Jack Osbourne’s “Night of Terror”, The Block Universe, and Quantum Weirdness in the Ghost Shows

Well, it has happened: physics (or intimations of it) now needs to be introduced into the paranormal shows in order to sort through the mishmash of theories that are popping up to explain hauntings. Recently, it’s not just about the spirits of dead people engaging in the classic haunt, but “crossing timelines”, “overlapping dimensions,” and quantum queerness. Jack’s show is the first, I believe, to introduce these concepts and expand upon them by inviting a “time jumper” specialist (still not sure what that is or what she does), but he most certainly will not be the last host of a ghost show to start exploring Theories of Reality. He is right to do so, for the traditional concept of the spirit wandering about and creating havoc or messing with our devices to indicate their presence, well . . . perhaps that is finally fading out as the preferred explanation for bizarre phenomena.

The vast majority of the paranormal shows, the books written about hauntings and “ghosts”, and the entire tradition of studying communication with the “dead” assume three truths:

#1: People have bodies when they are alive, but they also have a soul and a spirit. The soul and the spirit persist in an undefined state after the death of the body.

#2: The soul moves on to the Afterlife, and the spirit can haunt homes and buildings, and be either “intelligent” (capable of interacting with humans attempting to contact it) or “residual”, playing out scenes from its life in endless loops (not capable of interaction).

#3: The spirit can be contacted via various devices designed to prove that it is there interacting with us. A medium can “tap into” the energy of the spirit and give us messages from the Beyond that will be consistent with who they were in life.

However: once you understand some very basic points from modern physics, the picture becomes far more complicated. The classic assumptions about what a “ghost” is, should be questioned now, in light of what we know regarding the Block Universe, Eternalism, and General Relativity: namely, that time is either relative to the observer (Einstein), or that it does not exist at all outside of the human brain (Lanza, Barbour, Rovelli) and shared experience. All one needs to do is to remove time from the equation, and you must interpret paranormal phenomena in a completely different light.

First of all, everyone in a timeless universe contains all aspects of their experience, or lives all their possibilities at once. You are only aware of the events and experiences that you can force into a timeline, so that you can preserve such concepts as cause and effect, action and reaction. Without such mental gymnastics, you could not survive in a world where you experience everything at once–your brain must filter, choose, reduce, and organize information AND PERCEPTION in such a way that time appears to pass smoothly from past to present, from present to future. You need to believe that the future is open and can be created, and that the past is over, complete, and unchangeable, even though none of that is true according to our best theories of how reality works.

You are both alive and dead in the Block Universe (see my previous posts). If, as a “dead” person, your consciousness can roam around timelines and spatial dimensions with a special ability to occupy any zone of the Block Universe that it desires to, then you are, for all intents and purposes, a “ghost” to the you that cannot do such a thing given your current constraints of occupying a body and a narrative that “leads” to your death. This explains the apparitions of the living and déjà vu, that sense that you have experienced your current reality before. Every person, then, contains within them their own “ghost”, even if we are not aware of it.

A haunting, then, is not about a separate thing: the ghost or the spirit. It’s all you or all them in all their ontological states at once. It’s an aspect of you or of someone else that we can engage with in the proper circumstances and in an altered state of consciousness, which the effective paranormal investigations induce. But: it’s all NOW–1860, 2025, 2099, 14 BC–these are points in space, not realities that once existed and now do not. The question is how to ACCESS these points in the Block Universe, how to reach them or interact with them, which is what we are actually doing in the investigation, NOT contacting spirits from the past.

We privilege our point of view, our perception, because we are designed to do that as human animals. However, that perception can and does break down all of the time, and then we realize that the “me” that is on my deathbed is right next to the “me” that is playing checkers in the high school gym. The person that is haunting an old building is only aware of themselves in a present moment, and you are the weird intruder, the person out of place, asking truly bizarre and irrelevant questions. The part of you that is already dead co-exists with what you perceive as happening right now, so your consciousness is always truly free to roam around the Block Universe and have infinite shared experiences with all those other points in space that are someone else. And, whether death returns you to the same old timeline or you get a new body, set of experiences, and even a new planet, it won’t matter, because it’s all real right now, anyway. There is no “will happen”, only “is happening”. So reincarnation makes no sense if it depends on a classical timeline. You are currently living multiple versions of yourself, and who knows? Maybe everybody else, too, if consciousness is unitary and we are simply branches of the tree.

These are the concepts, rooted in real science, that the paranormal shows, books, and media need to start exploring with some rigor and curiosity, because the lost spirit stuck in the past looks more and more like a figment of our collective imagination. Kudos to Jack Osbourne’s show for taking some steps in that direction (see the Virginia City episode).

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD