birch:
Hold on a second. Just because these cant be answered in the most concrete fashion doesnt mean it isnt the case. You cant say something is bullshit with every occurrence or thought. Speculation is the first step or else you censor even natural thought, even if not exactly correct, is the first step and can be remedied or modified later.
I agree with you.
It's fine to speculate, but if you're going to speculate about the quantum vacuum, for example, don't you think it would be a good idea to first learn something about what the quantum vacuum is? Speculation isn't just a matter of throwing fancy words around and imagining stuff. You have to start with a level of knowledge, and connect your speculations to the real world. Otherwise, what you're doing is not speculating, but fantasising.
It is unnatural to give the third degree demanding concrete fact or evidence for everything and if not all in place immediate or understood, say it is all a lie. If anyone were to demand someone qualify every experience or thought with 'evidence', it would be exhausting and in many cases impossible depending on context. If that was the case, no one should allow themselves to even wonder or speculate or follow a hunch which concrete evidence may not have been apparent initially could lead you later to it.
It is important that you understand that I'm not accusing people of lying, necessarily. I have not said that I believe that everybody who claims to have seen a ghost is a liar. Some of them undoubtedly are (and in some cases that has been proven). Some are honest but mistaken. Some are actually delusional.
It comes back to this: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
Ghosts don't "fit" with everything else we know about our world. They are claimed to have features and abilities that make no sense in the light of what we know about the natural world. It is, of course, claimed that ghosts are
supernatural - they literally operate without the constraints of natural laws (laws of physics, for example).
If ghosts are real, then we need to radically revise our understanding of how the universe operates. The problem is, there's no compelling reason to believe that ghosts actually exist. The extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary thing just doesn't seem to be there. Instead, we have a whole lot of fuzzy (and often faked) photographs, plus some bad audio and video recordings (the best of which also usually turn out to be fakes), plus some tall stories told by various people who were usually on their own when they say they saw a ghost.
There are plenty of stories in science where people came up with crazy ideas that turned out to be right. For example, the idea that all the continents drift around over millions of years, splitting apart and coming together and colliding and moving away again. Sounds like nonsense, and most people didn't believe it for a long time. It was an extraordinary idea, and the evidence just wasn't there. But then, a funny thing happened. People started to compare rocks from Antarctica and Australia, and - hey! - they were the same. And what else is this that we found in Antarctic rocks?
Plant fossils? So, Antarctica wasn't always an icy wasteland. And look! Certain animals from Africa are similar to certain animals from South America - too similar unless there was some contact in the past between those groups of animals. And so it went, until after a while the various lines of evidence from lots of different fields of science all turned out to be best explained by the theory of continental drift. So now that's part of accepted science. Extraordinary evidence (lots of it!) showed that the extraordinary claim was actually true.
Could this kind of thing happen with ghosts? Yes, it could, in principle. But as things stand we have no extraordinary evidence for ghosts - just a collection of claimed evidence that can be more plausibly be explained by other ideas (e.g. that people's perceptions aren't always accurate, that some people are fakers, etc.)
The concept that there is some 'residual imprint' is just trying to give some structure or framework to work with. It can be built upon or discarded later but it has to start somewhere.
I think the idea of ghosts being "residual imprints" on something is putting the cart before the horse. Before we need to explain what a ghost could be, we need to establish that there are actually ghosts out there.
Or maybe the "residual imprint" theory
predicts ghosts. But in that case, what
else, other than a ghost, can leave a "residual imprint" on a place? Can a normal person do it? How can we reliably detect these imprints? What form do they take?
How are they imprinted? We need more than a vague buzzword to make this into anything approaching a useful hypothesis.