Sometimes a Ghost is Just a Ghost

Over the years, many a sci-fi television show has professed exclusive ownership of the ever sought after correct method of identifying and documenting the elusive Ghost.

Each of these shows comes equipped with it’s own version of an overly dramatic front-man (or often front-woman), who’s seriously diluted monologues often connect or compare the possibility of ghosts with both an afterlife of some kind, and a latent religiosity woven into the very nature of the so-called haunting.

My purpose here is to examine the logic of what is essentially the anthropomorphising of the “Ghost”.

First we should define the word Ghost.  Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines ‘Ghost’ (noun) as:

1: The seat of life or intelligence: soul

2: A disembodied soul; especially: the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness

This is interesting in and of itself, and it’s important to note that there are several other definitions, relating to photographic and other social issues which are not relevant here.

While most people would immediately associate the word with the appearance of a dearly departed loved one, the unexplained effects of apparitions, and the spooky after hauntings of the evil dead.

Does anyone see a pattern here?  Is it coincidental that the very mention of the word ghost, elicits a response that produces any variety of mental images based on one’s own experiences?

It seems even more interesting that the more etymological definition of the word relates to that internal person, that entity of consciousness and awareness that lies behind your eyes.  (You describe your body as “my body”, ask yourself, who is “my”?).  Religiously speaking, one labels that entity as one’s soul; that precious energy to be saved through redemption and eventually communicated to heaven upon the eventual death of the outer body.

Are you lost yet?

Well, personal beliefs about religion aside, the argument at hand is one of removing the Hand of God from this discussion, and short of entering into the forum of quantum physics, epigenetics and transcendence, we need not debate the overall validity of religious belief to continue.

Let’s consider logically, what ghosts could be in terms of our physical world.  The emerging science of epigenetics has produced some interesting theories revolving around the central idea of “knowing the knower”.  That’s really a fancy existential way of saying, how do we define the energy that makes up our consciousness, as examined on the subatomic level.