Are Ghosts an Evolutionary Adaptation?
This has been reposted from my Medium blog so if you’ve already read this… my bad! Once I’ve reposted them all I’ll start on new posts.
TL:DR Ghosts might be evolutionary indicators of danger.
Negative Nancy’s
Have you ever noticed that negative things hit us harder than positive things? It’s that one jarringly unpleasant comment midst the sea of kind ones that glares at us and lingers longer in the mind. There’s a good and simple reason for this – it’s important to be hyper-aware of bad and potentially dangerous things, on balance, avoiding bad things is better than enjoying good things.
This runs so deep within us that it can even come before the need to be rational, in some situations humans will tolerate a ‘useful lie’ — something that isn’t literally true, but confers some kind of evolutionary advantage on the people who believe it. For example “porcupines can shoot their quills” would qualify as a useful lie, porcupines cannot in fact shoot their quills, but someone who believed that falsehood is far less likely to mess with one.
As the fact that colour doesn’t exist outside of our brains illuminates, what matters most is that we can navigate effectively through the world, not that we see the world accurately. So it’s fair to say that there’s some wiggle room when it comes to how we perceive the world a twilight zone where fact, fiction and functionality converge elegantly.
Intuition
Then there are examples where we know something without knowing how we know it. We aren’t able to quantify it or explain it. Typically we describe these things as ‘intuitions.’ Something is clearly happening — patterns, connections, environmental and social cues are being detected and pieced together in a subconscious way and this manifests in terms we can only describe along the lines of a gut instinct.
We’ve all had situations where something feels off or out of place and… sometimes these feelings are totally wrong, but other times they are spot on. Taking a similarly evolutionary perspective on this, it’s much better to have more of a skepticism in this area and be overly-cautious with your gut instincts than to discount them and risk missing something dangerous.
Some places are eerie, spooky, creepy, some places have that feeling of dread in the air. This is too common a thing to not have some kind of purpose, or at the very least, to not have had a purpose at one point in our evolutionary history.
Hallucinations
We know that people hallucinate in various situations, sometimes as part of a mental illness, sometimes chemically induced and other times just out of the blue. Ghosts (unless they’re real…) would qualify as hallucinations in most people’s estimations. To me it’s more than possible that seeing ghosts becomes more likely in the following situation:
Our subconscious detects signs of danger in an environment or situation
This leads to us becoming more predisposed to hallucinating
We’re more likely to see ghosts (and other such things) as a result
This makes us want to avoid that environment
Although it’s totally irrational, it’s functional, it’s helpful and more importantly — it’s adaptive. So maybe ghosts are just one of the many wonders of the human mind and its insatiable capacity to allow us to survive and thrive in an unforgiving world.