Polls Archive 30 - Do you believe in ghosts?

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=WN6Qi9jhses

Poll 30 - "Have you ever had an experience which led you to believe in ghosts, or spirits of the departed that carry on after death and somehow have contact with our world?" Poll ended December 30 2008. 43% said yes, while the rest said no.

This poll question relates to poll 28, which asked if visitors to the blog had ever seen a person's "aura". The results for both polls were very similar in terms of percentage for yes and no, although I think it's also noteworthy that a substantially larger number of people responded to this poll question than the other - this seems to confirm that a lot of people have an opinion about what happens to us after death, while less of us have an opinion about auras.

Continuing that idea, here's a link to an article from a recent issue of Scientific American Mind, called "Never Say Die - Why We Can't Imagine Death". In a "Key Concepts" summary, the editors boiled down Jesse Bering's article to these three points:

• Almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body.
• Even people who believe the mind ceases to exist at death show this type of psychological-continuity reasoning in studies.
• Rather than being a by-product of religion or an emotional security blanket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.

What does this last point mean? This is quite easy to relate to if you've ever had a general anaesthetic. The surgeon asks us to count down from ten, we make it through a few numbers and then our experience of reality just "stops". Completely unlike the process of sleep, where we are still dimly aware of our surroundings, and able to be roused if need be, the patient on the operating table simply has a hole in their awareness, for them the surgery did not happen until they wake up in the recovery room. In the way of thinking that this project plays with, it's like their awareness was simply folded across the fourth dimension, creating a discontinuity where they simply "jumped" from the moment in spacetime where they were being put under, to the moment in spacetime when they start to come to afterwards. Here's a paragraph from Jesse Bering's article:

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

The article also talks about the concept of "person permanence" - something that delights babies is the surprise of playing "peekaboo", and young children soon learn that the people around them continue to exist even when they can't be seen. Person permanence, then, also gives us all a deep-seated intuition that some part of a person carries on after death. In this blog I've recommended Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop" many times, because it offers some clear-headed discussions of the patterns and connections that carry on after a loved one dies.

So: there are many very logical reasons for why any of us can believe that some part of a person's spirit carries on after death, and perhaps a great many more visitors would have said "yes" if my question had been as simple as that. But what I was asking for was more specific than that - it's one thing to intuitively believe that some part of us carries on, and it's quite another to admit to having had a supernatural/paranormal experience which seemed to confirm that idea.

How many of us have heard stories like this one - "I remember the day Grandma died, she appeared at my window and smiled at me. The phone rang a few minutes later telling me she was gone, and all I could say was 'I know'." Anyone who has had an experience like that will tell you they know for sure that there are parts of us that continue on, and all of the above dispassionate discussions about person-permanence and consciousness will not convince them otherwise.

In blog entries like Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, I've talked about how these ideas can be integrated into my way of visualizing reality. Our minds are very sensitive to patterns within the noise, and personally I have no trouble accepting the idea that parts of our consciousness exist within timelessness, connecting us all together across the spacetime of the fourth dimension, the probability space of the fifth dimension, and beyond. To close, here's my song about death and what carries on: "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep".

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next - a compilation of Polls 26 through 30

Polls Archive 28 - Ever Seen an Aura?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF3aiPWIgXI

Poll 28 - "Some suggest that an 'aura' might be a way of seeing a part of a person that exists outside of their body, and possibly connects to other planes or dimensions. Have you ever seen a person's aura?" Poll ended December 1st, 2008.

I have to presume that any regular visitors to this blog have an open mind, and even a certain willingness to embrace ideas which are outside of the mainstream. Nonetheless, I have to admit I was surprised to see that 44% of the visitors responding to this poll say they have seen a person's aura, that is higher than I would have expected. Poll 30, on the other hand, asks if visitors have ever had an experience which led them to believe in ghosts, or spirits of the departed that carry on after death and somehow have contact with our world: on that poll, 43% of the respondents said "Yes", and that's a number that's lower than I expected. Why? Because I only know a few people who have seen auras, but I have lots of family and friends who at some point in their life have had some kind of a supernatural experience which led them to at least be willing to consider the possibility that some part of a person carries on after death.

Here's the logic I've worked through with this project, and some of the past blogs where I've explored these ideas, which of course are also central to the book this project is based upon.

In Information Equals Reality, we discussed how this phrase which is being used by quantum physicists also relates to the more metaphysical concepts we're talking about here: ultimately, genes, memes and spimes are all ways of thinking about our reality from outside of our limited space-time viewpoint.

In entries like Magnets and Souls and Daily Parrying we looked at projects like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight, and the general problem projects like mine can run into: centuries of training have encouraged scientists to reject anything that acknowledges our participation within the reality we are part of. Science, they will tell you, needs to remove spirit and the soul from the discussion, otherwise you are back in the world of alchemists intoning incantations over their experiments to ensure their success: look up "magick" in wikipedia for more about this.

In entries like I Know You, You Know Me, and You are Me and We are All Together, we took these ideas even further, into a way of using concepts from quantum physics and Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation to show how we are all connected together. And most recently, in Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, we made the bold suggestion that patterns each of us senses within our reality are always part of a continuum - "pareidolia" is the word used to describe patterns our minds perceive within randomness, but since the main function of our minds is to make sense of the disorientingly large amount of input coming into our senses, we should never be too quick to dismiss those perceived patterns.

To finish, here's the video for Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkTVhzBgNk

Next - Polls Archive 29 - Do Electrons Have No Size?

Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkTVhzBgNk

Last blog, in "Elvis and the Electrons", we talked about a BBC science documentary which says there must be other versions of our universe where Elvis is still alive right now. But what about our own universe? I haven't checked the tabloid racks lately, but certainly in the three decades since his passing there have been countless reports of people seeing Elvis. Let's all agree for a moment that Elvis really did die back in '77 - the question, then, is what might have caused some of those people since then to think they saw Elvis?

This time around, I'd like to talk about the phenomenon of pareidolia. Here's the definition from wikipedia:

pareidolia describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Here's a short video showing Pareidolia-type images. This was created by "Caino" from Italy, who kindly gave me permission to use this video:


A direct link to this video is at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1878026/pareidolia/

My friend Bob introduced me to this word when he sent me this link - http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4105, which talks more about the backwards recordings effect, where people can be convinced they are hearing messages that aren't really there. And over at Clifford Pickover's Reality Carnival, a quick search for "pareidolia" on that page reveals a number of tasty discussions.

Two Dots and a Line
Scott McCloud created one of my favorite books: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Presented in a comic book format, it does an excellent job of explaining the connection between simple graphics - how we human beings can look at two dots and a line in a circle and instantly recognize a face - and the layers of meaning that are communicated with different drawing styles. It also speaks to what our brains are hard-wired to do: look for meaning within the constant input coming into our brains.

Perceiving Patterns
Where is the dividing line, then, between pareidolia - sensing things that aren't really there - and the leaps of intuition that allow us to see things that are hidden from view? This is a very blurry line indeed. If any of us can look at a picture of a particular mountain or a particular piece of toast and very clearly see the face of Jesus, does saying "but that's not Jesus, it's just some coincidental shapes" make us stop from seeing the face? If we look at a piece of abstract art that conveys a particular emotion, was that emotion deliberately imparted by the artist or is it merely our brains that are adding those layers of meaning? And how is it that a piece of music can instantly be recognized as being sad or sprightly, angry or peaceful? In all of these cases there are connections across space and time that our brains plug into, which allow us to impart meaning to the input. Saying "that's just our brains interpreting a random pattern" really diminishes what is so amazing about our ability to interpret this huge amount of data that is coming in through our senses... and ultimately, if our universe is really just the result of random quantum fluctuations, then our ability to make sense of any part of our reality at all is a gigantic testament to the ability of our minds to tease out coherent and understandable patterns from the noise.

Have you ever seen an aura? Or a ghost?
One of the poll questions that recently finished here on the blog was about whether people have seen an "aura" - a visual representation of a person's energy field that surrounds their body. Another poll that will finish in a few weeks asks about ghosts - have you ever had an experience which led you to believe in ghosts, or spirits of the departed that carry on after death and somehow have contact with our world? In both of these polls, I was surprised to see how many of us have had personal experiences that confirm there is much more to our world then the blunt physical reality set out before us.

Making sense of the data, finding sense within the noise
And with this project, I have been trying to show that there are strong connections between theories of parallel universes and universal wavefunctions that connect our reality together, and theories that support the existence of extra dimensions (after all, it needs to be made clear that extra dimensions are not a prerequisite for all theories involving multiple universes). The intuitive way of visualizing our reality that I've come up with, I believe, has ways of tying those ideas together very strongly, and leaves room for those other more mysterious connections of spirit, memes, intuition, instinct, and the paranormal to be incorporated into our model of how reality really works.

Yes, sometimes a piece of toast is really just a piece of toast, a guy wearing Elvis sunglasses is really just some guy, and pareidolia imparts meaning that really isn't there at all. But whether you're talking about dark energy and the missing 96% of the universe, or theories of extra dimensions, or the personal experiences that people have that tell them ghosts, auras, and other paranormal events really do exist, we are dealing with things that are beyond the here and now, and extend out into realms that our simple spacetime is not able to hold. Hard line viewpoints that say all of these fanciful things like dark energy, extra dimensions, auras and ghosts don't exist, then, should be examined very carefully.

What's wrong with embracing a bit of the mystery? It makes all of us richer to expand our minds beyond the hard physical world that's in front of our noses and think about what it might be that lies beyond.

To finish, here's a song about how important our role as conscious observers is in the universe we are headed towards - the song is called "See No Future".


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=69pUzwSONBc

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - Here's a related article from the November Scientific American "Mind" issue, written by Michael Schermer, on "Patternicity".

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, December Report