The Ghost in the Time Machine (One of the Bigelow essays)

The Ghost in the Time Machine

Leo Ruickbie

The way in which apparitions present themselves to us tells us something about them and in
doing so will raise questions about the nature of reality. Dickens again provided us with an
interesting structure in A Christmas Carol. The ghost of Marley opens a supernatural journey
involving “The Ghost of Christmas Past,” “The Ghost of Christmas Present,” and “The Ghost of
Christmas Yet To Come.” We tend to think of ghosts as things of the past, yet, if anything of
ourselves should survive physical death, then it must also be capable of spanning temporality. This
creates a new way of approaching the question of survival that will lead us to a new conclusion...

...Have I convinced myself? Having now laid out the ‘best’ evidence and connected the dots, as it were, the Scrooge in me may still be thinking of my stomach, but the scientist must acknowledge
the evidence even when it contradicts cherished theories. This evidence leads necessarily to the
conclusion that our ‘ghost,’ consciousness, can exist independently of space and time, the
fundamental co-ordinates of the body. Such a bold claim has been made before, but this time we
have also seen that modern physics has revealed a universe in which just such a state could exist
where consciousness itself is a quantum process and time is an emergent property of quantum
entanglement, timetanglement.