Spooks

Friends have been talking lately about spirits and ghosts. What is this all about? Modern people don’t believe in ghosts and spirits do they? Actually it is quite amazing to me the differences all around in how people perceive their surroundings-- their world view, weltanschaung, perceptual net, system of beliefs, whatever. It doesn’t pay to discuss the spirit you saw in the basement last night with your nuclear physicist friend and talking about quantum mechanics with your wife’s astrologer is likely to be a frustrating experience.

When I was doing my undergraduate slog in Psychology they force-marched us through a whole dense forest of 19th century German theories of perception—Helmholtz and the Gang. Before total boredom had set in, there was one thing that struck me: science generally maintains that all information we use to interpret the world comes to our brain from the outside, through our senses. I am not a philosopher so I am not really interested in things like the archetypes of Nietzsche or exactly what your brain thinks it is seeing when it sees a table. That segues on into psycholinguistics and, I feel, is all dependent on whose words you use and doesn’t really matter anyway. Now Helmholtz et al only counted five senses—they maintained that the ONLY way you are going to receive information is through your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and fingers. Makes sense (pun intended), unless you consider that the brain itself and possibly the heart are very large electrical sense organs and are quite possibly capable of perceiving things that the other five cannot. We know that pigeons have an area in their brain that contains ionic iron particles and is therefore responsive to the Earth’s magnetic field and that certain fish can "taste" the electrical fields emanating from their prey's nervous system. To a 19th century scientist would that be any weirder than the possibility that human brains might have an area that is responsive to time, that elusive variable that constitutes the 4th dimension in the General Relativity Equation? Or that human and all animal hearts have a way for their electrical field to perceive eddy currents and relay them to the brain as the thing we call Love? I do not propose such theories. I am just saying there is a lot we don’t know and I never put down people who have seen ghosts just as I never put down scientists who insist that such things can’t be proven and so do not exist.

I like the word spirit better than ghost as it implies the essence of something or someone while “ghost” originally meant only what is left behind after something is gone, as in a jet contrail. Both concepts are interesting though and maybe what we really mean when we use these words is something of both. In a deterministic world view, we are on an immense billiard table playing pool with God using Einstein’s equations to call our shots. All masses that have ever been in motion have affected other masses or changed to an energy state, so by calculating backwards an Uber-mathematician (God?) could determine the position and state of anything at any time. That sounds very similar to me to belief systems which maintain that just as all motion and energy is ruled by the ghosts of past motions, all life is ruled by the actions and feelings of past lives. It is absolutely true that we don’t have to re-invent wheels every lifetime-- all the information we have built up about the way the world works has been passed down to us by dead ancestors. We in the West are generally not even very grateful to them, being pretty stuck on ourselves, the Golden Children of the Present. We think we know it all.

In the West ghosts are spooky and not something you should be friendly with—they are the lost souls of individuals who have really messed up and haven’t managed to go to Heaven, instead living in some misty purgatory with worms dangling out of their eye sockets. In Japan and China spirits of ancestors are loving and involved with our lives. They are interested in seeing their descendants prosper and be happy and all they ask is a little recognition and rice wine once in a while. There are ghosts (hungry and otherwise) there, but they are the REALLY messed up ones and are not always attributable to one distinct soul or person. They are the ghosts of Ideas and Delusions and should be avoided, but even they can teach the living at times if the living have the strength.

Darwin didn’t know about DNA; we do and can easily understand how these twisty molecules perpetuate themselves and twist from the past into the future. Richard Dawkins wrote about “memes”, the DNA of ideas and how they can mutate and evolve. The spirit of what we once perceived as a “person” is nothing more than the totality of all the perceptions and ideas and thoughts we have recorded about that “person” and is as fully capable of passing on its lineage as are the molecules that once made up the chemical equation that walked and breathed. Nothing is lost, all is passed down.

What does “exist” mean anyway? No matter how we choose to interpret it, we all live in the same Universe. All stories must be true. Just because a particular human holds a chair in Physics at the Max Planck Institute doesn’t make them any more qualified to interpret the Universe than a Nenet shaman dancing for reindeer in Siberia. Nels Bohr having tea with Madame Blavatsky, Gary Snyder serving the jam buns. I feel that any and all Theories of the Universe must be both true and false at the same time—true because at some level all possibilities are True and false because at every level all we perceive or can conceive of is False—an immense illusion that is so immense that even the idea of immensity is undefinable and false. Even the idea of Illusion is meaningless unless you have a duality between the Object and the Perceiver.

Om