Ghost Stories
We need a working, testable theory of ghosts!
Back about 5 years ago, in the spirit of Halloween, I wrote an essay expressing skepticism that ghosts could exist. This proved to be one of my more controversial essays as a few people wrote to me to say they’d had personal experiences with ghost and didn’t appreciate my skepticism one bit. According to research by the Pew Research Center, about 18 percent of people report having seen a ghost, with a higher share reporting more vague connections with people who have died. Larger percentages of people believe in ghosts more generally.
I am actually pretty open to the idea that where people’s personal experiences conflict with science, it’s possible that science got things wrong. Granted, I’m generally skeptical of anecdotes which are prone to unreliability, but on the other hand, I do think it would be really cool if ghosts existed! But I think part of the problem is that there’s no clear theory for how ghosts could exist. As such, there’s not really testable hypotheses, which is one reason I think scientific skepticism and personal belief are, perhaps, a bit at loggerheads on this issue.
Ultimately, I think this is an issue for paraphysicists, not parapsychologists, as any theory would need some kind of clear argument for how something like a soul could both exist and somehow get caught and be visible to others after death. But here’s a back-of-the-napkin effort which, I hope, someone smarter than me might turn into a real, testable theory if that’s even possible.
So, we’d have to start by assuming that, in addition to matter and energy, there’s some kind of basic element to consciousness that is, on some level, distinct from these other things. Let’s call it soulstuff. I’m sort of open to this idea…call it optimism. There’s a whole Cartesian argument that the only thing we can truly observe is our own consciousness and materialist explanations of consciousness have always left me rather dissatisfied.
Of course, what’s lacking, aside from our own observation of our own consciousness, is any way to reliably measure this soulstuff. I don’t mean the TV ghost hunters running around with gizmos they made in their garage. Without intuiting some way of reliably measuring soulstuff, testable hypotheses are impossible. Perhaps the most famous effort was the 1907 study by Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who weighed dying people before and after they died, and found their weight decreased by 21 grams. It’s never, as far as I know, been replicated and there’s also the question of why we’d expect a soul to weigh anything. Maybe they do but, again, it feels like we’re lacking a clear theory here.
People seem to express experiences with ghosts that fall into two broad categories. First, those that are place bound (hauntings) and those that are person bound (visitations). The latter are the sort in which a dead loved one visits and are typically benevolent.
Let’s assume that soulstuff exists…why does it get stuck after death? We can assume further that soulstuff is routinely “trapped” by the right combination of matter and energy in order to create consciousness in living things. Basically, this is the functioning nervous system. Of course, who knows if a nematode, say, is truly conscious, but for the sake of this argument, consciousness is trapped within brains and, when we die, released presumably to return to some cosmic miasma from which it arose.
In this sense, hauntings might occur should the natural environment near where someone died happen to have just the right elements of matter and energy to trap even just some of that soulstuff in place. Perhaps that’s particularly true if the consciousness in question is agitated by some form of trauma, in keeping with the popular mythology of bad deaths being associated with hauntings.
This might also be one thing the cable TV ghost hunters got right. Any kind of manifestation of consciousness would take energy, and that could draw energy from the surrounding environment, hence why ghosts make things cold.
I’m struggling a bit to think of a good (even in the vaguest sense) explanation for how visitations may occur. This would require soulstuff to maintain coherent identities after death. But perhaps some elements of one person’s consciousness can latch onto another’s consciousness at the moment of death, kind of sharing space in one nervous system. I’d be curious if visitations are more common among people present at the time of a loved one’s death, for instance.
What I’m obviously lacking here is any real physical theory for how any of this could work mechanically. I think that’s why we need a creative physicist to weigh in. I’d love to see someone come up with a rational theory of how ghosts might exist…how consciousness might be measured…and how this all could be testable.
So, paraphysicist, here’s what I think we need:
1) Some theory for how consciousness might have arisen like matter and energy from the beginnings of the universe.
2) Some understanding of how consciousness is trapped by nervous systems.
3) Some way to measure, directly or indirectly, consciousness, whether in live bodies or in hauntings. Energy consumption appears to be the best indirect method perhaps?
4) Some understanding how things other than living nervous systems might trap consciousness.
5) A clearer understanding of cultural beliefs about hauntings and visitations that are reasonably consistent…and might be tested with more rigorous means. For instance, if people are intuitively anxious near hauntings, and hauntings are more likely after violent deaths, do people exhibit more anxiety when randomly brought (assigned) to houses in which people died violent deaths versus more natural deahts?
Paraphysicists, what have you got for me?
Until then…there’s still only one way for us each to find out for sure!