Hobbies to pick up if you are bored 👻

I don’t believe in ghosts. There’s just no possible scientific explanation. A person’s being, their humanity, is inextricably tied to their body, and I think that’s beautiful, and I think that should be enough. Ghosts are in some sense an idealist fantasy: Putting the essence of a person before their material existence, and stubbornly insisting that this essence carries on past the end of materiality. Would Marx believe in ghosts?

A person’s life ends when their body is shut down. Whether slept, drowned, overdosed, shot, steamrolled, exploded, asphyxiated, herniated, scared, delighted or any other gradation between peace and violence, the person’s body ceases to function as a self-sustaining system. After that, the body decays, if it is not otherwise dealt with - preserved or cremated, stabilized or incinerated. At this point their agency, personality, personhood must be gone; If they were not, would they not still have material power? And how could this power manifest without a material form?

The idea of a ghost is the idea of temporary or partial material form: A being that does not really exist, but which can exist. The spiritual life of ghosts is in cultural understanding of unfinished business. A contradiction that has not been resolved, but which must be. Belief in ghosts indicates backwardness, an unsophistication in which the believer is not aware of the social formation around them and thus must interpret its spiritual life literally. No matter what they mean, ghosts do not really exist.

There are no ghosts in Gaza.