An interview with Dr. Jeanette Crawford, Professor of Paranormal Studies at the Midland Institute of Parapsychology in London, on the ethereal diversity of departed souls.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe in ghosts?
CRAWFORD
"Belief" isn't the right word. Scientists don't really believe in this or that, generally speaking. Did Richard Feynman really believe in multiple histories? Does Steven Hawking believe in worm-holes? It's not really about having faith; more like whatever seems to provide the simplest and most consistent picture of things. I'm open to the idea, let's say. And to the possibilities stemming from it.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a difference between understanding the natural and understanding the supernatural?
CRAWFORD
Again, these are kind of antiquated concepts. Supernatural implies not real – beyond the natural – so, what does that even mean? How could anything not be natural? If ghosts exist, they are natural. Even if they come from another world, that world has to be governed by some sort of order. Supernatural could only mean imaginary, so most experts reject the term.
INTERVIEWER
What about the term, paranormal? Is that a useful or meaningful distinction?
CRAWFORD
I mean, I'm willing to live with it. But the problem is, it defines itself by what it isn't. Paranormal suggests "more than" – which is vague. What's normal? Does it mean that which we, as humans, normally experience and perceive in our daily lives? In that case, almost all science is paranormal because it attempts to describe the otherwise invisible substructure of very, very big and very, very small things. The Big Bang, black holes, superstrings – all of these are theoretical constructs, extrapolations taken as real but never actually observed directly. If there's a difference, it's that my field deals with the "preternatural," which means particularly unusual, as yet unexplained phenomena. Events so rare they often lack sufficient recordable data and therefore repeatable results. But I'm willing to accept "paranormal" on the grounds that, for now at least, it's a fringe science. The methodology is current, but it's not accepted by the mainstream. It's "outsider art."
INTERVIEWER
Let's talk about some of your findings, your theories. What is an Anterograde Spirit?
CRAWFORD
According to the Determinist movement, all future events are locked into a "predetermined" causality. Things that will happen are bound by the same laws of the things that have happened, and are therefore theoretically predictable. Meaning, if we knew the precise relationship of everything in the universe to everything else in the universe, then we could say with 100% certainty which causes would produce which effects. That's Determinism, an issue which the science community remains divided on. Now, if you apply Determinism to paranormal theories of ghosts, you run into interesting scenarios. For instance, one model holds the position that ghosts are atemporal, that they exist outside the "human" scale of time. If this were true, it follows that there must exist, in the present, spirits whose bodily host has not yet been born. Hence, anterograde.
INTERVIEWER
There's a chapter in your book about viral ghosts. Could you summarize it here, a bit?
CRAWFORD
The subject isn't just about viruses, but about all ambiguous forms of life. We know, for instance, that not all matter is biotic – few doubt that rocks, earth, water, etc., are distinctly abiotic – and that other forms of matter, such as fungi, flowers and animals, retain the properties of life. However, there are many micro-organisms, particles and acids whose living state remain elusive to classification. Such ambiguous forms include viruses – microscopic parasites – which appear only to function as living beings when infecting a host. Only during such an infection, for instance, may a virus reproduce. Reproduction, of course, like respiration, is a property believed to be only possessed by living things. The disquieting conclusion held by many biologists is that viruses are only sometimes alive, the way the letter y is said to be only sometimes a vowel. So, what then of a virus’ spiritual status? Do viruses have a soul only sometimes? How can that be?
INTERVIEWER
I don't know.
CRAWFORD
There are many theories on this. My own position is that spiritual energy, if it exists, can be plotted along a spectrum, with consciousness as its x-axis. By consciousness, I mean the integrated family of cognitive processes which results in a functioning awareness of time, space, and personal identity. This is where it starts getting tricky, because the level of that sense of orientation varies not only among different species but between organisms within a species. A dog may be more conscious than, say, a beetle, but not as conscious as an octopus. It's not a switch – this is conscious, this is not – it's a continuum. And the bigger the engine, the more power it generates. So, the idea is that an organism's conscious potential is directly proportionate to its spiritual energy.
INTERVIEWER
You often employ mechanistic metaphors.
CRAWFORD
Yes, and I've gotten a lot of flak for it. Since the Industrial Revolution, people have debated the anthropomorphic nature of the machine, or the mechanomorphic nature of man – is it right to replace workers with industrial apparatus? can a computer think? will a robot one day be able to feel? create art? – and these heated discussions have permeated fields as wide as science, art, ethics, economics and religion, to name a few. Paranormal researchers, though, have rarely explored these issues, presumably because of a personal conviction that the technological and the spiritual have nothing to do with one another. But recent developments in nanorobotics and quantum computing have raised serious doubts about this perceived irreconcilability. It can be said quite demonstrably that nature works according to rules, and in a very real sense everything that exists, and everything that can exist, is a product of a few very basic axioms. The rate of expansion. The force of gravity. The electrical force that holds atoms together. Know what I mean? Without these "instructions" programmed into it during the Big Bang, the universe would never have been able to sustain itself. But it may not be the case that every universe functions by the same rules. And my branch of paranormal studies deals with the hypothetical cross-over points between different sets of rules.
INTERVIEWER
What kinds of different rules might inter-dimensional ghosts abide by?
CRAWFORD
That would depend on the "recipe" of forces governing the particular universe in question. You might have two-dimensional "flat" ghosts, or one-dimensional line-shaped ghosts. In a world shaped by fractalinear dimensions, you might have fractal ghosts. Or "anti-ghosts" that are simply dimensionless points on a grid. All spirits might be fused in an elliptical knot. Or stretched out into an infinite singularity. In our own world, "intelligent" machines or computational systems may possess corresponding binary souls.
INTERVIEWER
How do these theories fare with your peers?
CRAWFORD
They're generally accused of being too speculative to be meaningful, but the whole field is predicated on speculation, so.
INTERVIEWER
Are there angry ghosts? Vengeful ghosts?
CRAWFORD
I have no idea.
INTERVIEWER
Do ghosts evolve? Are there extinct ghosts?
CRAWFORD
Yes and no. Evolution implies a sequence of events arranged in time, one following the next, through mutation and adaptation and what not. Competition. But if ghosts are atemporal then sequentiality wouldn't apply. They wouldn't sit on a timeline like living organisms do – they would have, in a sense, "already" evolved, and have "already" gone extinct.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned mutation. Does that mean there are mutant ghosts?
CRAWFORD
That's actually a reasonable assumption. We mustn't presume that all spirits are the perfect beings we imagine them to be; on the contrary, if mutation and chance apply to the rest of nature, they must also apply to the parts we don't usually perceive. I've read about so-called "Siamese ghosts," those conjoined by an intraspiritual bond, and about spiritus inversus or “inverted” ghosts.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to what you were saying before about consciousness, it seems that the whole idea of a spirit is somehow contingent upon and inextricable from that of a self. But my question is this: if the self is something that is not fixed, as many philosophers and psychologists attest, but rather ever-changing, as it moves through each stage from birth to death, gathering experience, remembering and forgetting, growing and decaying, then what are we to say of the eternal soul? Does it possess the consciousness of a single sperm cell or that of a full-grown adult? What if a man, during his life, became schizophrenic or suffered a stroke, forever impairing his mental state? Would that affect his spirit? Which is the “real” self? Does a soul reach the afterworld with crippled faculties? If he was a drug addict for the majority of his life, does he arrive high?
CRAWFORD
That's a good question, and people have been debating it for centuries. One possible answer to these troubling questions is the Rauschmann “transfinite self” theory which builds on Georg Cantor’s conjectures on cardinality. Cantor argued that far from being a single, all-encompassing entity, infinity came in many shapes and sizes – in fact, infinite shapes and sizes – and could be configured and manipulated in mathematically sound ways. Rauschmann took this theory and applied it to parapsychology, suggesting that each spirit is not a single ecumenical body but a set of interpenetrating forms, infinitely divisible.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have a favorite ghost story as a child?
CRAWFORD
Hmm. Not really. My grandfather spun some great yarns, but I myself never really followed the lore.
INTERVIEWER
Have you experienced any hauntings?
CRAWFORD
Almost everyone claims to have had some kind of weird encounter at some point in their life, but the truth is that probably over 99% of them are bogus – my own included. When I was eight, I was absolutely convinced I'd seen a UFO. I saw some strange multi-colored lights arranged in a disc-like shape ascending from the cornfield behind my house. I still don't know what the hell it was, but my not knowing doesn't entitle me to make wishful assumptions. Most people would swear by things that are totally untrue.
INTERVIEWER
Does that mean you don't believe accounts of alien abductions?
CRAWFORD
Picture an alien in your head. The one you're imagining, the little grey one with the tiny neck and the pear-shaped head? The one every so-called abductee seems eager to describe? Well, not surprisingly, people didn't begin to identify that particular alien-archetype until it started appearing in 1950s sci fi movies; once the image was popular, the sightings became popular. In other places, you see different culture-specific iconography supplanted over the same background of events – capture, sexual examination, communication, experimentation – which, to me, suggests it's a purely psychological phenomenon. So, again, I'm intrigued by the idea, but I don't think physical visitations are plausible.
INTERVIEWER
What about extra-terrestrial life in general?
CRAWFORD
That's very different, because here we're talking about numbers. The chances of something else existing somewhere are quite high if you consider the sheer size of the universe and the number of systems within it. Thing is, whatever life is out there almost certainly isn't very sexy. Probably some bacterial fuzz on a sun-facing planet, or a primitive crustacean type-thing buried under miles of ice.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a personal goal? Is there a Holy Grail for paranormal or preternatural science?
CRAWFORD
Yes. Dying and becoming a ghost. That's the only real way of testing any of this.