THE SCIENCE AND LOGIC OF GHOSTS
The fact that a very wide range of occurrences, such as a door shutting on its own, lost keys, a chilly spot in a corridor, and visions of a deceased relative, are attributed to ghosts makes it difficult for scientists to evaluate them.
For their 2016 book, sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul spoke with people who had had ghost experiences “They discovered that “many participants were not sure that they had encountered a ghost and remained uncertain that such phenomena were even possible, simply because they did not see something that approximated the conventional image of a “ghost” in Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life (opens in new tab)” (Temple University Press). Instead, a large portion of our respondents only believed they had encountered something strange, unusual, spooky, or intriguing.”
As a result, many persons who publicly state that they had a ghostly encounter didn’t necessarily see anything that most people would consider to be a conventional “ghost,” and they may have really had entirely different experiences with the sole exception that they couldn’t easily explain them.
Personal experience and scientific proof are two different things. There is no one, accepted definition of what a ghost is, which contributes to the challenge of examining spirits. Others contend that ghosts are telepathic beings that are projected into the world from our brains. Some people think that ghosts are the spirits of the deceased that, for whatever reason, become “lost” while traveling to The Other Side.
Others still divide up distinct kinds of ghosts into their own unique subcategories, such as poltergeists, persistent hauntings, intelligent spirits, and shadow people. Of all, it’s just conjecture, much like guessing on the many fairy or dragon races; there are as many distinct kinds of ghosts as you like.
Ideas regarding ghosts contain a lot of paradoxes. Are ghosts, for instance, real or not? Either they can smash doors shut and fling things across the room, or they can pass through solid objects without affecting them. It must be either one or the other based on logic and the principles of physics. If ghosts have human souls, then why do they frequently show up wearing clothing and carrying seemingly soulless items like hats, canes, and dresses? This is in addition to the numerous stories of ghost trains, vehicles, and carriages.
Given that ghosts are claimed to speak with psychic mediums and should be able to identify their perpetrators for the authorities, if ghosts are the souls of those whose deaths went unpunished, why are there still unsolved murders? The concerns are endless; virtually every claim made concerning ghosts is met with logical objections.
To find the ghosts’ presences, ghost hunters employ a variety of inventive (and shady) techniques, frequently involving psychics. Most ghost hunters who claim to be scientific appear to be such because they employ high-tech scientific tools like Geiger counters, Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras, and sensitive microphones. Virtually all ghost hunters make this claim. However, no one has ever demonstrated that any of these technology can genuinely find ghosts. Flames were thought to turn blue in the presence of spirits for millennia. Few people now believe that item of folklore, but it’s probable that many of the signals used as proof by ghost hunters today will be viewed as equally false and out-of-date in decades to come.
Others contend that because we lack the technology to locate or identify the spirit realm, ghosts have not yet been confirmed to exist. However, this can’t also be true: Either ghosts exist and manifest in the real world, where they may be seen and captured on camera, on film, on video, and in audio recordings, or they don’t. We ought to find concrete proof of the existence of ghosts if they are capable of being observed or documented scientifically, but we don’t. If ghosts exist but cannot be observed or captured using scientific methods, then none of the images, recordings, and other media that have been used as proof of ghosts can be true ghosts. It’s hardly surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of actual proof of ghosts has been unearthed given the abundance of fundamentally incompatible hypotheses and the paucity of relevant scientific research.
And of course, it’s now simpler than ever to produce and distribute visually eerie photos on social media thanks to the recent release of “ghost apps” for smartphones, making it increasingly harder for ghost hunters to distinguish truth from fiction.
