I think there might be a real scientific case to answer regarding an explanation for ghosts. However, IMHO ghosts have nothing to do with human spirits and evidence of an afterlife. Rather, all can be explained by postulating that we live in, and are the product of a simulated Universe. However, let’s look at alternative explanations first.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
The immediate, and most obvious, explanation(s) revolve around routine, ordinary, physical events that witnesses misinterpret. There can be many natural sources for strange lights; many natural sources for weird noises, even apparent changes in temperatures associated with spiritual manifestations.
The next most obvious category of explanations resides within the mind. If you’re tired, under the influence, have through no fault of your own abnormal brain chemistry or disease or injury, then what you perceive might not be what you think it is. Some people might be extra sensitive in their perception of and able to be influenced by infrasound or magnetic fields. There are dreams that can be extremely vivid (lucid dreams), and hallucinations. For the ‘all in the mind’ theory to be credible, you’ve got to give equal opportunity to a whole range of other equally logical, yet equally nonsensical items like sightings of flying pink elephants. The mind can conceive of flying pink elephants equally as well as ghosts, yet where are the reports of flying pink elephants? There are millions of other plausible topics that could be imagined and reported as reality but aren’t. So when you get thousands of sightings of one data point in a landscape of plausible millions of data points (that aren’t ever noted and logged), what does that tell you about the ‘all in the mind’ theory?
However, I suggest that on balance, while there is certainly some truth in a sweeping generalization that each and every ghostly sighting has a prosaic explanation, I remain unconvinced that all those who experience apparitions are akin to having converted believers preached to. Sure, some people seek out ghostly encounters and expect to experience same just like some Bigfoot/Sasquatch hunters see a partly concealed animal a mile or more away in thick forest and immediately jump to the conclusion that it must be a Bigfoot. The will to believe is a powerful influence.
A believer in the ‘flying saucer’ explanation of all things UFO is more likely to look at the planet Venus and explain ‘There, an alien spacecraft’, than someone who poo-poos the whole UFO subject. It takes something extraordinary to turn a non-believer/sceptic into a believer/convert, especially when extraordinary event conversions cut across all cultures over thousands of years!
So, we have extraordinary encounters and reports from far too many un-expecting and unprepared witnesses, from all walks of life, since at least the times of the ancient Greeks. There’s thousands of reports from witnesses not seeking out new (or any) ghostly encounters, those sober disbelievers who get bumped in the night anyway. Well, as I said, there are just a few too many to suggest that prosaic explanations can account for 100% of cases. 95% I’ll go along with; just not 100%. So, what other explanations are plausible?
One can invoke the idea of parallel worlds to explain ghosts, not as the remains of the dead but is barely perceptible images of living beings (or inanimate objects) on a parallel world; a parallel Earth in all probability. But parallel worlds or universes are theoretical at best and the macro mechanism(s) by which these macro ghostly entities could appear in our realm is also very hypothetical, and it’s compounding one speculation by heaping on it another. However, there’s a better bet in theorising that on the quantum (micro) level, there could be interactions between parallel worlds. However, that probably doesn’t help us explain ghostly manifestations.
It’s pretty obvious that the existence of a discrete chunk of matter/energy has an influence of other discrete chunks of matter/energy that influence remaining - for a while at least -even when the first chunk moves away or otherwise vanishes or changes in form. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) is the ghostly remains of the Big Bang origin event of our Universe. The Big Bang is no more, but the influence remains. If you look at a bright light then turn the light off, you’ll still see, for a brief while, an afterimage of that light. You can also detect its infrared (heat) radiation for a spell, even after lights out! You might be able to tell that someone has recently been in a room because the temperature is slightly higher in one place coupled with a higher concentration of perfume in that same place not to mention that the sofa cushions (that same location) are still slightly depressed as if someone had been recently sitting on them. Footprints are another example of influence between one chunk of matter/energy and another – influence left behind even though the original chunk is now far away. Such are the clues from which Sherlock Holmes and kin make their living from.
Now to the best of my knowledge, ghostly manifestations tend to be recent – recent with respect to human history. That is, I know of no reports of ghostly dinosaurs, or sabre tooth cats or Neanderthals (there’s no haunted caveman caves). While I’m sure the ancient Greeks saw ghosts from their recent past, we don’t tend to see ghosts of ancient Greeks. It almost seems that after a certain period of time, whatever influence on the environment the original matter/energy chunk (human for sake of argument) had, the remnants, those ghostly manifestations, ultimately fades away to something no longer distinguishable from the ordinary or everyday background, and does so usually within several centuries. Imagine turning off a light having it slowly fade away, but taking perhaps many centuries to do so.
The problem with this idea is that I’m sure any physicist could calculate how long it would take for any residual trace of something to fade and blend into the background as to be indistinguishable from the background. It doesn’t take all that long after turning off the oven for its temperature to cool to that equalling the background temperature. So, explaining ghostly images days, months, years, even decades or many centuries after-the-fact is problematical at best. I like the idea, but I can’t see a way to make it work in practice. Be that as it may, there’s probably some wheat among the chaff here, although I’m not quite sure however what this observation (that ghosts fade away in time) all means, if anything. But I think it’s an important observation and offers up a clue towards an ultimate resolution.
One could easily imagine a ghost (or any kind – formally animate or inanimate) as the product of a hologram. The only difficulty with that idea, of course, is that ghostly apparitions have been observed, noted and logged way, way before modern holographic technology came into being.
Simulations on the other hand could be a horse of a different colour. The basic premise here is that you and I and all we see and hear (and touch, taste and smell) is an illusion because we are all simulated beings ‘living’ in a virtual world, the creation of a person or persons (or even an alien or aliens) unknown. We, and our Universe, are as ‘real’ as the characters and their universe are in a computer game. In a simulation of that sort, it’s certainly possible, maybe even logical, to provide as a subroutine an afterlife – a plane of higher dimensional existence (whatever that means exactly) – perhaps something, a concept, we’ve come to identify as Heaven or Hell. But let’s just call that subroutine afterlife the ‘spirit world’. If we can have ghosts in our virtual computer game worlds, then by implication, our Supreme Simulator could have provided the software for ghosts or ghostly apparitions (animate or inanimate) inhabiting the subroutine spirit world!
On the other hand, why would a Supreme Simulator provide a software subroutine providing for ghosts? Well, who knows the mind and rational of our Supreme Simulator, especially if our S.S. is an alien? Actually, I think the simulation of ghostly phenomena could be a mistake; something not actually intended. I suspect our ghostly manifestations are just a previously deleted bit of software. Since nothing is ever truly deleted – deleted files can usually be recovered albeit by experts. Overwriting previous text doesn’t apparently actually destroy in total what was there before-the-fact. In a manner somewhat akin to receiving interference and ghostly images on your TV set, previous software, now deleted, might every now and again come marginally into the foreground.
So the bottom line is that science says they (meaning the things that go bump in the night, the afterlife remains of dead entities or non-biological things) can not be; witnesses testimony notwithstanding. Impasse! On the other hand, the simulation argument works for me. Impasse no longer!
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