Nothing to add, just thanks for initiating a rather interesting exchange read!
Stone Tape theory is a parascientific speculation that attempts to explain phenomena like ghosts and hauntings without reference to spiritual beings, such as the ghosts of the dead. Rather, it suggests that it is possible for the environment (stone or other material) to preserve impressions of past events, perhaps especially highly emotionally charged events, which can be perceived by later visitors to the site of the event. In this view, ghosts are not conscious beings, even in a reduced state, but more like a video or phonographic recording, hence the name of the theory.
The problem with Stone Tape theory is that there is absolutely no evidence for it, and no mechanisms have been proposed that are not pseudoscientific or disproven. I would like to suggest an alternative hypothesis, which also has no supporting data and is equally speculative, but possibly more plausible.
Apophenia is when the mind over-interprets impressions or events as having more meaning or connection than they actually do. Some types of apophenia are part of normal brain function. We're all familiar with pareidolia, the experience of seeing faces or other recognizable shapes in random surfaces, like rocks or clouds, or in unrelated patterns, like floor tile. Other types of apophenia include hearing music in random noise or seeing patterns in random numeric sequences (as in gambling or finance... but I repeat myself). So far, so normal, but excessive apophenia can be an early sign of schizophrenia, as when the paranoid constructs a meaningful narrative out of completely unrelated real events.
Intentionally self-inducing apophenia is one of the core techniques of chaos magick. Skeptics often attempt to explain ghost phenomena in terms of normal apophenia and pareidolia.
But in normal pareidolia and similar forms of apophenia, you can point to what provokes your recognition of a face or whatever it is. These curls in Queen Elizabeth II's hair look like eyes, that like a hooked nose, and those like a thick-lipped mouth (on the 1954-1955 Canadian "devil's face" dollar). But in ghost phenomena, it is much harder to see what might be causing the anomalous perceptions. Nothing about this cemetery resembles floating lights; nothing about this hallway resembles a woman in white.
My proposal is something in between Stone Tape theory and skeptical explanations of hauntings through apophenia. I suggest that there is another unrecognized type of apophenia, where some physical characteristics of a particular location, some arrangement of visual stimuli, some combination of light and shadow, some sounds, infrasound, ultrasound, scents, magnetic fields, and other stimuli perhaps below a conscious threshold, which, importantly, do not directly resemble the perceived phenomena, nevertheless consistently provoke similar impressions in different observers. There is, further, a kind of resonance, reflection, or synchronicity between the impressions produced by these places, and people or events formerly associated with the place. I cannot say whether the causality of that resonance goes forward or backward. That is, whether the past events somehow set up the conditions for these impressions, or whether the conditions are in fact totally independent of past events and people, but in another incidence of apophenia, in a place with a long history, there is always some story to which the phenomena can be retroactively associated.
This is as much speculation as Stone Tape theory is, of course, but in my opinion, it has the advantage of being speculation involving unknown reaches of human psychology, rather than the well-known physics of stone and soil.
Stone Tape Theory at WikipediaInteresting. I have also, on my own, thought about the "stone tape theory" as a possible explanation of such phenomena. I would venture a slightly different take which is not too far from the one you are suggesting.
The western mystery tradition (the "occult") holds that physical reality is the outer manifestation of a slightly different kind of matter, the so-called 'ether'. The notion of 'ether' is slightly different from the historical conjecture about an all-permeating 'ether'. The ether I am taling about, while still material, is non-physical, it is also called the "astral plane", the hindu cosmology has a similar concept, that of subtle matter, of which the conditioned mind is an expression. In fact, the very mystery tradition on the west claims that the jungian so-called 'collective unconscious' is part of this ethereal plane.
Now whereas matter appears to be discrete -neatly differentiated molecules, functional parts, individuals-, this ethereal, or astral, plane is continuous. That is how our own individual minds, while still sticking out as relatively autonomous, also share in the common pool of the collective unconscious. In fact, our own personalities are not at all clear-cut. We are the combination of our culture, environment, our parents, those people closest to us, etc.
Of course this is just a very rough exposition (and perhaps a somewhat inaccurate one, as I am not very versed in the subject, either) of an 'alternative' kind of ontology of reality, one that goes well beyond scientific capacity and wouldn't be --cannot be-- backed up by scientific method.
I hope you can already see where this is going. The 'stone tape' theory here I would replace for an 'ether tape' theory, where the impressions are left in the underlying astral 'body' of objects and places, such that individuals who are particularly sensitive to this shared plane of experience would be able to perceive, more or less strongly, the impressions left by passing events or people in the "immaterial" (actually material, non-physical) fabric of reality, at that region in space.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I believe that the impressions you are referring to have been called the Akashic Record. I'd be interested in some explanation of what you mean by "material but non-physical". Epicurus believed consciousness to consist in very fine or subtle matter, but this was still physical: it is composed of atoms that are smaller, smoother, and easier to set into motion than the atoms of familiar matter, and interact normally with common matter; their motion is eventually transferred to, e.g., the limbs of the body.
In my own case, I'm always trying to reconcile my interest in the occult with my belief in a universe that is not only purely physical, but strongly deterministic and intrinsically meaningless. I could also see impressions in a place as being made upon the noösphere, in the memetic or social-psychological sense, and persisting over time culturally though possibly sub-consciously. This is quite similar to your 'ether tape', except that the actual encoding occurs physically in human brains, though the information content can be described independently of its physical substrate. I have a related theory of demonic possession which I have not fully written up.
>I'd be interested in some explanation of what you mean by "material but non-physical"
You put me in a bit of a tight spot here, I'll try my best to explain myself :-)
We distinguish two different concepts here: matter, and spirit. The fundamental difference between both of them is that matter is ever subject to change, impermanent.
Now, inasmuch as "mind" is, in the dominant ontology of the west, considered to be an emergent property of the mechanistic processes of what we shall call 'gross matter', which is non other than what I refered to as what is "physical", ie, the aspect of reality which can be observed, measure and described by the physical science, then the whole of mind, again, is nothing but a material quality. I must say that I do not agree with this purely mechanistic perception of nature, and I think it goes both ways: the subtle matter, or ether, or the astral plane, call it as you may, carries the semantic aspect of reality, the one which in turn guides the processes of the merely reactive physical matter. In this sense, I disagree with the characterization of nature as
a universe that is not only purely physical, but strongly deterministic and intrinsically meaningless.
Here is a common allegory that I like to use: the semantics of a computer program are not merely the "emergent properties" of the symbols with which the program is written, they have a separate reality of their own (in our minds, in this case), and the very different manifestations of such a program (say, in a haskell source file, or in the final, compiled binary) are but a manifestation of the semantic plane which brings all the symbols (or words of machine code) together.
In my view, both subtle and gross matter evolve together in increasing complexity, just as a primitive cell could start out as a bilipid layer enclosing a sort of proto-RNA chain and some coalescing proteins, the semantic interpretation of it (which, granted, we apply retroactively from the perspective of fully developed organic living beings) as a sort of "stronghold against entropy" started developing as well.
Mind being matter, it is also bound to the rules of matter, in it's own way. It is so that logic and mathematics, being "non-physical", also follow rules of operation. It is so, too, that minds and personalities and not entirely unpredictable, but follow observable patterns. That these patterns are not subject to precise observation and measurement is related to their "non-physical" nature, as they cannot be measured by instruments which have a discrete, and more or less "objective" (meaning that we could reach almost universal consensus on their bounds and structure) body.
Look at the Tree of Life: everything upwards of Malkuth, the tenth sephirah, is a product of Creation, yet none of it is physical; and only the lower triangle, Netzach, Hod and Yesod represent the mind as we understand it. In general, everything below the first three sephiroth (the so-called "supernal" triangle), and perhaps even themselves, is matter. The idea here is that the very essence if nature is not the crude, physical realm of Malkuth, but the subtle, astral, or akashic structure of which Malkuth is the final manifestation.
As for what I mean by 'Spirit', it'll have to wait for a different post, I have elaborated quite a bit for now, and if subtle matter is an elusive subject, spirit is moreso, I couldn't claim to grasp it, let alone to talk at length about it.
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I must remind you: this is nothing but my own model of reality, as I have gleaned it from the very few sources that I have read. I do not speak for anyone else or accurately represent any one tradition, and all of what I may say may be inaccurate and subject to change. But it is, as of today, more or less a good representation of the model of the world as I have built it, to the best of my effort.
Interesting. Almost like the dead haunting the materials around us. I do not believe (in most things) but the concept of objects, buildings retaining energy, this is very true in a big way.
I lived in Midtown STL for a year. I would go out at night, no cars or people on the streets, and I could FEEL high energy levels all around me. Some describe this as a nefarious-ness in a/the city. Some say they are logically fearful for the potential dangers of anything/everything in the night, but I consider this off-putting perception as that of unnatural perception(s) - think about it: the streets are filled with cars and people all day, they leave at night, I go out (alone) at night, and the permeable and resonating energy of a vibrating town remains (or hasnt yet tapered off). So I KNOW no one is there, but I still SENSE energy. Nowhere in nature does this occur. cities, and towns, and infrastructure, cars, manmade buildings/structures are all absent in a/the natural world, so the ying-yang of high/low energy is not a common perception.
Just my take