The Paranormal: Mere Nostalgia

“Why are people so eager to accept flimsy and fabricated evidence in support of unlikely and even outlandish creatures and ideas? Why is the paranormal realm, from psychic predictions to UFO sightings, so alluring to so many?”

This is a quote from an article I read today. A psychology professor at Missouri Western State University, interviewed by writer Robert Roy Britt, responded with “it is an artifact of our brain’s desire to find cause and effect.”

On a related note, I believe that to admit to any belief (or non-belief) is to submit to a subjectivity. If I’m alone and my neck hairs start to prickle because the air suddenly seems different, I am more than likely to remind myself that I don’t believe in ghosts, only memory. I love this idea. Here is a relevant quote from Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, published in the early twentieth century:

By the very constitution of our nervous system, we are beings in whom present impressions find their way to appropriate movements: if it so happens that former images can just as well be prolonged in these movements, they take advantage of the opportunity to slip into the actual perception and get themselves adopted by it…So we may say that the movements which bring about mechanical recognition hinder in one way, and encourage in another, recognition by images…But, just because the disappearance of former images is due to their inhibition by our present attitude, those whose shape might fit into this attitude encounter less resistance than the others; if, then, any one of them is indeed able to overcome the obstacle, it is the image most similar to the present perception that will actually do so.

I admit that I haven’t finished the book; I am a slow reader when it comes to philosophy. But this idea that images from former memories can infiltrate the present perception and inspire recognition within the subject…I sort of touched on this idea in an earlier blog, but I didn’t go too far with it. I bet that, along with the MO psychology professor’s opinion about the desire for cause and effect, people’s memory mechanisms can be blamed for every recorded instance of the paranormal.

For example, I’m sure you caught the photo on the news of the Bigfoot slumped over in a deep freezer. Didn’t it look exactly as you want a Bigfoot to look? Somebody may as well have stolen a costume from that horrible 1987 movie starring John Lithgow. We all have a Bigfoot Standard Image in our minds. We have one for the Loch Ness Monster, one for Jesus, and one for Miss America. In my opinion, we may see objects in real life, but former images (as in the Bergson quote) sneak in and lay all over our perception, in the way that my grandma placed a sheet over the couch when the grandkids were visiting.

Back to what I hinted at earlier – any belief submits to subjectivity. I may not believe in ghosts, but even in this non-belief, I am throwing sensory information, what I’ve seen of silly reality TV shows, what I’ve read of literature, and my ghostless childhood, all into a consciousness processor. A conscioussor (that is horrible). My non-belief is as arbitrary as that of the Texan woman (in the above-cited article) who thought some mangy dog was Chupacabra!

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The Paranormal: Mere Nostalgia