If thought is the ghost

1. I remember a documentary I once saw- it was about the pink dolphins of the Amazon, filmed by Cousteau and his team.
2. There was a legend among the local tribes, that these dolphins were the incarnation of spirits, and that someday when someone killed a pink dolphin, his child was born with a dolphin’s tail- like a mermaid.
3. When Cousteau asked why that didn’t happen anymore, a local replied that it was because nobody believed in those legends anymore.
4. Then I wondered if mermaids, fairies, and such creatures of imagination had ever really existed.
5. If they used to live in the forests and along the shores of the sea, of lakes and rivers, and they only appeared to people who were pure or naive.
6. But today they seem to have disappeared. Is it because they are scared away by the noise and the lights of the big cities, or because modern people are disbelievers?
7. Then I thought about the modern civilization and the way we use our scientific instruments.
8. Although our modern instruments are supposed to be powerful enough, we are unable to trace back the creatures of our imagination.
9. Perhaps our instruments are not powerful enough. But, even so, there might be a more important reason why we can’t see ghosts- they might be driven away by the same instruments we use to detect them.
10. Such an argument is in accordance with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle- it is impossible to measure both the momentum and the position of an electron at the same time.
11. This is a thought experiment according to which we use an electronic microscope to spot an electron with a photon. But the photon disturbs the electron by changing either its momentum or its position.
12. Therefore we are not truly measuring the same electron, but instead we try to figure out the place where it used to be, before it had been disturbed.
13. The same could be true for all the creatures of our imagination, the ghosts which haunt our mind- and which may also compose our reality on a fundamental level.
14. Whether the uncertainty principle is based on a true or on a thought experiment, ultimately it is a principle of nature, reflecting our own thought.
15. As soon as we turn on our cameras or turn our eyes towards a ghost we want to observe, the ghost changes position, loses its subsistence and vanishes into thin air.
16. But this is exactly how our own mind works- as we try to observe an electron by the trace it has left behind at the point where it used to be before we observed it-
17. We have to give some thought to a thing, as we try to figure out what the thing is or where it used to be, while the thought is gone.

7/31/2018

Picture: Broken link