Ghosts.

What are ghosts?
Most commonly, they are the soul of a deceased person. A soul being the durable personality of a human which is independent of the physical body and persists after the body is destroyed.

Ghosts are reported being seen as actual people, dressed in the clothes they died in, or as pockets of cold air, or as strange movements of objects when nobody is touching them, recorded in photography as floating orbs of light, or in audio as strange patterns in background noise.

There are of course millions of ghost stories and you can probably find somebody in any room that will tell you they have had an experience with a ghost, or know somebody who did.

Why is this such a persistent concept?

People are ego-centric. I know that, historically, I found it hard to fathom a world without me in it. I was the nexus of all my experience. Essentially, I was the world, as far as I was aware. Only through study did it begin to dawn on me that the world had been chugging along for billions of years before I arrived, and it will continue to do so billions of years after I die. On the scale of galaxies, I am beyond miniscule.

These are hard truths to swallow for the brain which perceives itself as the reason for existence and knows nothing outside of itself. But that is the brain that has been the standard for the very vast proportion of human history.

To ourselves, it seems obvious that we are important. That we are fundamental to the existence we see around us. That the world would not go on without us. It seems inconceivable that we could end. And so, we insisted that we just do NOT end. When we die, we live on in spirit form.

There was no shame in thinking that way, when we didn’t know any better. But we have learned too much to ignore what we have discovered, and still call ourselves honest.

What is a soul? In order for my soul to be MY soul, it must have characteristics which are definitively me. Even if you insist that the cart goes before the horse, and that the body is a manifestation of the YOU that is the SOUL, then one way or another, the soul is intrinsically tied to what it is to be you.

That set of characteristics which are YOU must be analogous to the personality. After all, what other meaningful traits about you could exist and still call those traits diagnostic of the person that you are? Could your height live on after the body dies? Could your hair color? Those characteristics are meaningless when not in context with your personality. Personality being what you think, how you think it, and how you interact with others. Your sense of humor, the feelings of pride and shame, the sense of accomplishment, your protective instincts and your flare for artistry. All the things which distinguish you as a person from any other person who possesses the same baseline traits that you do. What else could a soul be, if it is not who you are? If it is NOT who you are as a person, then how exactly can it be yours? You may as well posit that your shoe lives on after you, and send that in place of a soul if the soul is not the important parts which make you, YOU.

So a soul is equivalent to the personality, except that the soul is assumed to exist independently of the body.

There has never been any evidence that this is the case, other than the assertions of believers. What we do know about personality, though, is that it is inexorably tied to the body. The activity of the brain IS your personality, and when you do things to the brain, you also do them to the personality. Drugs and alcohol deeply effect the behavior of those who take them to the point that they may say that they weren’t themselves in extreme examples or that their impulse control had been diminished in other examples. People who have not slept become erratic, grouchy, and have poor judgment. Depressed people can take drugs to improve their moods and there are also drugs which can worsen moods. Headaches and disease can radically alter our behavior and cause happy people to become morose and snippy, or depressed. People who experience brain damage also experience an equivalent diminishment of their mental faculties, or an alteration in their personality, famously observed in the case of Phineas Gage. These alterations conform precisely with our current understanding of how the brain works. Our understanding is not complete, but what we do understand has proven reliable time and again.

None of this should be an issue if the soul and consequently the personality are independent of and not reliant on the body. Why would a thing like being drunk make somebody who knows better drunk-dial their ex girlfriend, or drink and drive, when they would never consider such a thing sober? Why would the intoxication of the physical body have an effect on the non-physical soul?

Whatever else might be said, it is obvious that the thing which controls our bodies is IN our bodies, and inexorably part of our bodies… our brains. Changes in the chemical activity in the brain are what manifest in changes in the outward expression and inner monologue of our personalities. That is fact.

Things without living brains do not manifest any of the behaviors associated with personality. Put a man in front of a video showing people having fun at a picnic, or a laughing baby. You will see the change. The outward expression of joy indicating that he perceives what you have shown, processed it, and finds it appealing.

Now set a basketball in front of the screen. No reaction. Now set a corpse in that position. No reaction. Living brains = personality. Those things without living brains exhibit no sign whatsoever of personality. That brain activity IS personality. So, we can reasonably say that when a brain dies, the corresponding personality ceases. There is no evidence for anything else, and an urgent desire for there to be more does not make it so. There is no way to tell an assertion of the existence of durable immortal soul from the inventions of imagination. No proof, no evidence, nor any reason to believe beyond a DESIRE that we be special. We cannot assert its existence as fact and remain honest.

So, there is no such thing as a soul, or spirit as commonly pictured. But if we do allow for such a thing, what can we say about it? How could we know anything about it?

People are willing to tell all kinds of stories where strange or un-explained things happen and they attribute those things to the activity of ghosts. But why?

Regardless of whether you are no religious or believe in ghosts, you know for a fact that there are many religions and supernatural stories which are not true. You probably do not accept that Hades is the realm of the underworld. You probably do not accept that Zeus lives on Mt. Olympus, or that Paul Bunyan had a gigantic blue ox. You probably have rejected Fujin as the god of wind, or Thor as the god of thunder.

The numbers of supernatural explanations for naturally occurring phenomena seem to be limitless. Once, we didn’t know where the wind came from. Now we do. It isn’t Fujin whipping around a giant bag full of air, it’s a naturally occurring phenomena caused by the heating of the atmosphere by the sun’s heat.

We can apply the same reasoning to every ghost story ever told. Why does my house make strange sounds at night? It’s a ghost creeping around in the darkness! No. Your house is very heavy. It is settling into the ground and it does not move all in one piece. It creeks against itself. Not only that, it is making those same sounds all the time, but you only notice it when all the commotion of the day has passed on.

Your lights flicker because of bad wiring, or your bulb is about to burn out. Not because of a ghost. It’s cold in that one hallway because of poor insulation, not because a ghost likes to hang out there. That strange light you can see in that clearing at night isn’t the ghost of a rail-road worker carrying a lantern. It’s the headlights of the cars rounding the corner on the other side of the trees.

We like to understand things. And when we don’t we try to figure out what is going on. If we do not have a good grip on how things work, we might see intent where there is only physics.

Recordings of ghosts are usually in the form of misty shapes, or globes of light, or streaks in the image. We know what causes these distortions, and none of them are supernatural. They are motes of dust caught in the camera flash, or frauds perpetrated through long-exposures and the like.

Why do people describe ghosts as looking the way they do? Why are ghosts seen wearing clothes? Glasses? Shoes? Do ghosts have bad eye-sight? Do they get cold? Is that why they wear clothes? Why are some ghosts fat? I thought souls were not dependant on their physical bodies, yet they are often described with the maladies and infirmities of life.

If ghosts can interact with the world in a supernatural way, why do they still have hands? Why do they have eyes? Do they need them to see? Did a man’s macular degeneration follow him even unto death? Why do they still have anuses? What good are their teeth to them now? Why would a ghost have clothes? Are their clothes and intrinsic part of their being? Did their clothes have souls as well? Are those the ghosts of timberland’s past?

It doesn’t make any sense. Most people will say that ghosts are intangible. That is, you could walk right through one and not know it. They would have to be intangible, based on the stories I have heard. You couldn’t keep a ghost out by closing the door behind you, could you? Can a ghost be stopped by two inches of pine? Most would say no. And that a ghost could travel right through your walls. Well, if that’s the case, and a ghost can walk through walls, why is it able to go to the second floor of your house? It’s intangible, right? Why doesn’t it sink to the ground floor. Better yet, what keeps it from sinking strait to the center of the earth?

What does it weigh? If it stays on the earth, then it must have mass or be otherwise dependant on the laws of physics. If it did not have weight, it could not stay on earth. The gravity could not hold it, and it would vanish from sight as the earth hurtled away at thousands of miles per hour. The earth is rotating over a thousand miles per hour, relative to the sun. It is also orbiting the sun, at many thousands of miles per hour. And our solar system itself is orbiting the galactic center, traveling a 250 billion year circuit of a 52 light-year diameter orbit. That is a whole lot of speed, and that weightless, non-physical ghost is going to be left in the dust.

The only way to explain away these inconsistencies is nothing short of admitting you believe in magic. The indefensible, spooky-faced admission of a child who doesn’t know any better and lacks fundamental knowledge of how the world really works

SUPPLEMENTAL UPDATE

Check out this video, originally aired on PBS.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/how-d ... -work.html

It goes into some detail on the functioning of the brain. Among the topics covered are how magnetic pulses fired into the brain alters the activity, and expression of our personality in direct response to this purely physical, and non-spiritual stimulation. Including judgments of morality with all the "spiritual" implications that entails.

Well Johnson, I agree with you of course 100% about both souls and ghosts. However I have to say that I love movies about both these things, like the movie "Ghost" and more recently "The Orphanage" and "hereafter"

I have never understood why people believe they have a "soul" where do they think it is? Why do they think it has all the properties of the body it "inhabits" and will recognize other souls someplace else?

The Orphanage was a great movie.

You should check out "The Devil's backbone" too.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256009/


I'm all about horror and fantasy stories. There's real value there. Substituting that make believe world for the real one is what i speak out against.

Thanks Johnson, well said.

I would argue that cultural evolution to discard magical explanations is at the core of ethics. Magical and supernatural theories hinder people from seeking scientific understanding. In the case of the soul, there is an unethical dimension in the selfish desire for immortality. Our spirit/character comes into existence with our personality and dissolves back into the matter of the universe at our death.

Where I think there is room for discussion, and this is what Youkrst seemed to argue, is whether the supernatural can ever be a useful concept within a scientific pantheistic view. You say "the thing which controls our bodies is IN our bodies, and inexorably part of our bodies… our brains". That then begs the question of what controls our brains. There are sweeping currents of cultural causality of which we are often unaware. Buddhism calls this karma, or the law of cause and effect. We are influenced subconsciously and subliminally in ways that we do not realise. Now, I agree with you that all cause and effect is material. This means that karma is material. However, like quantum physics, it is too complicated and hidden for us to see.

The materiality of ideas has to be one of the most complex problems, given the ability of a dormant idea written in Greece or Egypt thousands of years ago to leap off the page and find life again in the modern world, or for an idea to be misunderstood and achieve influence throughout the world in mutant form. The dualist tradition that the representation (idea) is different from the thing (matter) does not logically mean that the representation is immaterial, but it does mean our concept of matter needs to be four dimensional, taking time into account.

I have argued that the real meaning of religion is natural, not supernatural. This is an issue of ontology, cosmology and ethics. The way wishful thinking turns scary noises into 'ghosts' is replicated on vast scale by the conversion of natural events into Gods. The nature of this conversion process is a very interesting question for the scientific analysis of religion.

as to what controls our minds, I am somewhat inclined to lean towards a deterministic reality.

It would be agreed that the state of the universe in THIS instant is directly dependant on the state of the world in the previous instant. The ability to predict what comes next is tied to our understanding of current circumstances.

We can predict with extreme accuracy the trajectory of a falling stone, provided we know the circumstances of the stone. Where our predictive ability breaks down is when new variables are introduced.

The probelm of a real deterministic future is we have no conception of what ALL the variables could possibly be, and if anything at all could truly be called random.

i remember one time i woke up from sleep in the middle of the night and my "awareness" or "consciousness" was about 6 or seven feet above my body.

i was wide awake, fully me (consciously) and yet physically my brain was about six feet away.

i remember another time i was dreaming a dream and in the dream was a tetrachtys of conscious globes all conversing simultaneously, and in my dream i was thinking "wow, this is amazing i am processing like 80 conversations simultaneously, i cant do that, this is impossible...." then i woke up because i had to pee, and was totally shocked because the conversation of the tetrachtys just kept going, i could still hear it.... it slowly faded out and all the while i was thinking "frak that is wild!, what a blast!, i know so little!"

i remember another time.... i could go on and on

i usually dont talk much about these things because people tend to get touchy about things that contradict the security of their belief systems.

i once heard of a girl that had half her brain removed and continued to function "normally"

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/36032653/ ... ay_health/

i have met many people who have not had the strange or unusual experiences i have been priviledged to have happen to me, but i cannot ignore my own experience no matter how difficult it is to parse.

here is a question

what is consciousness?

these are early days, something that strikes me as just as wild is this stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE7xRgfP ... ure=fvwrel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

please do not reply to this post unless you are willing and prepared to go out of your mind

also it occurs to me that we "know" so little... so very little.

knowledge is in flux, at one time apparently some people thought the earth was flat, then some better info found it's way to them and it became harder to find flat earthers, i wonder if there are still some around.

personally, i shy away from hard and fast conclusions because i know from experience that at any moment a new bit of understanding or experience can develop that requires a change in what only yesterday seemed so unalterable.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

i just started reading aldous huxley's doors of perception today and stumbled on this bit

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

reminded me of this thread so i pasted it in

youkrst, the Huxley material from The Doors of Perception illustrates why the hippie psychedelic movement flowered so rapidly. "Mind at large" is an entirely speculative concept for which there is no evidence. Huxley's suggestion that concepts are not data appears designed to cast doubt on empirical knowledge.

I agree with you that reality is far more complex than our current knowledge understands. For example there are probably deep patterns within nature of which we have only vague inklings. However, describing complex patterns as 'mind at large' is just as wishful as ghost stories. As for your discussion of astral travelling, I greatly enjoyed reading Carlos Castaneda's tales of how Mexican sorcerers could zoom about at will. If this stuff was real, and not just imaginary, you would think there would be at least some tiny evidence that some one obtained information at a distance. Lucid dreaming is easy to imagine, but that doesn't make it supernatural or even real.

Robert Tulip wrote: the Huxley material from The Doors of Perception illustrates why the hippie psychedelic movement flowered so rapidly.

does it? how so?

Robert Tulip wrote: "Mind at large" is an entirely speculative concept

is it? "Mind at large" looks like three words in inverted commas to me, but the reference is to something i have read about all over the place. and have some experience of.

Robert Tulip wrote: for which there is no evidence.

well a large number of people write an awful lot of words about this thing you say there is no evidence for, if you have not experienced it then that is fine, who knows perhaps you will, i know i was quite surprised, to say least, when i did, and do.

Robert Tulip wrote: Huxley's suggestion that concepts are not data appears designed to cast doubt on empirical knowledge.

empirical knowledge to me is fine, as far as it goes, and concepts i simply love.

which bit of the huxley quote made you think that he was designing a statement to cast doubt on empirical knowledge?

Robert Tulip wrote: However, describing complex patterns as 'mind at large' is just as wishful as ghost stories.

i wouldn't describe complex patterns as 'mind at large' nor would i use the phrase 'mind at large' but i think i have an inkling of what aldous might be getting at.

Robert Tulip wrote: As for your discussion of astral travelling,

oh, i was just describing some "supernatural" experiences i had, perhaps i should have picked other ones that weren't so "astral
travelly" like the time i was walking along the street and the "trees radiated out at me" with what i can only describe as an "inner divine luminescence" and music i was well familiar with sounded like it was from bloody venus, i was "sober as a judge" but not half as judgemental at the time.

Robert Tulip wrote:Carlos Castaneda's tales of how Mexican sorcerers could zoom about at will.

never read it myself, mexican sorcerors you say, sounds wild.

Robert Tulip wrote: If this stuff was real, and not just imaginary, you would think there would be at least some tiny evidence that some one obtained information at a distance.

yeah never seen any mexican sorcerors myself, unless they sometimes appear as strange lights in the sky, i've seen a few of those.

Robert Tulip wrote:Lucid dreaming is easy to imagine, but that doesn't make it supernatural or even real.

again, i dont know much about lucid dreaming, i've had these wild experiences at the strangest moments, many times when i am nowhere near dreaming, i assure you, though i dont expect you to accept, that i have had "supernatural" (by which i mean naturally super) experiences and they were "real" or at least realler than at least half the bs i've had thrown at me over the years.