Some brief observations on ghosts
Many people seem to believe this, at least in some sense. They have experienced hearing the voice of a person they knew who was dead, and believe that it is actually the disembodied consciousness of that person still in existence and communicating with them. Others strongly feel a "presence" of a dead person they knew, even if they do not hear voices. (I've had such experiences myself, as well as dream visitations that felt startlingly real.) I'm not sure how many people still take things like haunted houses seriously, but many did in the fairly recent past.
I don't believe in ghosts, mainly because -- based on what we now know about how the brain generates consciousness, thought, etc -- there is no remotely plausible mechanism by which those things could continue to happen without the physical brain functions which produce them. But if one does believe, the idea has some decidedly odd implications.
To begin with, how long do ghosts last? If the mind could continue to exist without the brain, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't do so indefinitely (although it's always iffy trying to hypothesize about how impossible things would work if they were possible). Are there ghosts of cro-magnon cave men still wandering around, having existed for tens of thousands of years? Common ideas about ghosts imply that they can perceive the physical world at least to some extent. If ghosts have the full mental capabilities of the humans they once were -- which their alleged power to communicate suggests they do, since language is one of the most sophisticated human abilities -- have these ancient ghosts continued to learn and think and observe the world for all that time and become wise beyond our wildest imaginings? Why don't we ever hear their voices?
Also, human consciousness and intelligence differ only in degree, not in kind, from that of the other sophisticated animals (many vertebrates, at least). Ape minds differ surprisingly little from ours, and anyone who has a dog or cat knows that it has a personality and the ability to think and learn. If humans become ghosts after death, then the same must happen with other self-aware minds. Is the Earth swarming from pole to pole with the ghosts of every individual animal that lived and died since the rise of complex life in the Cambrian explosion? There would be trillions upon trillions of them. Are there dinosaur ghosts which have been blundering pointlessly around for tens of millions of years?
Finally, why do people look upon ghosts as something to be feared? How could they possibly harm us? They're immaterial, so they couldn't touch anything. Nor could they make the air vibrate to produce sounds -- the "voices" people hear would have to be some form of telepathy. For that matter, if they're invisible, the lenses of their eyes (if they even have eyes) couldn't refract light, nor could their retinas intercept it, so they couldn't see anything. Of course, the concept of ghosts originated before people were aware of such subtleties. Believers would hand-wave away such observations with talk about "energy" and "vibrations" (words which don't mean what the people who keep misusing them in this kind of context think they mean), or various mystical and spiritual gobbledygook (which doesn't mean anything at all), but if one claims that disembodied consciousness can exist in the real world, then it's subject to the way that world actually works. Otherwise one is just making stuff up at random.
Ultimately the concept is an explanation the brain concocts for things we perceive but cannot account for rationally -- the hallucinated voices of the remembered dead, or those creaking noises upstairs that sound like something's moving around when actually nothing is there. We don't think through the practical implications, because what it would be like if it were true is beside the point. Go ahead and do that internet search for bestiality porn; your great-grandpa is not standing invisibly behind you and watching disapprovingly.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:39 AM
4 Comments:
I dream about the dead all the time. My father visits me all the time. Last night, I dreamed about my grandfather (my father's father), with whom I was VERY close. In one part of the dream, I was in his study & he had all these poems & art that I had created & he had lovingly saved.
Christmas really ended when he died. The family started to break apart & it's now beyond repair. There are no family holiday get-togethers at all anymore.
Not only do I get visits from dead relatives & other friends, I often get visits from them through the medium of music. Often, I'll be in the grocery story & I'll hear a tune & I'll think this or that person is near ~ it was their song or our song.
I'm not afraid of ghosts but I've never been the kind of person who gets haunted by them. I loved the people in my life & I still love them. Whether they are alive or dead.
Well... I have personally witnessed things that I was unable to scientifically theorize until I got older. I've always had a cat in my life. I had two when I live in an apartment in the early 80's. They woke me up one night just meowing up a storm; pacing back and forth on the bed. In the bedroom were three "orbs", one blue, two gold, just floating. I put on my glasses, turned on the nightstand light, and I could still see them. The cats and I followed as they floated out of the bedroom and into the center room of the apartment. I watched as they slowly faded away. I was visited by them a few more times while living there.
I have had incidents like that cross my path several times. Most recently, we had a dog (overweight Sheltie) that passed away. For months after, we (husband and I) would hear him walk across the bedroom floor and drop himself against the wall where he normally slept, with his heavy sigh. Or the click of his toenails on the hardwood floor and a "body" hitting the landing before coming down (he was good at going up the stairs, but waited for us to carry him down as he grew older). That went on intermittently for several months.
Having studied human physiology to become an LMT; IMHO, our bodies are essentially large batteries; our cells are comprised of atoms. Part of that study involved the practice of Reiki which is geared to help energy realignment in the human body. When I performed Reiki, I could feel my energy and that of my clients. As for the human body, I was with the my father in his hospital room when he died. He has several massive strokes, so they had an EEG machine hooked up to him, and for several minutes after they declared him dead, where is EKG was flat-lined, his brain monitor was still showing small spikes of energy. I could see muscles faintly firing (twitching) around his body. I surmise that these "ghosts" we witness are just the residual energy that has not been able to ground out; it has to have gone somewhere. Some energies are strong, some not so strong. He never visited me after he died (other than in dreams), but then again, he did not die in someplace like that earlier apartment or our home today for his energy to just hang out.
So that's my theory, I'm sticking to it.
I've had such experiences too -- I think many people have them. When a person who is very important to us dies, it's natural to have dreams about them. The brain centers that harbor memories of that person and are set up to deal with them are still trying to do their jobs, which is probably why we so often have a sensation of their presence, especially when reminded by something we associate with them, like a piece of music or a particular object.
Unfortunately, mistaking such sensations for objective reality is not harmless. I have enough issues with obsessing about suicide as it is. If I actually came to believe that an afterlife existed and I would see my mother again, it's very likely I'd actually do it.
I certainly can't propose an explanation for the lights or sounds you describe, other than the obvious possibility of simple hallucinations (and I don't know enough about the circumstances to know how likely that is). But I'm sure you're aware of the principle that not being able to figure out the explanation for something is not a reason to entertain a supernatural explanation.
Unfortunately, the Reiki case is an example of what I was talking about in the second-to-last paragraph. Actual energy, in the scientific sense, certainly exists in the human body and in the brain, and it's not surprising that some activity persists in the brain for a short time "after death" -- the very concept of an exact moment of death is not really valid, since the body consists of various systems that take different amounts of time to shut down and probably show sporadic activity while doing so. The use of the word "energy" in fraudulent pseudo-scientific systems like Reiki has no connection with actual energy; it's just gobbledygook and doesn't really mean anything at all. As an aside, I'm quite shocked that studying to become an LMT would involve "study" of Reiki. That's like requiring study of unicorns as part of getting a zoology degree.
Residual energy in a dead body would just turn into waste heat and dissipate. It wouldn't continue to exist in some kind of organized form separate from the body.
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