This is my response to the second part of CJ’s article arguing that ghosts are a kind of hallucination, nevertheless created by something with an objective reality outside of the human brain. The second part of his essay is more speculative and possibly more controversial, arguing as it does that contemporary brain scan technology and the attempts to create artificial telepathy through technology could lead to devices to see ghosts technologically.
There are already devices aimed at ghost hunters which claim to be ghost detectors. As I understand them, they work by detecting minute changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which, it is claimed, is produced through the presence of a ghost. This is rather a specious assertion, and in my experience the serious psychic investigators such as those in ASSAP are highly sceptical of it. The technology that CJ suggests could be used to see ghosts is different. He is impressed with recent advances in the use of brain scans to read people’s minds. In one experiment, a man was able to play chess through mentally thinking out his moves, which were detected by the machines. I recall another experiment in which people were played something by either the Beatles or Pink Floyd. Their brains were being scanned while they listened to the music, and the experimenters were able to reconstruct from the scans what the test subjects had heard. It wasn’t perfect – the scientists said that it sounded like the band was singing underwater, but it was definitely recognisable. And then there is Elon Musk and his desire to create genuine artificial telepathy through his neuralink implants.
CJ is well aware of the totalitarian dangers of this technology, and the possibility that it could be used by highly oppressive regimes to monitor the thoughts of their subjects. He cites the psi judges in the 2000 AD strip ‘Judge Dredd’, to which could be added Agent Bester and Psi Corps in the 90s SF TV series Babylon 5. The latter character’s name is undoubtedly no accident. It looks like a homage to the SF writer Alfred Bester, the author of The Demolished Man. This is about a millionaire planning a murder in a future society with telepathic police monitoring the citizenry. Closer parallels to what CJ is suggesting, however, are in the 2000 AD strips ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ and ‘ABC Warriors’. ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ was set far in Earth’s future, where the bulk of the planet’s population live underground and the world renamed Termight – Mighty Terra. It is ruled by Torquemada, Grand Master of the Terminators, successors to the medieval military orders of the Crusades, who have turned humans’ fear of aliens into a religion. In one story describing the past of the alien hero’s human companion, Purity Brown, it is revealed that the Terminators use such technology to monitor and suppress dissidents. Purity’s father, a tube engineer, keeps his hatred of Torquemada well hidden until one night he has a dream. This is detected and he is arrested. Yes, I’m sure it’s based on a passage in Orwell’s 1984, just as I don’t think it’s an accident that the mobile surveillance vans used for this kind of surveillance in the strip look like the old TV detector vans which used to go about looking for people watching TV without a licence. There’s always been a very strong element of satire in 2000 AD.
The ABC Warriors is a long-running strip about a group of former war droids, led by the square-jawed, patriotic Hammerstein, to fight evil and oppression on Mars. In one episode, the Meknificent Seven, as they are dubbed, are sent into a Martian city, whose ruler prefers to communicate only through technological telepathy. The city is divided into various quiet zones in which citizens must keep silent so that the ruler’s machines can monitor their brains for subversive thoughts. There’s also a satirical edge to this story as well, as there is a subversive graffiti artist sending the ruler and his secret police up. One of his murals depicts the ruler and his head of secret police in a kiss, much like Banksy’s painting of two policemen.
There are real dangers and possibilities with this technology. One of the videos on YouTube discussing it describes an experiment in which people had their arms linked through the technology to another person’s brain. This person was then able to move the first person’s arm against their will. This brings us very close to a possibility the British scientist J.D. Bernal outlined in his book, The World, The Flesh and The Devil, in which one person could be mentally linked to a control a group of robots. Or alternatively, Star Trek’s Borg, a technological gestalt organism in which the individual is totally subsumed into the group. In the 1960s and ‘70s some scientists predicted that it would be possible to technologically implant false memories, exactly like the premise of Philip K. Dick’s short story, ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, filmed in 1990s with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Total Recall. At the moment we seem to be safe from such intrusive technological surveillance. As CJ points out, the equipment at the moment uses sensors directly connected to the skull, so it won’t detect people’s thoughts from a distance. As he also reminds us, people’s brains are also wired slightly differently, so what could pick up A’s secret cogitations may not pick up B’s private thoughts. Mercifully for democracy and freedom.
There are two ways brain scanning technology could be used to allow people to see ghosts. One would be through monitoring the visual cortex of a medium, so that others are able to see the spooks he or she sees, either through monitors or being technologically linked to him or her and experiencing what he or she feels through impulses fed directly into their brains. But, if I’m following CJ’s argument correctly, this is not what he’s talking about. I think he means using the brain scanning technology on the environment, not an individual, living brain, in order to reveal the presence of a ghost.
CJ reminds his readers that the 19th century founders of the Society for Psychic Research concluded that ghosts were hallucinations, but generated remotely by other minds and brains. The SPR’s constitution states that one of its aims is to investigate unknown powers of the human mind. The Society coined the term ‘telepathy’ to describe this process, although the concept existed long before its foundation. It was originally called ‘thought transference’. In the early part of the century, one of the pioneering lady novelists of the period wrote a story in which a young woman develops this ability. She then encounters a man with same telepathic abilities, and is left terribly alone when his telepathic presence vanishes. I think CJ believes that the brain monitoring technology could be used to artificially see ghosts if it was directed at the environment and the specific spot where the ghost was located. It would then pick up the impressions from the disembodied mind generating the illusion of a ghost, which would then be reconstructed into an image or sound by the technology, or piped directly into the experimenters’ visual cortex so they could ‘see’ it for themselves. He is, however, somewhat sceptical of anyone inventing ‘ghost goggles’.
It’s a thought-provoking and challenging idea. Let’s see if we can further unpack what might be involved here. I think this idea assumes that, even though the person generating the ghost hallucination has passed on, nevertheless they left behind something analogous to the human brain. Something so similar, in fact, that even though other instruments may say that there is nothing there save empty space, the technology used to scan living minds can nevertheless be used on it with something like the same results. But this brings us back to what this mind or brain stuff could be. Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel The City and the Stars, has its young hero meet and befriend a disembodied mind in space. The novel is set thousands of years in the future in which space travel has ceased and the Earth become a desert, desolate except for a single city. The disembodied mind is the result of experiments by human scientists at the height of civilisation and interstellar travel, which succeeded in embedding minds on space itself. Something similar was described in the BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s Tripod’s trilogy. The alien invaders in their citadel in the French alps use living computers created by another alien civilisation, who similarly embossed volunteers from their culture on space-time.
Back in the 90s, an American neurosurgeon, Hameroff, suggested that quantum processes in human brain cells generated consciousness and would continue after death, thus preserving the identity of the deceased and generating ghosts and Near Death Experiences. Philosophers have suggested that consciousness is an integral part of the universe along with matter and energy. And way back in the 1920s a New Zealand scientist had much the same idea. In his view, not only did the universe contain the elementary particles of matter, such as atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, but also a particle of mind – the Mindon. This comes close to the 18th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz alternative theory to atoms, monads. Atomic theory, then being seriously revived and considered by European scientists and philosophers, was regarded with suspicion through its association with atheism, as laid out by the ancient philosopher Lucretius in his De Rerum Naturae. Leibniz instead argued that there were similar particles, monads, which also contained elements of consciousness and soul. These gradually gained in size, intelligence and supernatural power, following the divine will.
The problem here is that we don’t know what kind of mental stuff ghosts are composed of, or how it could interact with material technological bodies. Anything embossed directly on Spacetime without particles of matter, such as atoms and electrons, is, I would say, far beyond the ability of our technological devices to detect. Remember that brain scans work by detecting the minute bioelectric signals passing through the matter of the brain. Although these signals are minute, they nevertheless arise through a material process. We have no means to read disembodied minds. The same problem arises if the minds of ghosts are generated by quantum events. We have no means to monitor these outside of the bioelectric and chemical changes in the brain.
There is another problem in that brain scans are set up for the particular structure of human brains. Even if the ghosts have or constitute the type of brains that generate hallucinations, as the SPR theorised, we again have no idea, if these brains are organised in the same way mortal, embodied brains are. It may be that they’re totally different in structure, in which case the scanning equipment may not work.
This may not be an obstacle to getting usable results, however. Psychic research is replete with instances of ghosts and poltergeists interacting with electrical equipment. There are cases of electrical machines working in poltergeist cases despite being disconnected. People have also received phone calls from deceased friends and relatives. In some cases, they had carried on a normal conversation unaware that the person was dead. Some time later they may find out that the other person was no longer alive and that their phone had been disconnected. I think there are also cases where people have apparently received phone calls, either from ghosts or from supposed space being or Ultraterrestrials, despite their own phones being disconnected. And then there is the Electronic Voice Phenomenon. This follows the research of Konstantin Raudive, and is when a tape recorder or other electronic device records the voices of the dead, even when they are inaudible to the experimenters. In one version, the researcher tuned his or her radio to a dead channel, and waited for fragments of speech to come over the airways. This method of supposedly hearing the voices of the dead is controversial and there is considerable scepticism about it. Signals from other channels can bleed over into others, so that the snatches of speech heard may actually come from people who are very much alive broadcasting on another channel whose signals for a few moments got onto to the supposedly empty one.
There is also the problem of pareidolia. The human brain appears wired to find patterns, even when there is no pattern there. This includes people mistakenly hearing Satanic messages when they play records backwards. This was demonstrated a several decades ago at a Cheltenham Festival of Science by the editor of Dr Who Magazine, talking about the science behind the series. To demonstrate how the human brain can be fooled into hearing coherent speech in cacophonous noise, he played a piece by AC/DC backwards. This just sounded like white noise. He then read out what people had supposedly heard when doing this. This was the rock band admitting that Satan was their lord and that he tortured them in their garden shed. He then played the same track again, and you could actually hear these words, even though nothing like it had actually been said and it was an entire illusion. People experimenting with EVP therefore run the risk of hearing entirely illusory messages across the airwaves coming from the white noise and interference on radios, at least of the analogue type.
The EVP also raises the question of whether ghosts could also be recorded on video tape by video cameras. There have been a number of attempts by researchers to photograph ghosts, as well as photos by ordinary people of spectral figures. Again, there have been many cases of fraud here, most notoriously by the 19th century spirit photographer Hans Mummler. Obvious methods of faking such photos include double exposures. One explain for photographs of ghosts was that camera exposures are longer than that of the human eye, and so cameras could capture on film objects that were otherwise too faint to be seen. There are, however, very few, in any, uncontroversial photographs of ghosts. Some spectral figures have supposedly been caught on camera, including CCTVs. There was much excitement a few years ago of footage from a stately home of a door opening and someone in 16th century costume looking out, long after the period actors employed at the historic palace had gone home.
Way back in the 1980s there was a piece of conceptual art, Belshazzar’s Feast, which was shown on Channel 4 and reviewed on Did You See…? Hosted by Ludovic Kennedy. This was a piece of animation, in which a cartoon fire blazed against an entirely black background while a ‘strangulated voice’, as Ludo called it, described the horrific messages that people had supposedly received while watching television after closedown. 24-hour broadcasting on television really began in the 90s. Before then, broadcasting stopped at 11 or 12 O’clock at night, after which there was only the ‘snow’ pattern you otherwise got through interference. Despite this, some had stayed up late watching their TVs and received frightening messages about alien invasions. The film is still about, and I think it might even be on YouTube. I wonder if this is, again, another example of people finding messages in what is just noise.
Despite this, I am not aware of anything similar to the EVP occurring with visual cameras. I’d be more than willing to hear otherwise, but I have not heard of people at ghost investigations recording a moment or so on their phone cameras, only to replay it later to find a ghost present with them. When recording ghosts, their seems to be a difference between sound and vision. One may be recorded, the other not.
Considering the numerous examples of ghosts and poltergeists interacting with electric devices, it is possible that brain scanning technology could be used to record ghosts in the same way it records sounds and impulses from living minds, despite the apparent absence of anything material to scan and record from. I doubt that such experiments are going to be made soon. At the moment, scanning equipment for the brain is large and expensive. I cannot see hospital authorities, stretched for resources, agreeing to let such valuable equipment be used for something to apparently frivolous as finding ghosts.
But this does not mean that something like it may not occur spontaneously. I can imagine technicians in some of the older hospitals becoming confused while performing a normal brain scan, perhaps while setting the machine up and doing a few preparatory checks, to find signals from a brain despite no person actually being connected to the machine. A case like this, while fascinating and worth investigating in itself, would also go some way to corroborating CJ’s suggestion that further scanning using the equipment for the Visual Cortex itself could indeed render ghosts visible.
For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/10/cjs-working-ideas-on-ghosts-part-2/
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