Ghosts and Demons

Like many people, I suspect, I enjoy watching the different ghost-hunting programmes that one can find on the Discovery Channel streaming service. Much of it still appears to be sheer bunkum, but it seems there are now some shows that – whilst they can hardly be called ‘scientific’ – are at least dedicated to a high threshold of honesty. (Unlike the accusations that plagued the British show, Most Haunted.)

An interest in ‘spiritualism’ is nothing new, and the level of indulgence in the Victorian age certainly led to many fake psychics taking advantage of gullible seekers. Indeed, the ‘thrill’ of the unexpected and unexplainable [unless you know how the trick is done] still engages audiences of stage illusionists today. One could easily dismiss all of the current ghost-hunting shows as just a continuation of that tradition, where so-called ‘paranormal investigators’ use the old tricks of misdirection and fakery to lead audiences to believe they have seen a real phenomenon.

There’s also the problem that all of these shows would fail the test of ‘repeatability’ under controlled conditions. We can only see where the show’s presenters point their cameras, and we only see the edited result. The argument that we don’t understand how the manifestations occur, making them inherently unpredictable, could easily be a smokescreen. And even a show where ‘nothing really happened’, or where someone is ‘exposed’ as a faker, adds credence to those where the presenters seem to be besieged by paranormal events.

For myself, I like to come at the issues ‘from the other end’. I don’t try to validate what the shows present; instead, I try to build a picture of how these so-called ‘paranormal’ events could actually be described as ‘normal’. And I try to fit that picture both to ‘hard science’ and to what I have discovered of how my perceptions and the universe they reveal actually seem to work.

One of the persistent themes of both ghost-hunting shows and spiritualism in general is that ‘something’ persists beyond death. I dismiss merely labelling this as ‘energy’ because – frankly – what use is a label that is merely a label, for something that is neither explained nor understood? So let’s look at the various forms of ‘haunting’ as if there were some real phenomenon there.

A ‘residual haunting’ is where people experience something that can best be described as a memory of past events. They might see an actual apparition, or they might just hear noises. Both can, apparently, be captured by recording equipment too – even where that equipment was not installed with that intention. This lends credence to the idea that these events are not merely the result of telepathic perception, but are a phenomenon with ‘real world’ energy, sufficient to affect the recording apparatus.

A phenomenon with ‘real world’ energy requires a coherent pattern of quantum-level interactions, which in turn requires a ‘generator’ of coherent probabilities. It also requires that generator to operate across space and time – even accommodating the way that this planet rotates and orbits around the Sun, whilst the Sun itself moves within our galaxy and the galaxy also moves. But that latter is actually a lesser problem, because ordinary matter also does those things, in what physicists call an ‘inertial frame’. So let’s return to that ‘generator’.

The world we perceive is very far from being a ‘constant’ thing. Every part of it is oscillating constantly, into and out of our ‘reality’. It doesn’t all do so ‘in harmonious phase’ but magnificently out of phase. As any part oscillates out, the interactions it had (and has) with other parts act as a sort of ‘memory’ that drives [with a probability profile] how it will oscillate back in. And that memory travels in an inertial frame, across space and time. So here’s the somewhat radical suggestion: what if ‘intent’ – which has a physical existence – could also travel as part of the memory (information) within an inertial frame?

What if ‘intent’ was a bigger force than we realise, capable of travelling along the time path of an inertial frame?

What if ‘intent’ could act as a probability generator (or influencer) at different points along the time-space path of an inertial frame?

What if the thing that allowed intent to appear to cross time was simply the physical context of other matter – itself generated by continual interactions at the sub-atomic level, as its constituent parts or particles oscillate into and out of our ‘reality’?

I realise it’s quite a jump to ascribe all of the above to something as apparently commonplace as ‘intent’. But one of the common features of so-called paranormal events is that they seem to be linked to a highly repeated intent: walking the same path, many times; remembering the same grief or the same, unresolved desire, many times.

But then, what of ‘intelligent haunting’, where an entity seems to be able to interact with the investigators, in real or near-real time? Where, for example, it can answer questions, or cause physical phenomena ‘on command’? Or where it can ‘fiddle’ with investigators’ equipment while they aren’t even aware of the activity? These ‘intelligent’ spirits seem to be remembering themselves, in much the same way that the living do, but without a physical body to provide ‘automatic’ continuity. But could it be that ‘intent’ also provides the framework for those ‘spirits’: intent to protect someone or something; intent to gain restitution or revenge; intent to cause harm?

And so to non-human ‘spirits’: to poltergeists and even ‘demons’. These, it seems to me, could also be created by living things, but without an attached memory of their living origin. Or perhaps there was, once, an attached memory but it was distasteful and was ‘deleted’ – wilfully forgotten.

I realise all this is mere speculation. I didn’t introduce it as anything else. But as a possible model, it has some ramifications. First, intent can make connections – can form structures. Conscious intent would make even stronger connections and structures than accidental intent. Second, intent can also travel along such connections, creating a framework for telepathic influence, remote viewing, demonic ‘oppression’ and and even ‘magic’. Third, the universe as a whole may have a collective intent. Finally, if you believe in an ‘afterlife’ then the intent associated with it may well generate that ‘reality’.