The paranormal incorporates a whole potful of concepts, some which maybe plausible, some rather implausible, and some that are IMHO impossible. Here I detail what I think are six impossible metaphysical or paranormal concepts, and why. But for true believers I give an escape clause toward the end.
We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. In “Alice
1) You’re alive and you have one or more out-of-the-body experiences. The immediate problem here is how can your body physically split into two separate living entities? You (and your body) can’t. Further, your out-of-the-body self has obvious functioning sensory apparatus, since your out-of-the-body self can recall what it sees and hears, and therefore it must be physical in order for light, sound, etc. to register. If your out-of-the-body self is physical, it must have mass and since you’re in Earth’s gravitational field, weight. Since your out-of-the-body self doesn’t have wings, it can’t float or fly around, so gravity should do its grabbing thing and bring your out-of-the-body body crashing back down to earth.
Conclusion: your out-of-the-body experience was actually self-contained within your own mind. It was all a mental hallucination or an illusion. An independent observer would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly will not have witnessed two of you, one on the slab and one floating around. Now you may say your significant out-of-the-body other is invisible. But that doesn’t wash since then it couldn’t see. That’s a prime flaw in all ‘invisible man’ tales from H.G. Wells on down. If it couldn’t see it couldn’t ‘report’ back to you what it saw!
2) You’re dying and you have a near death experience. The exact same problems arise as with out-of-the-body experiences. It’s all in the mind, just like a dream is internal to the mind. An independent observer can’t witness what you’re dreaming and they can’t observe you split in two, even if you are dying.
3) You’re now dead and so part of you turns into a ghost. Alas, only part of you performs this magical transformational split since while others may see your ‘living’ ghost, they can also witness at the same time your very dead and decaying (or decayed) body. Something is screwy somewhere. Now the physical you seemingly kicks the bucket – you die. However, some part of that ‘you’ doesn’t kick the bucket, but instead retains animation. So, like Schrodinger’s Cat, you are both ‘alive’ and dead at the same time. Talk about a split personality!
Now presumably, at the time of death, you lose weight, that weight transferred into the newly animated part of you – your ghost. Your ghost must have weight since it is something physical, and being physical, is subject to the laws, principles and relationships of physics. Why is your ghost physical? It’s physical since if you can see it, if you can hear it, if it interacts with its (haunted house) environment, it must have substance. You can’t see or hear or interact with a nothing! A nothing of no material substance cannot interact with a material something, like matter and energy. Only matter and energy can interact with matter and energy.
Okay, so you are dead and your ghost is alive, or at least is associated with animation. How can this be logically explained? Does every part of your deceased body contribute to your ‘I am alive’ ghost, or only bits and pieces? Does your ghostly self have a ghostly stomach and lungs? Logic demands that since your ghost is physical, it needs to ward off the second law of thermodynamics – entropy – in order to retain its ghostliness. Your ghost gives off energy. That needs to be replenished. Translated, your ghost needs to eat, drink, breath, sleep, etc. otherwise your ghost will also kick the bucket since neither you, when you were fully alive as one unity, or you, as that dead/alive split personality, can give off energy endlessly without replacing it.
All up, the transition from a 100% alive you to an X% dead you coupled with a Y% alive or animated you (i.e. – your ghost) cannot be explained by any concept of physics, chemistry or biology that is currently on the books. The logical conclusion is that when you are dead, you’re dead: full stop. Ghosts are just one of those six impossible things some people believe in before breakfast. However, I do provide an escape clause – see below.
Discussion 1 – 3: Now if out-of-the-body experiences, near death experiences and ghosts are credible and real, then each and every one of us is carrying along a duplicate you. You are your own clone! Are you aware of another or second you within you that presumably will get the flu when you do and have all the same personality characteristics and virtues and flaws and physical defects? I’m not, but that’s just me (or all two of me). There’s one difference between the two of you – one of you will die, but the other, well as the song goes “I believe that the heart does go on” and on and on and on.
4) You recall your previous lives. No doubt in you previous lives you were someone important and not one of the great unwashed, despite there being vastly more great unwashed that VIPs. But great unwashed or VIP, it’s total nonsense. You are the product of the union between a single egg cell and a single sperm cell. Your father’s sperm cell couldn’t have a ‘memory’ of your past lives. Your mother’s egg cell couldn’t have a ‘memory’ of your previous existences. Therefore your single cell that is you at the moment of conception could not have any knowledge of your previous lives. So, where did this recollection of previous lives come from? How about it came from within your own mind and your previous lives have no reality outside of that mental realm.
5) Extra-dimensional; trans-dimensional; ultra-dimensional; higher planes of existence; spiritual planes of existence; astral planes; other levels of reality, etc. are all very warm and fuzzy New Age buzz phrases that mean absolutely nothing. You won’t find these sorts of phrases, like “another physical plane” adequately defined (and certainly not in physical science texts), or if defined, then defined in equally mystifying hocus-pocus terms. I gather these New Age authors just assume you intuitively are supposed to know what they are on about. They all allude to physical places where you might be mentally more spiritual, or moral, or more knowledgeable, or an all-round better person. Maybe it’s a place where you are cool, calm and collected with no stress; where you have perfect skin, a strong and steady pulse and heightened senses. But you would be hard pressed to say the physical geography of your new realm was anything but 3-D and where time flows from past to future.
Any mental or physiological state, altered or otherwise from the norm, has to be housed in a volume (3-D) – like a body – where cause and effect and rates of change operate (i.e. – time flows). In other words, these realms are exactly the same as the Universe you currently squat in. So these ‘other realms’ aren’t really alternative universes, rather it’s you that has altered within this Universe. It’s the same old Universe; different versions of you.
6) Do you claim to have remote viewing or extrasensory perception (ESP) and/or the related concept of telepathy? Again, that is a belief internal to you – your personal mental delusion. There are but four physical forces that act upon you or can influence you. There’s gravity. There’s the strong nuclear force that holds the atomic nucleus together. There’s the weak nuclear force which lets atoms split apart – radioactivity. Then there’s the electromagnetic (EM) force. Only the latter could explain ESP/telepathy since it is the EM force that transmits information from A to B at the speed of light via photons – visible light photons, gamma-ray photons, radio wave photons, microwave photons, X-ray photons, infrared photons, ultraviolet photons, etc. To receive information directly into your brain, bypassing your normal five sensory channels and organs (sight, sound, taste, smell and touch) restricts immediately what part of the EM spectrum could be at work.
It can’t be visible light since the thickness of your skull blocks that out – your brain resides in eternal darkness. If it were infrared or ultraviolet your brain would heat up and fry or get sunburn. If it were microwaves, you’d experience an everlasting ‘hiss’ in your brain due to the cosmic microwave background radiation – a leftover from the Big Bang. It’s not radio waves since you aren’t bombarded with 24/7/52 information from radio stations around you – not to mention all that radio noise given off by interstellar hydrogen and other elements and compounds that are in interstellar space. In fact, each and every part of the EM spectrum can be rejected for these sorts of reasons.
That’s quite apart from the fact that if you were telepathic, how could your sanity cope with the picking up of the thoughts 24/7/52 of all those odd-bods and sods around you?
If remote viewing were even possible, why are there spy-in-the-sky satellites; the U-2; eves-dropping bugs planted; industrial espionage is rampant; computer hacking (cyber-spying) ditto; intelligence agents like the fictional but all too real 007 and agencies like the NSA or CIA, and all manner of other espionage apparatus part and parcel of our modern society? Remote viewing, etc. would be the great equalizer. It would result in a level playing field among all nations and nationalities. There could be no secrets in any medium, from paper to grey matter that’s safe. That’s not the way the world works, so ESP and telepathy, etc. is just so much BS. On a more personal level, you could ‘see’ winning scratch-it lottery tickets without scratching, and select accordingly. Students would all get 100% on their exams.
Besides, if ESP/telepathy/remote viewing were really possible, given all the scientific put-up-or-shut-up experiments that have been conducted, why isn’t this standard information in all the relevant textbooks? The global implications of such abilities, over the course of human events, would not have produced the sort of history we know today, since from Day One, human society would have been an Orwellian society because Big Brother would have been watching you! In fact everyone would be ‘watching’ everybody else. Again that not the way of the world, so of course it’s no surprise that these ESP and related experiments have all resulted without resolution in favour of the claimants.
Escape Clause: Apart from special effects on make-believe TV and in the movies, and works of literary fiction where all things are possible, there is another realm where anything goes – virtual reality; video games; simulations of all kinds. It’s in fact a simulated Universe that resides in the guise of computer software. Software can be programmed to give rise to images or experiences of out-of-the-body happenings; near death experiences; ghosts; past lives; astral planes; and ESP. You could have existence in other dimensional realms like the famous 2-D “Flatland”.
So, it’s a trade-off. If you accept these six impossible things before breakfast (and lunch and dinner too), then you need to believe the seventh – you don’t exist as flesh-and-blood; your ‘reality’, including say telepathy, resides in a computer. Who programmed the simulated Universe is another question.
That escape clause aside, if after multi-decades of inquiries and research into the plausibility of these six topics, there’s nothing, no hard evidence to convince scholars, academics and sceptics of their bona-fides, then I think it’s safe to conclude that if it ain’t happened by now, it’s not going to. These really are six impossible things. It’s not rocket science after all to come to once-and-for-all conclusions about these issues in the affirmative if they were in fact issues that had any possibility of an affirmative resolution.
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