hauntings of all kinds

The concoctions of homeopathy are seldom recommended by those who align themselves with materialistic naturalism. Uncontroversial chemistry and physics guarantee that these highly diluted doses don't contain the slightest speck of the original ingredients. So the sole possibility is that these ingredients have left behind an unspecified aftereffect, which persists and does medicinal work without the physical presence of the former ingredients' matter or energy. These incorporeal aftereffects are central to the products' effectiveness...yet no phenomena fitting these characteristics have ever been confirmed to exist. In general, this or any practical application of incorporeal but locatable stuff could be labelled a haunting.

Unfortunately, not everyone commonly recognizes that the shakiness underlying this topic's reasoning has a multitude of parallels. There are proposed variations of hauntings in diverse contexts. Obviously, one is when the spirits of the deceased loiter in badly maintained historical houses. Another less grim context is the haunting of living creatures' bodies by life energy. Then there's a combination of these two referred to as possession: spirits of the deceased haunting living creatures' bodies without their consent. Or, the personal haunting might be invited and helpful, as in requesting a friendly, powerful thing to gently occupy, advise, and enhance the requester's own spirit. Maybe the haunting is of the interior of a place of worship, because its activity is inferred from the atypical communal behavior of a crowd during their worship rituals. Maybe the haunting is of objects that have been put through blessing/anointing/consecrating ceremonies. Like homeopathic products, the proposition is that these hauntings have undetectable active factors which are distinct from physical causes.

Without a doubt, the foremost haunting of all is the soul—a category also including every non-figurative definition of "the mind". Souls are said to be intertwined with a person but not as something material inside them. This is analogous to the healing stuff intertwined with a homeopathic product but not as something material inside it. Souls are said to be normally confined to the person but cannot be pinpointed or interacted with using anything material. Similarly, the healing stuff in the homeopathic product is confined to the inner contents—a consumer must ingest the product—but the healing stuff cannot be pinpointed or interacted with using anything material. Souls are said to mysteriously encode and store bits of data without modifying states of matter. (This is a unique difference from the usual media of information encoding and storage.) Likewise, homeopathic products mysteriously remember the original ingredients without the use of lasting changes to the set of remaining molecules.

The pitfall is that parallels are suggestive but not irrefutable. Ideas' resemblances don't force someone to treat them as a single class. The wonder of compartmentalization allows for rejecting the reality of some hauntings while defending others. Someone's preferred hauntings may seem utterly reasonable at the same time that an array of alternative hauntings "are just silly". Again through compartmentalization, it doesn't matter whether the verification methods and results that back their preferred hauntings are roughly comparable to the methods and results backing the disliked hauntings.

An instantaneous change of mindset isn't the realistic, likely outcome when compartmentalization reigns. The moderate hope is to weaken it and compete with it: to tempt someone to freshly reexamine their previously accepted ideas with unflinching eyes. Pondering these ideas' counterparts might facilitate that. If an idea is in some sense like that one over there, how is it known to be more accurate than that one, i.e. better grounded?