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) devious human agency.
what were your prior probabilities of encountering them? Having experienced this strangeness, what are your current probabilities?
My estimate that I will experience something along these lines is something around 0.000001, 0.005, and 0.001 (note that there is some overlap between 2 and 3, and I count “someone inducing hallucinations” as #3 for this). If I did experience things that could be explained by any of them, they would increase massively—they’d sum to something under 1 to account for options I haven’t listed. But they’d retain their proportions, so figure 0.0001, 0.5, and 0.1. It would take a lot of evidence to reduce the RELATIVE probability of 1 vs 2 and 3, not just the absolute probability of experiencing weird shit.
So, before your experiences, what were your priors for your main causal hypotheses? and what are your estimates now?
For myself as a reader of the post, I must admit that I add a sub-possibility of #3: the poster is misrepresenting something, intentionally or un-. And that my prior (for experiencing reports from strangers of strange happenings) gives this a higher likelihood than the others by more than an order of magnitude.
Sorry for that, but don’t let it stop you from examining your own experiences in a rational way, and finding ways to distinguish among possibilities in order to make correct decisions.
I can’t really rule out any of those options, but the discrepancy in situations and people present makes it difficult to blame any one person for all of the events. (The key event in particular occurred with my girlfriend and brother present, while my sister was out of state. And the event with the sonograms occurred when I wasn’t there, so not even I am a common element in all the weird events.)
I’m leaning towards a mixture of #2 and a fourth option—that there’s some environmental condition in the house which is causing people to behave oddly.
An important qualifier in my post is that I previously regarded the idea of haunted houses (again, without prejudice for the word “haunted”) as purely fiction, entirely in the heads of the occupants. I’m now forced to conclude that there are houses where—for whatever reason—strange events are indeed common.
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) devious human agency.
what were your prior probabilities of encountering them? Having experienced this strangeness, what are your current probabilities?
My estimate that I will experience something along these lines is something around 0.000001, 0.005, and 0.001 (note that there is some overlap between 2 and 3, and I count “someone inducing hallucinations” as #3 for this). If I did experience things that could be explained by any of them, they would increase massively—they’d sum to something under 1 to account for options I haven’t listed. But they’d retain their proportions, so figure 0.0001, 0.5, and 0.1. It would take a lot of evidence to reduce the RELATIVE probability of 1 vs 2 and 3, not just the absolute probability of experiencing weird shit.
So, before your experiences, what were your priors for your main causal hypotheses? and what are your estimates now?
For myself as a reader of the post, I must admit that I add a sub-possibility of #3: the poster is misrepresenting something, intentionally or un-. And that my prior (for experiencing reports from strangers of strange happenings) gives this a higher likelihood than the others by more than an order of magnitude.
Sorry for that, but don’t let it stop you from examining your own experiences in a rational way, and finding ways to distinguish among possibilities in order to make correct decisions.
I can’t really rule out any of those options, but the discrepancy in situations and people present makes it difficult to blame any one person for all of the events. (The key event in particular occurred with my girlfriend and brother present, while my sister was out of state. And the event with the sonograms occurred when I wasn’t there, so not even I am a common element in all the weird events.)
I’m leaning towards a mixture of #2 and a fourth option—that there’s some environmental condition in the house which is causing people to behave oddly.
An important qualifier in my post is that I previously regarded the idea of haunted houses (again, without prejudice for the word “haunted”) as purely fiction, entirely in the heads of the occupants. I’m now forced to conclude that there are houses where—for whatever reason—strange events are indeed common.