How to Believe Ghost Stories

A new article  How to Believe Ghost Stories by Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin.

I'm jus' gonna comment as I read it (I reserve my more detailed critiques in my other blog and this is only a popular piece against "ghosts"). 

He says:

Experience, after all, doesn’t always match reality.

It does the vast majority of the time.  Personally, I cannot think when any experience of mine. at least as an adult, didn't match up to reality.

How many times have you felt your phone vibrate in your pocket, only to realize you didn’t actually get a text?

Never, although people rarely call me.  But that would be the very vaguest of impressions.  It cannot be compared to a person seeming to be in front of you that just looks like a person is really there, but in fact is an apparition.

The results of induced hallucination studies, for example, may provide a window through which we can better understand what’s going on with ghost stories. In both cases, we have reason to think that what people perceive is influenced by their prior expectations.

That's the same for all of our normal everyday perceptions too (see this blog post of mine).  What we see is moulded and shaped by prior expectations.  Says nothing against a real object being out there though.

Accepting the supernatural explanation requires accepting the truth of things we can’t, even in principle, measure or observe.

I wonder if the author accepts that others are conscious?  Consciousness cannot be seen or observed.  Indeed, it can't even be inferred if the world is physically closed as the mainstream academic opinion holds.

Immediately after he says:

It requires giving up on the explanatory completeness of science.

Apart from what he labels "ghosts" or any other anomalous phenomenon, there was never any reason to accept the explanatory completeness of science in the first place.  Science only explains the quantifiable aspects of reality.  To suppose it explains the totality of reality is like imagining that metal detectors detect everything that exists (see this blog post by me here).

Science has been enormously successful in catching up with the apparently unexplainable, and it won’t stop.

Meaning that if current scientific laws do not accommodate some phenomenon, then a new theory is dreamt up that explains all that the hitherto theory did, but also explains this new phenomenon.  But any new phenomenon is always something that is objective and material.  In, say, the past 100 years, what hitherto paranormal phenomenon has science explained?

Even if we accept that this man knew his dentures were put in the drawer by granting that he was, for a time, a disembodied mind, the supernaturalist then has to explain how this mind could function in connection with this same body both before and after the NDE. Most of what this man has seen in his life, he’s seen through his eyeballs. Team Science reminds us that we know something about how a physical brain receives visual inputs from physical eyeballs. How does a nonphysical mind receive visual inputs from physical eyeballs? Team Supernatural still faces the task of explaining how the physical and nonphysical can interact.

Until the believer in ghosts can provide a compelling explanation for this.

I have, and will give the links to my relevant blog posts in a sec.  Just to say, the question makes no sense since what he labels "team supernatural" hold (or ought to hold) that vision isn't caused by anything, it's innate to the mind or soul. See 1.  How could we see, hear, taste, touch and smell during an "out of body experience" (OBE)? 2. Skeptical Inquirer attempts to explain why psi could not possibly exist 3. A Causal Consciousness, Free Will, and Dualism