Well, what else could it be?
Tuesday, January 8, 2008A friend of mine expressed surprise when I told her I didn't believe in ghosts. She responded by telling me a story she'd heard recently. She'd been on holiday and talking to the proprietor of an old hotel when he told her his hotel was haunted. He was very specific: it was the ghost of a very young boy, named Billy (well I can't actually remember his name, but lets assume it was Billy), who had died there.
He told her that at night he would leave the function room building, turn off all the lights as he left, and proceed down the garden path. Often, when he got to the main building, he'd look back and see that some or all of the ligths had been turned back on. Sometimes it happened while he was there; he'd turn a light off and when he came back to that room he'd find it on again. Sometimes he would yell "Billy, stop it!" and it would stop.
My friend asked "How do you explain that?"
At the time I answered "Well, I can't. But why does everyone always leap to ghosts? If you really want to know why keep asking the question? Why not go there and really find out?"
As is often the case, I thought of all the good things to say after everyone had gone home.
"Invisible squirrel monkeys!"
I've recently finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and towards the end (p367) he shares a seemingly inconsequential anecdote that blew my mind:
"Tell me," the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth." Wittgenstein responded, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?"
Based on the available evidence invisible squirrel monkeys is just as likely an answer as the ghost of a small boy. Monkeys are mischeivious, they like to fiddle with things and when he yells he probably frightens them off for a little while.
However, had the proprietor gone about telling people he was being harrassed by invisible primates they'd all think he was barking mad. Why is a ghost so much more plausible than invisible monkeys? Why do people even ask questions like "Well, what else could it be?" when it's equally likely to be a hundred other silly things, or far more likely to be something entirely normal and rational? Are our brains pre-conditioned to accept or believe certain things, to interpret experiences in certain ways and then give up trying? How far does this pre-conditioning go?
And, besides, why would a ghost put so much effort into flipping light switches for crying out loud? Surely there are more useful methods for getting attention from the living?
4 Comments
Better damn hope it ain't squirrel monkeys: "They live together in multi-male/multi-female groups with up to 500 members" - health inspectors would have a field day.
The Wittgenstein story illustrates the problem I have with the famous philosophers. He has this deep thought showing that the world is not as we shallow thinkers suppose: Sun going around Earth is not so "natural" a way of thinking, it is just people being blind to the possibility of the Earth rotating and it looking the same way.
But he is all in his head. Common sense says that you can tell the difference between something going around you and you spinning around or you being spun around. In the latter case you feel like you are spinning and get dizzy.
Wittgenstein's deep thought is only deep if you leave out the common sense of any person whose feet are in the ground.
Maybe all that tell's us is that we cannot trust only our senses to guide us. We must resort to methodical investigation and experimentation.
Common sense is obviously wrong in this case, we don't feel dizzy and yet the world IS spinning at a terrific rate. We are always upright, but the world is NOT flat.
The role of our senses and by extension our consious mind is apparently NOT to present us with the true state of our environment. But just a version of it that keeps us safe and functioning.
bugstomper wrote: "But he is all in his head. Common sense says that you can tell the difference between something going around you and you spinning around or you being spun around. In the latter case you feel like you are spinning and get dizzy."
Yes, if you are spinning at an appreciable rate, you notice it.
Now, stand in place and spin at a rate of once per 24 hours. That's 1 degree every 4 minutes. Your body wiggles around more than that on it's own.
As Dawkins also pointed out, "common sense" only applies to things we commonly experience. We don't commonly experience the vast distances and sizes involved with the sun.