Ghosts and The Economy of Thought

 

A gust of cold wind slapped me across the face as I ascended the narrow stairs, each step giving out a shrill cry as my feet landed. Everything I know tells me to turn away and my pounding heart begs me to heed the warning signs. There is bound to be an evil presence at the landing, my sick mind yells. So brace for it, I whisper back, we either find out tonight or live speculating. It was the single, most empowering decision I had ever made and the doubtful voices were silenced forever.

The extremes of emotion with which we approach the unknown deceive us of the simplest clarity. We are often too emotionally malleable to allow proper inquiry into the big question: are there truly sinister forces of the afterlife or are we just afraid of that which we do not know? The paranormal – which, in the most literal sense, simply means that which cannot yet be explained by present scientific methods – has plagued human thought for centuries and thus holds a very special status across most communities. It is almost always laced with religious rhetoric, gloom and death that to be able to dissect it requires a huge amount of unlearning. Or learning, depending on which side you are on.

The present modalities of empirical inquiry are admittedly limited, and have not been able to account for a myriad of phenomena. It is an elusive dependence, for we end up confident that we have discovered all there is to discover and any claim unproven is essentially ungrounded. We proceed to ostracise the unproven as “pseudoscience”, and unknowingly commit argumentum ad ignorantiam, or the Appeal to Ignorance fallacy. The lack of knowledge on a concept does not justify discrediting it altogether.

It is, however, feasible to reduce paranormal events to mere inconveniences of thought and do away with them. One of the most fundamental principles of science is to derive the simplest explanation for every phenomenon, a practice perpetuated by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. A good theory must be minimalistic, i.e. it should require only as little thought sequences as possible and at the same time, leave minimal room for doubts. As the scientific method was crafted to help us understand the world better, it is counterintuitive for us to choose the long, windy path when a shorter route is available. This is the economy of thought: the practice of understanding an event in the simplest, most convenient terms.

To deem an occurrence supernatural requires an unwarranted stretching of the imagination, contradicting the economy of thought. One claim shall lead to another and another and another, and ultimately results in a terribly long to-validate list. To illustrate this, think of how a tale of a haunted house is usually depicted. The soul of an old tenant, murdered while living in the house, roams the building in hopes of seeking vengeance against his murderer. He resorts to scaring families into getting them to lure the murderer into the house so he can perform the deed. His soul is said to be unavenged and thus cannot pass on to the afterlife.

If we were to dissect each and every claim, we would be left with more questions than answers. Below are just a few, for now, that I have formulated:

• What defines and constitutes a soul?
• How much of one’s morality, philosophy and ideology, while alive, affects the soul upon death?
• Is everyone’s soul upon death the same or is it individually different?
• Are the actions of a soul after death amenable to religious laws?
• Why is the man’s soul geographically bound to the site of his death? What are the restrictions and advantages of roaming as a soul in contrast to living as a human?
• Do other animals also have souls? If so, do they also seek revenge on their enemies?
• What are the criteria to be able to pass on to the afterlife?
• Do souls seek revenge of their own accord or are they encouraged to do so by the pre-requisites of the entry into the afterlife?
• Is there an afterlife? If there is, which religion guessed best?
• Is the afterlife inter-dimensional? Or is it just on another planet of a different solar system?

Evidently, this mode of thinking is highly speculative. An explanation is confabulated for every claim made, leading the inquiry on and on until it is forced to come back and bind itself to faith. It is an unnecessary expenditure of thought and stretches the imagination too far beyond the boundaries of reason.

A more logically congruent approach to the scenario above would be to study the population of the area. Is the majority of the residents religious? If so, which religion do they subscribe to? Horror stories are almost always in line with the faith of the story-tellers. Tracing and understanding the psychology of the story-tellers could also be important as, often, tales as this are more reflective of the state of mind of the story-teller than they are of reality. Another approach is to rationalise the claims of ghostly sightings by understanding the architecture and geographical site of the building. Is it located in the shadows of trees for there to be seemingly otherworldly apparitions at sundown?

While such inquiries may not guarantee a resolution, they, at the very least, ask leading and approachable questions without expending an unnecessary amount of thought. As Mach said, “…all metaphysical elements are to be eliminated as superfluous and destructive to the economy of science.” The trick is to keep digging into the story until all that is left of it is an irrational fear of the unknown.