Are Ghosts Glitches in the Simulation?
I’ve heard so many people say, “I’m a skeptical person, but…” then proceed to tell about an inexplicable supernatural experience they’ve had. Well, I’m a skeptical person, and I’ve never had any kind of remotely supernatural experience in my life. So either I’m extraordinarily lucky/unlucky to have avoided such an experience, or most people are not as skeptical as they’ve think they are.
Ghosts are the big one. It seems as though everyone, even supposed atheists, has a ghost story. But not me. I do not believe in ghosts. Most “ghost sightings” are misinterpretations of visual phenomena, hallucinations by one’s mind, or a combination of both. The whole concept of ghosts doesn’t make much sense: Some dead spirit stays on earth just to frighten the living? I don’t see any way ghosts could exist in our universe…unless our universe is a simulation.
Ghosts could be glitches in the simulation-remnants of the past that remain stuck or visible in the present. You may see and hear things that happened years ago in the simulation, but the “ghosts” wouldn’t be conscious of the present and interacting with it in any way. They’d just repeating what they did in the past, which could possibly explain some ghost sightings. Except almost all ghosts tend to be manifestations of people from recent history-someone who died in the past few decades, or a couple hundred years at the most. You rarely hear any ghost stories about people seeing cavemen or dinosaurs.
Most alleged ghosts are from modern recorded history, based on people and stories from the past that people today are already familiar with. If you heard somebody died in a house or a hotel room, you’ll be primed and more susceptible to interpret sights and sounds you’d normally ignore as evidence of a ghost. This leads one to think that ghost sightings are not simulation glitches but simply psychological glitches, all in the person’s head. Not that anyone who sees a ghost is crazy necessarily, but their mind is simply playing tricks on them. That, or they are merely being irrational and misinterpreting things. There is a simple scientific explanation that they are unaware of. Unless…
The simulation could have only started a couple hundred years ago, and all of history before that was just fabricated for the simulation. Again, that’s possible, but if we are in a simulation (which I think the odds are high that we are), and the simulation is this realistic and convincing, it’s more likely that the simulators would be able to completely eliminate glitches such as “ghosts” than ghosts being real. After all, if ghosts are glitches, why have I (and other rational skeptics) never encountered one?
Originally published at https://steemit.com on February 27, 2020.
