Ghost hunting is not and never will be scientific
I wanted to give a quick shout out to science for a moment. I’ve blogged a good deal about the crew at TAPS and ghost hunting so I wanted to state in no uncertain terms that what those guys do is not a truly scientific endeavor.
I also don’t want to go into the depths of “What is science” in order to explain what a “scientific endeavor” is. That really a treatise of a far broader topic. Suffice to say, to really be a scientific endeavor you would first have to have a theory as to what you are investigating.
That said, a brief description is in order. A theory is really just an idea. Any idea you can think of. Well, not just an idea. Scientifically speaking, a theory is some collection of hypothesis on a topic that is backed up with some amount of evidence. In other words, you go out, see lots or apples falling to the ground, and eventually develop a theory as to why that’s happening.
Here is a good definition of theory http://www.nebscience.org/theory.html that is doing far more justice to the topic than I am.
Ok, well, is that what Ghost Hunters are doing? No. They have come up with an idea of something, Ghosts, and are going out looking for evidence to prove they exist. That’s backward. I can come up with an idea “I believe a giant mountain made of beer and buffalo burgers exists” and then head out looking for evidence to prove it. I can find bottles of beer. I can filled spilled beer. I can find left over buffalo meat. All things could suggest that such a mountain exists. Or at least I can make that evidence look like it does but we all know it really doesn’t. (As an aside, if anyone does find Buffalo Beer mountain please email me immediately with GPS coordinates, I KNOW its there somewhere.)
TAPS and Ghost Hunters in general have a dozen things to say about Ghosts. That there are demons, that some hauntings are just a ‘playback’, that some entities are good, some are evil, etc etc. Well, how they hell do they know that? The answer is they don’t “know” that. By trying to explain what evidence they do find under the umbrella of some other belief system that is itself unknown is not scientific in any way shape or form.
Another big blow to Ghost Hunting is that it really can never be scientific. Why? Because you can’t really replicate any findings. Go to an old building, look for a wisp, a voice, something, and it might be a ghost. That’s not really evidence. You can’t put a ghost into a laboratory. And because you can’t do that you can never really study it, analyze it, define it, and theorize on it.
Now, I am not saying that human consciousness does not survive the death of the body. How the hell could I say that? There is a substantial amount of eye witness testimony, personal accounts, personal experiences, to warrant further thoughts on the subject. I really don’t think you can just slam the door shut on it all because some jaggoff on Halloween in 2008 tied a coat hanger to his jacket and pulled on it. In truth, the Ghost Hunters are now doing more damage to the ‘idea’, and it’s an idea not a theory, of human consciousness surviving after death.
I for one think that the possibility for it is not zero. The biggest reason I can think of is we really don’t even have consciousness defined. How can you argue that consciousness doesn’t survive the death of the physical body if you have no idea what consciousness really is? The universe is a strange and crazy place. According to string theory there are countless universes that exist in it all separated by an 11th dimension. The 11th dimension is closer to your skin than your clothes are, you just can’t perceive it. There are another 10 dimensions, four that we can perceive, in our universe. The others? Can’t tell you about it. That’s freakin weird. Here we have something that science is telling us exists but we have no way with our senses to perceive it. Well, doesn’t that open the door to other things that exist that we have no way to perceive? Not a theory, just a thought.
