The Observer Effect on the Dead: How Studying Ghosts Might Collapse Them Into Existence

When We Try to See The Indeterminate

We gave ghosts bedsheets because the human brain is too small to handle a spook that exists as maths.

I wrote a philosophical principle and it sits dormant gathering dust. It challenges Substance Dualism and The Hard Problem of Consciousness. The influence behind its creation came from my actual paranormal experiences. I also hate maths. 

General Nursing Home Weirdness

I worked nights in a nursing home with a nurse. The building was a Victorian building from the 1870's and belonged to a young couple with a young child. Shifts were routine, as you would expect, assisting residents to bed, domestic duties, medication, hourly rounds as you'd expect but we stayed awake. 

It didn't take long to notice that something felt off during the quiet hours. Some staff had strange experiences to share, others seemed to fear talking about them. You take it with a pinch of salt, until you hear someone physically clattering around in the kitchen, then you guessed it, no one is their, cliche, but true. It was a regular occurrence night staff had gotten used to hearing. 

Footsteps in the hall: Clearly the monitor. Hearing strange things on the same monitor at ungodly hours: It's picking up another houses monitor. Television turns itself on, what then? It was programmed by day-staff for a joke. Radio turns on by itself, same excuse. There was a fear and logic, denial and reason giving explanations served well as a survival mechanism. How do we know there's nothing in the room, checkout my blog on that here. 

Our Experience

My colleague called my name, it was the stereotypical time of three in the morning, the woman sounded off, frightened of a spider or something. But she was mopping with an unnecessary intensity and I waited for and explanation. 'What's up?' I asked, fighting the tiredness. She kept her focus on the damp floor and gestured sheepishly with her head. That was when I saw a dark long smoke-like mist spread out corner to corner across the walls, it was unnatural.

Regardless, I quickly checked all electricals, namely the toaster and the kettle and then the windows: all was as it should have been. Nothing explained this thing. So I faced it, studied it. It was churning, not drifting like steam or smoke. Swirling in patterns that made no sense given the room's still air. What the fuck was it?

Small but random flashes of light began zapping at the other end of the dining room. I was not afraid but exhilarated. It felt like a recently deceased patient was nearby. The more I watched the more sparkles of light popping in and out of existence the more I needed to make contact.

I called out, 'Hello. . . I know you're there. Do you want to talk?' 

My colleague ordered me to stop, fear transformed the gentle mannered nurse; she threatened to drive-off home. At that point I saw movement in the room, a bit like mirage heat, as if the air in the room itself was carrying itself. It was there. My colleague, who I selfishly terrified, dragged me out of that room and closed it shut! Recognition, I thought, well, almost. A threshold was crossed.

Getting Philosophical About Such Things 

I think I can provide a framework as to what actually happened. Years later, after developing my own philosophy: The Incompatibility Principle, it seems the entity in question, was in fact, Indeterminate Potential or in simple terms here, consciousness without biological form. 

Consciousness/IP cannot exist for very long without a body in this deterministic physical world. The clash is a fundamental principle. A body defines our conscious experience via its sense data, phenomenology, subjective experience. 

An unbodied consciousness is Indeterminate Potentiality, all of its states at once, but physics tells us the act of conscious observation or measurement collapses fundamental waves to particles. I did a post on this sort of philo-sciencey stuff here. Exactly the same is happening here. Watching these phenomena creates a reductive manifestation, this is actualisation akin to wave function collapse. 

Collapsing results with the experience of incomplete light, smoke, distortion of physical, possibly even a full apparition. Reality isn't two different substances spirit/matter or mind/matter, but think of it as different modes of the same, ice and water.  

The Ice Cup of Water

I've often wondered about the physics of this. How does unactualized consciousness interact with deterministic matter? What's the gradient that allows manifestation? My conclusion: we don't just observe it. We activate it. Our presence, our engagement—that's what feeds the collapse from potential into the determined, but it cannot hold properly. 

Why? Our physical world is a crystallised form of indeterminate potential, we can only stay in biological frames in a determinate universe for a limited time. My colleague's terror, my fascination—both were fuel in reducing indeterminate potential into a limited manifestation.

What if residual consciousness lingers in the world? Especially in places like Victorian nursing homes. We tend to believe history saturates living spaces, begging the question: Can consciousness desire to remain in these earthly places? It is easy to imagine consciousness reverting to its potential state, pressing at reality's edges, manifesting as the phenomena we witnessed in that dining room. 

Nailing Down a Ghost

Do we put this all down to being a nursing home? If consciousness isn't tethered to such stereotypical locations we call haunted, they would technically be everywhere. 

However, people are in institutions for years and some might simply want to say, 'so long, and thanks for all the care!' These places we expect to be 'haunted' could all be the much needed fuel to strengthen existing spooky circulations. In other words, we consign cultural and social labels onto strange experiences we don't understand, I wrote a post on that here. 

I've never forgotten that night. Neither has she.