Superstition comes in many forms. For many of us, it can be anything from owning a lucky penny to belief in a spirit world that lives along side our own. For almost my entire childhood, I grew up believing in all sorts of paranormal phenomena. It was at least the case that most people I knew at that age believed in ghosts in some form or another. Ghosts are one of those things that there is actually an abundance of evidence for although the reliability of this evidence is certainly not of a high standard.
A quick search on google will find numerous videos claiming to prove the existence of ghosts, spirits or other equally supernatural causes. On top of this, every other person has an anecdote of something that they’ve either seen first hand or that their friend had seen which can’t be possible without a ghost or something similar causing it.
One such story that I heard recently was a video of a table moving across the room all by itself. I won’t include a link to the video as it itself doesn’t really matter but I wanted to take a minute to break this down as an example. What I’m going to do is take the premise of the actual video and make an example that is infinitely more credible.
I want you to assume that we have a high quality 4k UHD recording of the event. You can see in the video that there is no-one visible in the room and the room is well lit (all three of these things so far are things that we virtually never get from any ghost videos). Now we’re going to brick up all the windows and doors are prevent the chance that there was a strong wind and we’ll just completely empty the room of everything apart from this table.
As the video begins, the table slowly slides across the floor. There is good quality audio of the table legs scraping along the floor seemingly all by itself.
So what is the explanation? I can honestly say that if this were shown on the history channel as part of some ghost hunter type series, the number of people who would attribute it to ghosts would be by far the majority.
Similarly, if this video were on a hollywood effects TV show or some kind of magic show, people would immediately assume they are being tricked somehow.
This means that the context of the video and where you see it makes a huge difference to how we try and solve the problem. In psychology, this effect is known as priming. Daniel Kahneman gives an example of this in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” where he states:
consider the ambiguous word fragments W_ _ H and S_ _ P. People who were recently asked to think of an action of which they are ashamed are more likely to complete those fragments as WASH and SOAP and less likely to see WISH and SOUP.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
So lets assume we know the people who made the video and we know them to be very honest and not have any part in video effects or magic tricks. We are as convinced as we can be that they haven’t done anything to make this table move. What is the conclusion that we can reasonably come to about how the chair moved?
There are still a couple of possibilities which spring to mind. For example; someone could be playing a trick on this friend, or a rather more farfetched explanation might be that there was an earthquake or some other geological event which titled the room slightly. Either way, lets say that we disprove every potential explanation that we can think of.
Are we now justified in believing that ghosts did it?
The short answer is no. So far we have evidence of a table moving by itself, but we have no evidence as to what moved it. The “argument from ignorance” is a particularly prevalent fallacy when discussing claims of this nature. Loosely put, it states that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proved false or vice versa.
We are currently at a position of not knowing what moved the table. In actual fact, we have no idea what moved the table. Assuming you don’t visit this problem with a preconceived bias that ghosts not only exist, but can also interact with our physical world, there is no reason to even consider that ghosts are responsible for this occurrence.
If we don’t approach the problem with the intellectual baggage of already believing in ghosts, then ghosts become no more likely or plausible than microscopic fairies, wizards or even vampires that can’t be recorded on camera.
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it is hard to argue that their existence is heavily contested. If the reason you believe in ghosts is merely down to a convincing video that you’ve seen or heard about, I’d caution you to approach such things with a new lens of scepticism.
Now you might be reading this and be thinking to yourself, the ghost I saw wasn’t on a video, it was with my own eyes. I’ve heard numerous stories from people I’ve known over the years who say things like they saw a person-like shape in the corner of the room that looked at them or spoke to them. This is very different from just seeing a video. To investigate this I want to take us back to the days of cavemen.
This is not my own anecdote but I felt it was very fitting. The premise is that there are two cavemen stood next to a bush that begins to rustle. They have two choices, either assume it’s something dangerous and run away or wait until whatever is causing the rustle is identified, dangerous or not and then make a further decision.
Now 9 times out of 10, the person who waits by the bush might be fine and it turns out to be some kind of harmless rodent or something of that nature but the other 1 in 10 time, it turns out to be a sabertooth tiger that quickly kills the man.
The person who immediately ran from the bush is actually wrong in assuming it’s something dangerous 9 times out 10 but always survives and is therefore far more likely to propagate his genes and the inverse is also true that the person who stays is correct 9 times out of 10 but unlikely to survive long enough to propagate his genes.
Now what does all of this have to do with ghosts you might say? Human’s have developed a lot traits which cause us to be wrong a lot of the time in order to ensure our survival. We naturally look for patterns and also naturally try to solve patterns with certain common solutions. For example, we naturally see faces in things like trees or cracks in the ground, we hear completely innocent sounds that our minds try to interpret as voices. I’ve woken up convinced that someone was standing in my room only to let my eyes adjust and see that it was just some benign object that doesn’t usually reside in that spot.
At best, if you are completely convinced that what you have seen was real, at what point do you need to consider that you may have been hallucinating? Hallucination is something that we know exists after all. It can be replicated in a lab and furthermore, the subject of hallucinations can be manually influenced externally.
Can I prove that ghosts don’t exist? No. However as stated earlier with the argument from ignorance fallacy, that does not add any weight to it’s truth. Just as I can’t prove wizards, fairies or vampires don’t exist, it doesn’t make them any more likely to exist as a result.
As with everything I write, I write it with the intention of having people assess whether or not their beliefs are reasonable. There are some things people may want to believe but if they are honest with themselves they may very well realise that they are doing so irrationally. The simple word of caution from this article is to be sceptical about the things you see, the context of where you are seeing them and the psychological priming that may take place in advance of any conclusions you draw. With these few steps of scepticism, we will hopefully be able to rid ourselves of many irrational beliefs that negatively affect our decision making.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature