Ask the Dreadlocked Science Geek

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by June

Dear Knower of Ephemera,

This is a Paranormal Question that bugs me a lot:

So, we've been around in our present form about 75,000 years, right? Now granted, in the early days, procreating was harder and there weren't so many of us (Humans). But lets say that since we began as a species, there have been (Conservatively) 50,000,000,000,000 people that have passed away, wouldn't the planet now effectively be overrun with spirits and ghosts to the point where we just couldn't turn around without seeing one?

So, firstly, let's take that number down by an order of magnitude. 50 billion is a more reasonable figure than 50 trillion. However, fifty billion people is still a LOT of people to have passed through this veil of tears. One would think that if ghosts did exist (and I see no reason to accept the proposition that they do) you would barely be able to walk down the street without running into one.

The movies always portray this phenomenon as something that only happens in dark secluded homes and institutions in great disrepair.

Do you think they are trying to lull us into some kind of false sense of security with the moral "Stay out of dark secluded homes and institutions in great disrepair or something bad will happen"?

I think that this fear of ghosts is the confluence of a couple of evolutionary hangovers (as I like to term them) meeting and recombining. The first is our fear of the dark. Compared with a lot of things that were evolving alongside our Primate ancestors we have really poor night vision. Certainly compared to the big cats that were also resident in Africa a few million years ago, we were at a very big disadvantage at night. Imagine two individuals, one of whom is afraid to venture outside of the relative safety of the cave at night and another who isn't. The fearless one is more likely to become a pleasant little late-night meal for some big cat that likes it chimpanzee meat on-the-hoof, as it were. If you are eaten before you can breed, you lose the evolutionary game. So there would be *some* selective pressure to fear the night and, until very recently, lots of good reason to do so. The other thing is our overactive agency detectors.

This is going to take a bit of explaining. By agency I mean ascribing intention to others actions. Let's say that you, I and another person are sitting on your couch. I get up and go to the kitchen and open your fridge. You hear me rummaging around and pulling out a bottle. The other person asks "hey, what is she doing" you are going to use your intuitive psychology to say "Aj is probably thirsty and is getting a beer". You assume (most of the time correctly) that when someone takes an action there is some goal or consequence that they are pursuing. We do this intuitively. In fact our brains can't *help* but do this. The flip-side of this is that we ascribe agency even when agency isn't present.

"Why does it rain."

There have been lots of explanations for the rains, thunder and lightning. Most of them have been *spectacularly* wrong because people ascribed some agent to be behind the scenes causing the rain. So rain was the tears of the gods or was a blessing or curse from the gods. Thunder and lightning were caused by the actions of the sky gods. And our dreams? Why do we see our dearly departed loved ones in our dreams? Because they are spirits who have come back from 'the other side' to impart something to us.

That's all you need for a belief in ghosts to be booted up--a brain that detects agency and patterns enthusiastically, a brain that is capable of dreaming, and one that seeks causal explanations for events that happen in the world.

We have a fear of dark and foreboding places because, until fairly recently, dark and foreboding places either meant caves (someplace that wolves, lions or other apex predators might be hiding), forest primeval or jungle where danger in the form of aforementioned predators could be lurking anywhere. It was absolutely adaptive to have a sense of trepidation about those kinds of places.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that our brains did not evolve to deal with the modern technological world. There's nothing in our brains that *prevent us from dealing with it but this is not a natural environment for our brains. No matter how much education you have, no matter where you are from, what you believe, you are carrying around on your shoulders a brain that is, for all practical purposes, unchanged since about 50K years ago. We're stuck with these formerly adaptive features because the vast majority of them simply do not have the power to reduce reproductive fitness in a modern context.

Cheers
Aj

I'm not sure if answered your question or not, June. If I didn't let me know.