I was in my bedroom at night, trying to sleep without much success, when I heard a strange noise. What was it? It sounded like whining. I stared at the ceiling trying to convince myself the sound had not been that strange; after all, houses make popping and cracking noises all the time, something to do with thermal differences.
Thermal differences. That was a good, sound and sensible explanation. Very scientific. It only had a small, very small, actually tiny problem: I hadn’t heard a crack or a pop, but a whine. Thermal differences don’t sound like whining, do they?
“The wind. It must have been the wind,” said a voice in my head. That was comforting, so I decided to shut my eyes and catch a little sleep. And I almost succeeded, but the moment I dozed off the whine returned, clearer and stronger.
I jumped out of bed. I could swear someone had whispered my name in that whine, someone with a deep, low voice, the voice you would expect to come from beyond the grave.
I turned on the lights and began exploring. Nothing under the bed, nothing in the closet… Nothing anywhere. Just my imagination.
I remembered that I have a sound scientific background. Science says that there are no such thing as ghosts, right?
Right?
Disclaimer: This post doesn’t support the idea of ghosts or anything paranormal or supernatural. In the spirit of this blog, it tries to get to the limit of natural laws and bend them, providing possible explanations for facts that may not really exist. And, besides, who doesn’t like a good scare?
- Science can’t disprove the existence of anything
Did you know that? Science is the most powerful knowledge tool we humans have and it can prove the existence of a lot of things. Unfortunately, it can’t disprove the existence of anything, or, if you want, it can’t prove the non-existence of anything. Let’s give an example: science has proven there are horses and rhinos, but it can’t disprove the existence of unicorns. All scientists can say is that they’ve been looking everywhere for unicorns, but they haven’t found them yet.
So the next time someone tells you that science proves there’s no such thing as ghosts, don’t take their words at face value. That’s not science, but omniscience.
- Sufficiently advanced technology
Arthur C. Clarke, a very prominent science-fiction writer and a man of unquestionable scientific prowess, proposed his three laws in his essays. The most famous is the third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Who are we to deny the existence of advanced beings between us? They could be aliens, people from other dimensions, from the future… the possibilities are endless, and none of them pose any conflict with science. What if they have a cloaking device to study us without interferences and sometimes that device malfunctions? Could you misinterpret that as a ghost sighting?
- Time travel
We’re not talking here about people time traveling, but about their signals. A very common case of ghosts is seeing them -and hearing them- as they repeat some event in their lives. Some parts of these events could have been recorded in a medium we don’t know of. yet (it would be, sorry for the pun, a medium’s medium).
One of these mediums could have been pottery. Time and again we find the news that some scientists have retrieved sounds from ancient vases, supposedly from the potters that made them. The idea is fascinating: while they were talking, the sounds were recorded in the fresh clay and then preserved for people to hear them in the future. Unfortunately, these news don’t seem to hold much truth. There’s an episode of Mythbusters, ep. 62, in which they test this theory and they don’t get any conclusive recording out of the pottery.
One of the most famous instances of this -for the time being- myth is episode 19, season 7 of X-Files, in which a mythical bowl is reputed to have recorded on it the words that Jesus spoke when he raised Lazarus from the dead.
In 1902, Charles Sanders Peirce wrote: “Give science only a hundred more centuries of increase in geometrical progression, and she may be expected to find that the sound waves of Aristotle’s voice have somehow recorded themselves.” It seems plausible.
- Actual dead people who come back after death to haunt the living
Until now we’ve seen three possible alternatives, from less to most scary: impossibility of denial, people using very advanced technology and actual records of dead people. But I know what you’re thinking: that is not so scary, those are not real ghosts. Real ghosts are spirits of the dead who come back to haunt the living, and that can’t possibly have any scientific explanation. There’s no scientific frame that could accommodate this idea. How could they interact with physical objects? Where could they draw the energy from?
Well, challenge accepted. It’s not been easy, but here goes: remember The Matrix? It was a great movie, with a lot of fun. But that was all it was?
They sure didn’t have computers when Plato talked about a reality (ideas) beyond our reality (shadows) or when Descartes looked for absolute certainty, but the idea has been floating around for a while now: how do we know that what we call reality is real? Maybe it’s just some projection of the real world.
Computers are able to create a new world. Have you noticed the level of detail in games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty? It’s not difficult to think that in just a few centuries we won’t be able to tell apart computer-generated worlds from real ones. And the world as we know it could be a giant computer simulation. This is known as the Simulation Argument, and its most recent form is credited to philosopher Nick Bostrom.
How is this connected to the idea of ghosts? Well, if the universe is indeed a giant computer program, every human being could be assimilated to a file. Death would be equivalent to erasing that file. But when you erase a file in a computer, you don’t immediately erase all its contents; you just remove the handle that tells the computer where is that file. When time passes, and depending on how busy the computer is, you’ll erase the file contents little by little until there’s nothing left.
That is our ghost, a file without a handle. But the information is there, at least for a certain time. And there are special tools that allow us, some other files inside the computer, to retrieve information from the missing files, that is, to make contact with the Great Beyond.
Strange? Sure. True? Probably not.