Tis’ the night before Halloween, and all through the house, not a creature stirs, not even ‘old Mrs.Blaustein’ walking in our attic again!
Ok, ok, I so wanted this thread in GQ, but since there is no factual answer, and since it is the night before halloween, I just as soon put it here, ‘in my humble opinion.’
The question is simple: Ghosts, and Ghost stories have been around for ages, millennia even, and yet, scientists and skeptics denounce them as mere figments of ones imagination.
So how on earth have they transcended continents, cultures, and thousands of years still to be put off as something that simply does not exist? If hauntings have occured since the dark ages and before, and countless studies of the ‘paranormal’ have happened for many, many years, why then can we not come up with one shred of truth validating this ‘residual self-image’ we call a ghost?
Is this a contrived phenomenon that everyone sans the scientists are privy to? Or is there something more sinister going on here? Or not?
What say you teeming millions? Ghosts…real or not?
I thought this was going to be about how a ghost from some millennia old culture can still talk (in the cases of those that do) and be understood by someone in a modern culture. That would have been a cool topic.
So far as this goes, I’m going to have to agree with Bosda. Visual hallucinations caused by neurological disorders, stress, or suggestion.
How did pyramids become a common shape across continents? Why do we have cave paintings in many, many places? Some things are just logical leaps (or seem logical to those who leap them at the time).
Pyramids: Easy to produce a tall, self supporting structure.
Cave paintings: Desire to leave a mark.
Ghosts: Desire to see dead loved ones over again.
Thomas Hobbes suggested that we never entirely stop dreaming – dreams are just more apparent when they’re not overwhelmed by waking sensory impressions. I don’t know if that can be squared with what we know about REM states and such, but I experientially I’m certain that imagination colours perception.
Neurological disorders or accidental exposure to organic hallucinogens could account for it too, of course. Or perhaps there’s a combination at work.
Someone has an proper spectral hallucination, and their subsequent relation of it to people with a normal level of suggestability creates “haunted” spaces.
Of course, a big factor in all this is an absence of artificial light. A few hundred watts of shadow-chasing energy is enough to lay a thousand ghosts to rest.
Phlosphr, check out Campbell’s work. He essentially says that there is a commonality between ancient cultures that a) comes from a shared experience of the world at the most basic levels and b) there’s a “monomyth” running around (i.e. the prototypical story). This explains why stories from different cultures often follow the same patterns and use the same tropes if not the same specifics (e.g. creation stories or what happens after one dies).
As for why people still believe in ghosts: modern cultures are created from ancient cultures. There are a lot of beliefs and traditions that are held over from thousands of years ago.
Science has explained many former myths and I believe we can agree that the myths were an attempt to explain things that people at the time had no “scientific” explanations for. As people began to take these myths as gospel (if you’ll excuse the expression), the myths were added to and enhanced, explaining not only natural phenomena but explaining how one should conduct themselves as well. Even if your ghosts weren’t in the first go round, they were surely added after, either to make a point or as a convienent plot device en route to teaching a lesson.
I think partially it is that everyone wants to know what happens when you die. Anyone, ancient Etruscan 900 B.C. to Aborigine in 1600, to New England Republican 1955 knows what happens to the body – so the only way to survive death is as a “spirit”.
That sprits are floating around “somewhere” becomes a basic core belief. That some people claim to see them is unsurprising.
However, and having said that, it isn’t like everyone is seeing, say a bedsheet with two eye holes: some people see Marley’s Ghost, some hear voices, some see nothing but poltergeist’s pranks or hear whispering spirits, some see actual ancestors or Abe Lincoln in the White house. There actually is no uniformity across all cultures and times, not at all.
Isn’t this a bit of a contradiction? I believe the there is quite a bit of uniformity across cultures with what a spectre looks like. Whispy, opaque, devoid of life…Ghostly if you will. I am only playing devils advocate tonight, I am merely placing the centuries old fact together so as to make the smallest of points. That being: For centuries people have “seen” passed loved ones in a certain place or situation. Residual self image, or complete fabrication aside, this is what has been reported for many hundreds of years…And that is the precise question I wonder about…Why? Surly someone has seen something…right?
I believe ghosts are real, but I also believe that they are not the spirits of people who have passed on. Rather, they are localized reflections or ripples of spirit that occur when some great trauma happens. Actual spirits of people go on to the afterlife, to experience the particular judgment and wait for the resurrection.
I don’t think it’s a matter of ghosts transcending ages and cultures. It’s simply that the same basic fears and concerns transcend ages and cultures. Who are we? What are we doing here? Where are we going? What happens when we die? What if there is a god? What if there isn’t a god? What if there’s no concept of justice? I think it’s these questions that give rise to all sorts of paranormal phenomenon. Why believe in God? Why stories of witches, vampires, zombies, and werewolves? They’re all manifestations of some degree of fear and a large degree of uncertainty.
My 2c…
We all have the ability to construct a reality out of stimuli.
Give us a few snatched fragments of a sentance, and y u n f g re ut th en .
Give us a short snatch of a ‘familiar’ tune, and we can become convinced we’ve heard it before.
If we randomly meet somebody who we haven’t seen for ages, and it turns out there’s some event somehow connected to both of us happening in the next six months, we feel it’s spooky.
If we get convinced we’ve seen something that we can’t rationally explain, it’s more comforting to say it was supernatural, than to admit that our senses and our senses made a big mistake.
I’ve been living in the same house for over six months, and every time I walk out the front door and to the right, I double-take. There’s a bush, which along with a shadow of a wall, look like a cartoonish ghoul. If I was more accomodating to supernatural ideas, I’d have long ago decided that it was a ghost. And hey, in these three houses there were probably a fair few tragic deaths - maybe it was one of them?!
This isn’t Great Debates, so I’m not going to press for a cite, but for a recent thread there I looked up some descriptions of ghosts through literature and I was surprised how un-uniform they were. The Greek description of ghosts had them howling and gibbering like bats swirling in a cave, and the warriors were still spattered with blood from the battles that killed them. A character in the Odyssey meets the ghost of his mother, who coyly steps out of reach when he goes to embrace her, and she explains they aren’t permitted to touch. The Spakespeare version showed a man who died in battle, but there was no mention of any blood. The Dickensian version was a tormented specter wearing the chains he forged in life, his clothing blown by an infernal spectral wind, and had a further added detail that Marley’s jaw was held on with a band of cloth tied around his head.
In other words, there aren’t many common features across time and cultures except that a) ghosts were pale versions of the living person, b) people are afraid of ghosts, and c) when the body dies, a spirit lives on.
The pale part? Well, that’s what happens to a body where the heart isn’t pumping blood. This, too, transcends cultures. That a ghost looks like the living person: not a stretch. And the way I read it, to believe in a ghost is to disbelieve in death, that one’s earthly demise is somehow not the end. I’m not sure that denial of one’s mortality is really such an unusual thing, in any culture.
Oh—and the Dickensian ghost was translucent, and the others weren’t. You might note that Dickens used a stage trick to make a translucent character “appear” on stage, using glass and mirrors. It would not surprise me that the concept of the “transparent ghost” soars around the mid-1800s when this effect was first used in stage plays.
In most stories, people are afraid when they see ghosts. Is this because ghosts cause people to become afraid, or that a mind in panic sees things which a mind at rest does not?
The alternative is that it’s all chemicals and electricity.
Us, here, typing in our opinions is simply reaction and is really no different than acid reacting with metal. That which is us stops when we die, when our cells no longer get nourishment. The awesome love we feel for our children just stops.
Isn’t that like saying horses are a myth because there is no pegasus?
Vampire legends also exist in all cultures, though the details vary widely (and none were traditionally at all similar to the Bela Lugosi/Anne Rice suave Eurotrash- that was totally a 20th century invention). For ghosts, it is possible that the legends of surviving souls, like the belief in a divine being, began when the population was much much much tinier (prehistoric excavations definitely imply belief in life-after-death) the ghost legends were a primordial religion that spread to the four corners as the descendants of the original groups split off (i.e. the American Indian belief in ghosts descended from their pre-Beringian ancestors in east Asia, which in turn descended from their own ancestors in north Africa).
Or maybe there are really ghosts. I’m a skeptic but I’ve had “ghostly encounters”, by which I mean I’ve had experiences that aren’t explicable with known data but would be if ghosts exist. I believe that there’s an explanation for these experiences that fits some form of physical law, and I also believe that most “sightings” are hallucinations or suggestion, but otoh I’ve had experiences when I was wide awake and not in a suggestive state that most definitely were not explicable, and I’ve even had some that were shared with others who witnessed the same phenomenon [doors opening & closing when there was no wind, a voice that called my cousin’s name when there was everybody in the house was in the same room, etc.]). Whether these are “ghosts” or not, they’re unexplained and if they happen to me then I’m sure they happen to others and, for want of an explanation, the supernatural is invoked whether it’s truly haints or not.
We can make ghosts fit physical law. All we need to do is change the law, as we have done many times when we learned something new.
Some day we may learn a way to perceive what happens after the body dies. Or maybe we already do see, but we’ll learn how to recognize what we see.
But there is something in us while we live that’s not there in the body after we die. Something very powerful. The fact that science can’t identify it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Surely any true scientist knows that.
Look up the concept of emergent properties sometime. There’s no need to invoke anything mysterious or supernatural or even particularly beyond the current ability of science to explain why we are what we are. Take an ant colony. Clearly, it’s a marvel of highly-ordered activity resulting in often-extraordinary feats of engineering. Yet a single ant is dumb as a post and cannot even survive on its own for any length of time… The incredible efficiency and adaptability of an ant colony is an emergent property of a complex system of individual ants.
Same thing with our brains. We’re just an astoundingly complex set of chemical and electrical interactions, nothing more.
So is that annoyance you feel at my challenge to scientific wisdom nothing but chemical and electrical interactions? Is it of any real advantage to the species?
An ant is definitely not as dumb as a post. Take a half-million posts and stack them up. Will they build a colony? Will they propogate? They may rot and provide sustennance for others, including the much smarter ants.
It remains to be seen if science can assemble all the needed chemical and electrical interactions, add some emergent properties, and create life.
I have read some about emergent properties. The theory does explain such as the collective “intellegence” ant colonies. It does not explain love and hate, etc.
Don’t misunderstand, I love science, and I find scientific exploration to be fascinating. I also forgive it’s limitations.
