thought you did.
The question of "probability of occuring" is only half the question. For you, the probability that those experiences are in your memory is 1 - they're real. The more interesting probability to explore is the relative likelihood of causes for these memories.
For the three main possibilities (or any others you find more likely than any of them): 1) "supernatural" or non-human action. 2) believable hallucinations (including hallucination of other people's reactions, or environmental causes of hallucinations in multiple people). 3) d...
The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is.
You should clarify what you mean by "haunted houses." You seem to be using the term "haunted houses," to mean "houses where people have experienced spooky things." If that is all you mean by the phrase "haunted houses," then your belief in them is not unusual in any sense. I believe that many people have had spooky-house experiences that they d...
You mention a housemate, apparently your sister. What's more likely: ghosts, hand-wavy stuff about electric fields, or your sister? Well, you know your sister, I know nothing about her.
Whatever the probabilities, the scariest hypothesis is that it's your sister doing all this. Poltergeists, whatever they are, seem to just do random weird annoying stuff. People, on the other hand, have purposes; crazy people can have crazy purposes.
Well, you notice you're confused: good! Now the best way to proceed is to form hypothesis on what could cause the strange phoenomena and test for those. Is there a ghost in the house? Is gaslighting/EMF messing with your head? Is there someone pranking you? There are various ways to falsify all of those... just test and update.
...The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is. In particular, I own a house in which bizarre crap has happened since I first moved into it. Persistently. I've moved into another house, and have been making repairs in preparation to sell it; most recently, in a room with almost no furniture, in a space with absolutely no furniture, a key was dropped by myself. Four people searched the area for significant periods of time on thre
I've read that a lot of people who say that they've lived in "haunted houses" have had weird stuff continue to happen to them even after they move - the house itself didn't have much to do with it.
I just have to point out that just because it's anecdotal evidence doesn't mean we shouldn't take it as evidence- albeit with a good amount of salt. Especially from someone who we have evidence (Being on this site in the first place) is at least mildly rational. (And I'm not even going to mention the ghosts thing.)
I recently started carrying a plastic water bottle around with me. I use to carry a metal one, because I was worried about plastic leaching into the water and that being toxic or something. I decided to investigate the risk recently, and came across a Quora post that's reasurred me that if I wash the bottle with soap, then dry it intermittently, it should be alright.
...There is a recycling stamp on every plastic bottle that is usually placed at the bottom with a digit inside (image above). This can help you pretty much understand the rules of recycling/reus
Was the alien geometry visible from outside the room? Or would the burglar have had to open the door and thus see the expensive materials before deciding to leave it be?
I don't blame supernatural events. I believe the house is "haunted," but purely as a description of the events. (Smallpox is still smallpox even after we discover that it is caused by microorganisms rather than, say, angry spirits, or an imbalance in our body fluids.)
I think this was misleading.
I'll start with a confession:
The evidence I have personally seen suggests haunted houses are, in fact, real, without given any particular credence to any particular explanation of what the haunting is. In particular, I own a house in which bizarre crap has happened since I first moved into it. Persistently. I've moved into another house, and have been making repairs in preparation to sell it; most recently, in a room with almost no furniture, in a space with absolutely no furniture, a key was dropped by myself. Four people searched the area for significant periods of time on three different occasions with no luck. I found it on the floor a week or two ago on top of something that wasn't there when it fell. Which is the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of my skepticism.
Other bizarre things that have happened include such things as my waking up to discover my recently-purchased bottle of key lime juice had been placed in the oven, and the oven turned on; the plastic bottle had just started to melt when I made the discovery. Another situation involved my sister, who one morning (while home alone) walked into the living room and discovered on a previously empty floor three sonograms of the previous occupant's baby. (There were -many- other things; I'm choosing for the purposes of this post the most unusual and least prone-to-outside-explanation occurrences. Night terrors, for example, are easily explained.)
Up until the last incident, the key, I was inclined to attribute the events to, say, sleepwalking and confirmation bias. At this point, I do not think the evidence really supports that conclusion anymore. My skepticism has been broken by personal experience; I'm not going to attribute anything to any -particular- explanation, but there is definitely something -not normal- about that house, whatever it may be; it has been the (nearly) sole repository of such experiences in my life. (The only other such experience was the day my grandfather (with whom I was extremely close) died, and given the mental turmoil I was experiencing, I'm disinclined to give that particular experience too much credit. For the curious, I was taking a shower, and the hot water repeatedly (3 times) turned off. As in, the knob was completely rotated to shut off the flow of hot water to the faucet.)
A key point of rationality is that evidence can in fact change your mind. Well, the evidence has changed my mind.
From a reader's perspective, this is all anecdotal evidence. So I don't expect to change anybody -else's- mind - indeed, you're probably making a mistake if you -do- change your mind, because out of millions of people, you -should- expect to see a few weird things being related by other people. The odds of somebody else relating an entirely factual series of anecdotes that suggest something unlikely are probably significantly higher than the odds of that unlikely thing being true. However, the odds of such things happening to you personally are considerably -lower- than the odds of hearing about the events from somebody else. Which all leads into a central conclusion: It's possible for the evidence to support one person believing something, while at the same time -not- supporting that anybody else believe that thing. If you win the lottery, that may be evidence for you believing you're living in a simulation or that some other mechanism "forced" the outcome - while at the same time the evidence doesn't suggest anything for somebody -else- winning the lottery.
I have a different purpose in mind: Making the claim that objectively irrational beliefs can, in fact, be subjectively rational. Prior to these experiences, I regarded the idea of a haunted house - I use the idea without prejudice for what "haunted" is or refers to - was that it was just superstitious people scaring themselves. At this point I'm forced by the evidence I've seen to conclude that there's something to the idea, even if it's not what people think it is. Maybe EMFs subtly messing with my brain (there is some weak evidence for the idea that electromagnetic fluctuations can induce metabolic changes in neurons - see http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=645813 ), maybe something else.
If a pattern-recognition algorithm doesn't produce false positives, it's probably getting false negatives, and given that we can test false positives but do not know to test false negatives, pattern-recognition should favor false positives over false negatives. What does this have to do with anything? Well, it means superstitions aren't a product of a poor mind, only -untested- superstitions are. A good intelligence should develop superstitions. It should, when capable, discard them.
But it should only discard such superstitions as it has evidence to do so.
Now, the skeptical reader might ask what odds I place on each of these events occurring. My answer is as follows: Each event was highly unlikely in itself, explainable as an independent event only by positing pretty unlikely circumstances (what odds would I place on me or my housemate sleepwalking multiple times when neither of us have any history of such behavior, and such behavior has entirely ceased since leaving that house? Keep in mind that neither I nor my sister were initially inclined to regard such events as even needing explanation; it's only been until the most recent episode that I've decided the evidence suggests anything at all, so the possible explanation that the sleepwalking was a product of disturbance at the first few unusual events seems unlikely). Further evidence has rendered each event less likely as an independent phenomenon - since moving to a different house, the occurrences have ceased. When returning to the house, occurrences resume within its context. My control, while hardly blind, is controlling. But meaningfully, the same evidence doesn't mean the same thing if it is coming from somebody else; out of millions of people, I would expect such things to occur. I simply cannot expect them to occur -to me-. (And I wasn't the only one who found the house to be... off. There's a sense of not-quite-rightness to one basement room which I cannot explain without resorting to Lovecraftian cliches about alien geometries. The house was burgled several times; the only room that was left completely untouched, even when the copper piping was stolen (and subsequently the water meter - I got a waterfall in my basement!), was that room, which is conveniently where I left a thousand or so dollars worth of building materials for a project I hadn't finished yet.)
Evidence is personal. The odds of something happening are not equal to the odds of that something happening to you. Therefore, while we should not be surprised if miracles (that is, really unlikely and contextually significant events) occur, it is still legitimate to be surprised when they occur to us individually. The qualitative rationality of an individual belief is not equal to the qualitative rationality of the same belief on a social scale; individuals get different evidence than society, even when the same evidence is apparently present both for the individual and the community.
And just as it is a mistake for people to judge the beliefs of others based on the community standard of evidence, rather than the individual standard of evidence, it is likewise a mistake for an individual to judge society based on the individual standard of evidence, rather than the community. Just as it is possible for the individual to rationally believe something that society should not rationally believe as a whole, it is possible for society to rationally reject something the individual has overwhelming personal evidence for.
Aumann was, in short, wrong, because Aumann Updating is based on the belief that two individuals -can- share evidence. Evidence is incompletely transferable.
(Note: Anthropic reasoning can potentially remedy this at least to some extent for -past- experiences; reproducible and continuing experiences somewhat less.)