A thread titled “Ghosts and the afterlife are 100% just made up, right?” appeared on 5ch’s general discussion board, sparking a split in opinion over whether ghosts and the afterlife are real. Alongside the point that no one has ever died and come back, so the claim can be neither proven nor disproven, some argued against their existence citing the brain’s electrical signals and the law of conservation of energy, while others left room for the possibility, noting how much of the universe remains unknown. The thread also brought up the story that physicist Erwin Schrödinger believed individual consciousness returns to one great universal mind after death — turning the discussion into something more nuanced than a simple yes-or-no debate.
It was made up out of wishful thinking — "wouldn't it be nice if there was something like this after we die."
Nobody's ever actually died (to tell us).
Once the body's gone, who's to say either way.
I've been calling out to her around the house for years since, and I haven't felt so much as a trace of her, let alone seen her.
and flatly affirming it
are both wrong — the honest answer is nobody knows.
Fair, but as long as it can't be confirmed,
the thread title calling it "fiction" is correct.
If some mysterious power like that existed, the universe would collapse.
Flip it around — maybe there are parts of the universe we don't know about where physics runs on that "spirit energy."
What we actually know about the universe doesn't even add up to 1%.
With aliens, we just haven't met them yet.
Science got where it is today by figuring out things nobody understood before.
The moment you say "we don't get it, so it can't exist," scientific progress grinds to a halt.
As for ghosts specifically, that's already been clearly explained by brain disorders and a tendency toward delusion.
Even that "1%" figure is looking shaky these days.
There's actually a theory now that we already understand almost everything.
The current trend is that things like dark matter and dark energy might not even exist.
Where does that electricity come from, and where does it go?
In physics, energy is supposed to be conserved — it shouldn't just increase or vanish.
It doesn't "go" anywhere.
It's just a physical phenomenon following this universe's laws of physics.
When matter churning around the universe happens to settle into a certain stable pattern, consciousness is simply one of the phenomena that arises from that.
You eat food, it turns into heat, and it's released into the atmosphere.
No contradiction with the conservation of energy there.
There's no way we've "already got it figured out."
All anyone's saying is "the universe is probably like this, and given our physics, this is the most likely explanation."
Even relativity isn't perfect — claiming we already understand it all is beyond arrogant.
What matters is how good the story is, not whether the ghost is real.
I get that.
Honestly, not just with ghost stories — without at least a bit of that mindset,
I don't think you can enjoy much entertainment in this world beyond straight documentary.
There's tons of them.
Plenty on YouTube and social media.
If anything, they're more accessible now than they used to be.
If you're that convinced they're real, seems like it'd be worth dedicating your life to researching it.
Apparently Schrödinger believed there was an afterlife — makes you wonder.
Not that your individual personality survives intact, but more that there's one giant mass of consciousness, and when you die you return to it.
Rather than sobbing "noooo, I don't want it to end here" on your deathbed,
it's a lot less stressful to go out thinking "heh heh, I'll become a ghost and peek in on people in the bath."
That's more for the benefit of the people left behind.
The person actually dying probably isn't thinking anything at that point.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
By definition, the only way to verify claims about the afterlife or ghosts would be to ask someone who has died — which puts the question in territory science can neither prove nor disprove. The thread split along a fault line in how people read that unverifiability: some took it as “so it’s fair to call it fiction,” others as “so no definitive conclusion can be drawn either way.” It’s a genuinely documented anecdote that physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote that he believed individual consciousness returns to some larger universal mind after death, and the thread noted the irony of a towering figure in quantum mechanics holding what looks like an unscientific view of death. Meanwhile, the counter-argument tying the brain’s-electrical-signals explanation of consciousness to the conservation of energy left a loose end of its own: electrical signals dissipating as heat and the separate question of whether “consciousness is conserved” are two different issues, and the thread wrapped up without ever fully untangling them.
*This article is an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Ghosts and the afterlife are 100% just made up, right?“
