You won't like my answer, but since I typically can't remember where I put the remote the day before, is it really that surprising that you don't remember setting it on the bookshelf years ago?  Or that someone else set it there and forgot about it?  It'd be different if it were all of a sudden on the couch you sit on daily, but it's tucked away on a bookshelf, and since it's collected dust, it's been there a long time and you haven't noticed until now.

I don't know what to say other than our rationalization will be that you forgot what you did with it and apparently it's on your bookshelf.  That, or someone could've moved it from the drawer without you knowing. 

Is there no chance you came home wankered one night and got that remote out of the drawer while looking for tally-hos or something?

All the odd things that have happened to me have related to the fact I expected one thing and my brain was jarred by the aberration of not seeing what I was visualising I would see.

Again with this you are strongly coming down on the side of woo on the basis of fairly subjective evidence. Why would a ghost be messing around with an old remote, anyway?

Can ghosts even move things? Lumie - can ghosts move things?

That wasn't allowed.

I'm not sure why I kept the remote, I suppose in case I ever got that item repaired or something and then wouldn't have a remote for it. But it (and perhaps another or two) was in a drawer I seldom ever go into.

The shelf, however, holds records that I play relatively consistently. So not only is the shelf kept clean, but I also use it regularly and would have noticed this remote randomly sitting there month after month: I'd have had to move it out of the way.

LOL I know, it's ridiculous. I'm going to confirm I that it doesn't operate anything and throw it away.

Well, I don't really mind his occasional mischief, aside from the one thing he did that was somewhat dangerous. It was also kind of annoying because when I first moved here, I was having really bad nightmares, like every other night as compared to the once a year or so I've had them the rest of my life up till then. I now sleep in my bed upside down, that sounds silly, I know, but it did seem to help significantly.

So what you're saying is that a remote control magically appeared on a well used shelf, and it was covered with dust.  Hmmm.... I just went into my office and inspected the contents of several of my shelves in well-used areas.  It turns out that when you don't dust regularly, some items build up a substantial coating of dust, even though they're in very close proximity to things that are often used.  

As it turns out, I am an absentminded collector of old remotes.  I have at least a dozen of them.  This happens because I lose remotes almost immediately upon opening new gadgets, and when the gadget eventually breaks, there's at least a 50% chance that the remote for it is in one of its "lost" phases.  Rather than spend twenty minutes looking for a remote to a dead gadget, I just throw the gadget out and let the details sort themselves out later.

The upshot of it all is that I located an old remote after a few minutes of digging.  It was in a bin with other homeless electronic knicknacks, stashed in a closet behind a box of three ring binders.  It's a happy coincidence that it was also thoroughly dusty.  I picked it up as one would normally pick up a remote, walked it over to a bookshelf, and set it down.  Then, examining it in pretty close detail as it sat there, I discovered that dust is pretty sticky stuff.  It didn't even look like I'd ever picked it up.  I guess my hands weren't especially sweaty or greasy, and the dust was well entrenched in all the nooks and crannies.

The point of this little empirical experiment was to decide for myself whether it's feasible that a person could move a remote from an unused location to a used location and still expect to leave a coating of dust indicating months of disuse.  I am certain that it is feasible now.

Which leads me to my next theory, which I bet you haven't even considered:

Sleepwalking.

There.  Put that in your ghost pipe and smoke it

And you know this how?  You were asleep at the time, after all.  What you mean is that you have no evidence that you have ever walked in your sleep.  Then again, there's a remote sitting on your shelf, so maybe you do have evidence now.

Yes, exactly. No feng shui, though. I knew it had something to do with where my bed is located, because I fall asleep on the couch in the living room a lot while watching movies. I don't think I've had a single nightmare any of the times I slept on the couch (or, in any case, far, far less), only in my bed in my bedroom.

Okay, here are some others:

One night I fell asleep on the couch and woke up around 4AM or so to discover every burner on my stove going full blast. That was the one that was kind of scary because dangerous. At first I suspected maybe one of the cats had done it, but because of the wide spread placement of the knobs, and the fact that they have to be turned all the way to light the flames, there's just no way they could have done that by accident. And I could have been planning to cook something before I fell asleep, but there were no pots or pans, and I don't think I've ever used all four burners on a stove all at once in my entire life.

I was walking through my kitchen one evening to discover that, out of the blue, a box of stereo cables and speaker wire was sitting right out in the middle of the kitchen floor. I had absolutely no reason to have pulled it out. There was nothing going on with my stereo that I'd have needed another cable. I wouldn't have pulled this big box out of the closet, anyway, I'd just have found the right cable. And even if I did pull out the box, I would have taken it to the living room where the stereo is, not the kitchen.

Out of the blue I discovered the trashcan under my desk filled with water. No spilled glasses or anything with water in it anywhere to be found.

The one that really got me: a beautiful 8X10 color photo I'd taken of an old abandoned one-room schoolhouse (built around the 1890s or whatever according to the plaque above the doors) out in the middle of the wheat fields of Ohio (where my mother grew up) I found sitting conspicuously on top of a box in my bedroom, like "look at me." Because of where it would have been, deep inside a box in a portfolio case, with a lot of other stuff piled on top of it, and therefore the trouble I'd have had to go through to find it, there's no way I could have pulled that photo out without a well-thought out and solid motivation for doing so. In other words, it's extremely unlikely I'd have forgotten doing it. As I've already said, I'm not insane.

Thanks for the condescending tone, but I'm sorry, but I consider the suggestion that someone who has never been found sleepwalking in 30 years suddenly starts to for no reason whatsoever is every bit as ridiculous as my explanation.

So let me get this straight. If I don't want to go out and spend $1000 on a video camera, spend hours of my life night after night recording and reviewing video footage, with no guarantees I'll capture anything, and if I find something strange, post it on YouTube months later just to show something to a few people on a random atheist web forum, that's me "making excuses???"

When your actual behavior is, "I don't remember putting my remote there...Ghosts!"?  Yes...Yes it is.  You are demonstrating that you want to believe more than you want to find out what is objectively true.

*shrug*

This is your third thread on this stuffs, so it seems obvious you are just searching for something to believe in.  Homeopathy, prophetic dreams, ghosts...it doesn't matter if we show a particular belief to be invalid when you are not willing to change your internal methodology for arriving at these conclusions in the first place.  And on top of it you start a thread then get mad at us when we ask for evidence...like we are just supposed to take your word for it?  If any of us were like that we would probably not be at a board called the "Rational Response Squad" that encourages skepticism and the scientific method as a way to discern fact from fiction.

Some people, like James Randi, have actually made a career out of searching for proof of this kind of thing.  They *are* willing to take the time and energy to investigate and they never find anything besides scams, creaky pipes and willful ignorance.  I'm sorry to sound harsh but the next time you bring up a case for woo, bring more to the table than your belief that it must be so.

Fair enough.  And no, I can't, but if you are going to ask here why reject what we say out of hand?  None of the things you have brought up so far are hard, expensive or time consuming to test.  So test them!  I'm really not sure what you are looking for when you ask these questions.

I'm rarely disappointed by the conversations that result from them, whatever my opinion of the answers.

You sound like a theist. It's like saying you want to lose a ton of weight without diet or exercise.

impossible using the normal methods. Passive infrared demands multiple zones be broken at right angles to the detector at a set speed of about 2 metres a second with the target being the source of a local variation to typical slow rise environmental background temperature. A warm body will generate a comparatively sudden electrical signal in a hunk of silicon tantalate. Once this tiny signal breaks a threshold, bingo, it's amplified and we get an NO or an NC in a monitored circuit. But ghosts are cold so a PIR won't work. And if Smarty's housemate Casper is behaving in typical fashion then volumetrics won't work either - we need air pressure changes caused by moving objects or breaches of a fixed perimeter. Ghosts don't open doors so that won't help us.

Ultrasonics? Nuh. Nothing to bounce off and the same with microwaves. They'll need a water-filled body for best effect and that'll be no use with Casper. Same goes for dual technology sensors and range gated doppler radar. Fixed IR beams that can be seen through special goggles will be crap unless we want to check out the awesome glutes on that magnificent welsh hottie from Entrapment and I've never, ever seen those beams used in a real security environment. Installing 500 criss-crossing beams, each with a transmitter and a receiver, power and comms? Not even the U.S. government would be bothered to afford that - especially when the stuff is visible wearing snazzy thermonuclear Bolles.

VMD - well for the most part this stuff relies on variations in the white part of an image based on breaching a certain number of detection tiles in a scene. Perhaps it'll be tile numbers broken, perhaps it'll be direction in which they're broken. There are proprietary systems that use intensifiers. They are cool but even Smarty will look like Alfred Hitchcock's Green Ghost when we run the video playback so no to that stuff, too.  

Glassbreaks? Nuh - unless it's a poltergeist but we won't see the monster itself. Pressure mats? Sorry. Reed switches, vibration sensors, McCulloch loops? Guard dogs? Nope to them all. The best and only way as I see it is to look for objects moving about the place like they did in Betwitched - but no jiggling!

Presumably Mr. Haunty picks up the remote control and physically moves it, right?  So no real need for motion detectors or all that crap.  Just a few webcams strategically placed.  When something shows up that wasn't there the previous evening, just look at the relevant webcam.  Even if Mr. Haunty is invisible, the remote is not.  Even if he magically teleports it using Haunty Magic, it's got to end up there in material form sometime.  I would think that video of a remote appearing suddenly would be damn interesting even without a fuzzy image of a guy in a top hat with translucent chains carrying it.

 Of course, you do have one serious problem.  If all you're doing is trying to prove to yourself that Mr. Haunty moves remotes for fun, your own webcam would probably do for evidence.  That is, if you examine the video and there's clear evidence -- a magical mystery glow on the shelf, and then a materializing remote, for instance -- then you're good.  You know your controls were good.  The door was locked, you are not sleepwalking in the video, etc, etc.

But if you try to give that video to anyone else, the first thing they're going to do is think, 'Fraud.'

So, if this is just for you, knock yourself out with a webcam.  But if you want anyone else to take your claim seriously, you're going to need to do rigorous scientific controls, which will certainly get expensive.  Incidentally, this is why most serious scientists don't believe in ghosts.  There's no well-controlled evidence for them.  Only evidence that is either easily manipulated, or evidence that doesn't really point to ghosts, but rather some other known natural phenomenon.

This is one of those things that a lot of conspiracy and paranormal fanboys don't get about science.  If someone were to demonstrate the paranormal in a valid, repeatable scientific experiment, then a peer review journal somewhere would pick it up.  It's just not possible that the entire world is engaged in an attempt to suppress evidence that ghosts exist.  There are scientists in hundreds of countries, each of which has their own political and cultural agenda.  Someone, somewhere would publish the results, and once that happened, the experiment would be repeated all over in an attempt to falsify it or prove it valid.

And in all of recorded scientific history, there's not a single shred of verifiable evidence for the paranormal.  Not a a scrap.

Which is why you probably sleepwalk and don't know it, or simply forgot that you moved the remote, or had a blackout while drinking, or something.

Well, you can put it in any category you want, but if you put the paranormal in the same category as evolution, you're just completely wrong.   You may not know this, but when you say observing evolution in action is extremely difficult, you mean that observing massive speciation events is extremely difficult.  Observing evolution isn't hard at all.  It's kind of hard to avoid if you're in any life science.

On top of this, we have observed speciation.  No, we haven't seen an ape evolve into a man... that's a lot of steps.  But we have seen speciation in fish, insects, bacteria, and other more short-lived species.  

Finally, you should know that while speciation is very interesting to a lot of non-scientists -- I mean hell... it's the explanation for why we're here -- it's far, far from the only aspect of evolutionary theory.  It's one of the things that happens because of evolution.  Literally thousands of other aspects of evolutionary theory are experimentally verified on a daily basis in every industry from cattle farming to pharmaceuticals.

With the paranormal, there isn't even a working theory about what sort of a thing a "paranormal thing" might be.  Please don't mistake internet theories with scientific theories.  There is literally no evidence for the existence of "things" that aren't material and natural, so scientists can't even begin to speculate about what such things might be.

To be honest, I've seen better evidence for ghosts than for most other paranormal/supernatural claims, so I might be a bit more sympathetic to it (of course, ultimately, I'm open to evidence for anything).

Evolution is not a random and/or unpredictable process though. Evolution is a stochastic process. Natural selection, arguably the most important mechanism, is completely determined. Digging in the past, we can often deduce the probable mutations that allowed certain evolutionary lines to occur as well as the advantages gained by such mutations. Biologists have also been able to accurately predict changes in gene frequencies countless times after introducing new genotypes into populations. 

Observed examples of speciation are, in my opinion, probably some of the best evidence for evolution, but they're not even close to all the strong evidence. You don't have to directly observe it to get evidence for it; you have geographical, fossil, morphological...well, you know the drill. This is something you can't get with ghosts. Due to the nature of the claim, there's no way to tell if a ghost went anywhere and did anything with any reliability unless you record it in a controlled setting.  

Ok, this is threatening to get off topic, but I think it's an important thing to explore.  First, and I apologize if I'm being overly pedantic, but evolutionary biology is... you know... a thousand times more advanced and verified today than it was when Origin was published.  

Second, you're making a pretty basic error in describing evolutionary chemistry as "unpredictable."  It's not.  In fact, that's the whole point.  We can make astoundingly accurate predictions of precisely what will happen, down to the atomic level, when various organic chemicals are brought together in certain ways.  That's a lot of the proof of evolution, in fact.  Organic chemicals behave very predictably, and because of this, we can know with virtual certainty that this or that process is what must have happened in this or that situation.

You're correct that with regard to abiogenesis, there's a lot of speculation.  But make no mistake.  EVOLUTION DOESN'T ADDRESS ABIOGENESIS.  Evolution describes a well documented, thoroughly proven process.  The study of abiogenesis is largely speculative at this point, but that's because, as you say, there just isn't a lot of data available, and the number of possible original replicators is staggeringly large.  There are so many possibilities that we may never have enough evidence to determine which one it really was.

But even here, the study of abiogenesis is not comparable to studying the paranormal.  Abiogenesis did happen.  It must have, because here we are talking about it.  It had to have happened with existing elements because... gee.. that's the only choice.  The elements in question combined in predictable ways according to the laws of the universe.  But with the paranormal, what are "things" made of?  How do they function?  How do they interact with the material world?  There's no working theory whatsoever because unlike abiogenesis, there's no reliable evidence whatsoever that such things even exist outside of the fancy of a few brains.

Scientists can speculate as well as anybody else, but they have absolutely no justification for doing so because there's no evidence on which to speculate.  That's why there's a stigma.  Any scientist who does speculate is doing so in an unscientific manner that would get destroyed in any genuine scientific review process.

That's what I've been saying.  Trust me, if scientists ever find a real ghost, two things would happen:

1) The scientist would win the Nobel Prize hands down.  He would most likely be the most famous scientist of the century, too, since he'd have discovered an entire new branch of science.  

2) Whatever house had the real, verifiable ghost in it would instantly be a million dollar cash cow for its owner.

And you're telling me it's a conspiracy?  Nope.  Not selling that one to me.  Way too many benefits to finding a real ghost for the entire worldwide scientific community to cover shit up.

I don't think anyone suggested a  conspiracy. To me, it seemed like smartypants was claiming that ghosts haven't been detected  because their actions occur in such a manner that makes them unable to detect in a credible way. The point of my post was to assert that this is not true for at least some events which are allegedly caused by ghosts. Many ghost actions would in fact be very easy to detect and prove if they did actually occur.

Ghosts and goblins are all bs, it is as real as you want it to be. They have had years and years to prove the existence of ghosts along with any supernatural carp, and they have not. I would sooner believe you have a smart rat in your house or alien visitations...or perhaps a terrible memory like me. Maybe you just forgot how bad your memory is.