I think the reason they brought all of these gadgets along was they had no idea which one might successfully record a "Presence".
And from the rube's point of view the hunters are simply very well equipped. It conveys the notion that they're serious researchers. Besides, they're really just modern-day mediums. Consequently their best chance of success, like "spiritual" mediums, is to thrown a whole lot of mud against the wall and see if any sticks. Some inevitably will, so you can count that as the one important hit among so many misses.
They [EMF meters] are useful to help find bad wiring but not so much for ghosts.
...
There is no reliable correlation between EMF spikes and "paranormal activity" so why bother?
For anyone who's still puzzled, the various flavors of electro-/magneticish fields fluctuate constantly in the typical home, in ways that relate to how the house is built. The most profound and obvious source of this fluctuation is varying loads on the house wiring -- or even that of the house next door. So your fridge compressor kicks on three rooms away, the needle waggles a bit, and the ghost-hunter triumphantly declares that he's found a "presence."
There's no reason to suppose that a ghost can affect electromagnetic fields. More importantly, no one has a full baseline catalog of all the
normal EMF behavior in my house. Not even me, and I'm the kind of guy who would do that kind of thing just for fun. Yes, there are electrical properties associated with living organisms. But the relevant scientists tell me that the human nervous system operates in the area of a couple hundred
microvolts at best. That's many orders of magnitude below what you will get from ordinary electrical appliances operating in your house. You're far more likely to get an errant reading from a microwave oven that was dropped during a move.
This is important for the same reason faking mediumship via drawing is important. It provides a toehold for a requirement for someone to interpret the results. The viewer of a drawing has to apply judgment to decide whether it's a suitable likeness. It might just be a very skillful drawing, and the rube translates appreciation for the skill into appreciation for how it allegedly came to be. Similarly the holder of a "scientific" gadget has to tell the rube what it means. It might just be Mrs. Gilch downstairs revving up her electric teakettle. But since the rube won't think of that as the cause, the ghost-hunter can "interpret" the reading as evidence of a ghost.
The problem with any gadget being used for ghost hunting is that there is no way to independently test them to see if they're appropriate for the task. First you need a ghost (a huge problem based on reality), then you need a ghost willing to help with your test (bigger problem since they don't exist).
That's really the nugget. And this also:
This kind of investigation has always seemed to me to be a textbook example of what Richard Feynman called cargo cult science. It copies the sort of thing real scientists do without the slightest understanding of why they do it.
By the same token, I think the ghost-hunters know exactly what they're doing. They're mediums. But we have become a society that, in a certain sense, defaults to scientific knowledge. Your average dentist's office is a temple to science. We profess that scientifically-founded methods can inerrantly prove criminal guilt and cure its causes. (Narrator: It can't.) Hence the new wisdom suggests that scientific methods can detect ghosts.
If the medium shows up in flowing robes, dangling earrings, and a scepter made from a shrunken human head, the rube is probably going to laugh. That's so passé. But if the medium shows up wearing a lab coat and toting a bunch of sciency-looking equipment, the rube is probably going to think it's real science. Even if the medium has no clue how any of it works. The goal in each case is to tacitly dispel the rube's predictable objections.
Back to the cargo-cult argument. The pseudo-scientific mediums are substitution pure speculation for the deduction step of the traditional hypothetico-deductive method. They say, "If there's a presence here, it will make itself manifest by _______________." The blank gets filled in with whatever behavior can be eked from whatever equipment the medium has brought with him. It might be as simple as an ordinary camera, in which case ghosts are simply assumed to display whatever gets captured by an inexpertly operated camera. The process never starts with what is known or can be reliably deduced about what ghosts are and how they operate. In scientific terms, the ghost hypothesis is completely unfalsifiable.
In order to establish a reliable empirical basis for detecting ghosts, we need to have an unmistakable ghost make itself available so that we can determine what physical parameters, if any, can be measured to stand as proxies for its presence. Only then can we say that this measurement reveals a supernatural presence. We don't even have to conclude that ghosts don't exist, and therefore that this necessary step is impossible. We simply have to point out that no ghost-hunter has done this. Whether ghosts exist or not, no ghost-hunter has undertaken any sort of validation process to ensure that what he's measuring has any hope of relating to ghosts.
The connection to cargo cults is even sillier. In the classic cargo cult formulation, primitive societies built vestiges of airstrips to invoke the "gods" of cargo planes. It doesn't work, of course, for the obvious reason. But if we carry the analogy forward to ghost-hunting, it would be as if the cult built the faux airstrip and then went back to the tribe claiming the plane landed
when no such thing actually happened.
Why I love this forum and why I find it beneficial is it has forced me to think INSIDE the box.
Which is important when you're trying to argue that something actually exists. The guy who designed NCC-1701E and
USS Shenzhou is a good friend of mine. We occasionally collaborate. He's an expert artist and model-maker, but he knows that I'm the expert on real spaceships and the design limitations. My expertise is valuable to him. And since a huge percentage of the relevant fandoms are actual practitioners in the field, getting right what can be gotten right in a fictional setting becomes more important to our studio overlords. Even if you're inventing fantasy technology, it has to work the same way every time, and within a plausible set of fanciful rules, if you want the fans to suspend disbelief.
Ghosts and spirits just don't do that. As we've seen, whenever we ask the believers in such things to come up with a consistent, well-behaved set of rules that supposedly governs this realm, we get a hodge-podge of contradiction and
ad hoc speculation. It doesn't even made good fiction. A new rule has to be made up to accommodate each new observation, which defeats the whole meaning of "rule." I believe this is why mediumship requires
ad hoc indirections and inherent ambiguities. They don't want to be pinned down, so that they can claim any serendipity in their favor.
