‘Hey Bill Nye, Do You Believe in Ghosts and the Afterlife?’ #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

Hi Bill Nye. My name is Marsalina. This is my son Ohenu. And we have a question about your perspective on ghosts and also what do you think happens to your life energy that ceases after you die? Is it just pushing daisies? Thank you. Marsha.

Greetings. People have wondered about life after death since there have been people. It goes way, way back. We started with ghosts. I’ll tell you I don’t think there’s any such thing. I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of when it comes to ghosts.

I’m a member of both the skeptics and the counsel for scientific inquiry, and we have looked and looked for haunted houses, for ghosts in cemeteries, for psychics who believe they’re in touch with people who are dead. And there’s absolutely no credible evidence. There’s no reason to believe that there are ghosts or life after death. People have tried and tried.

And you may know that Houdini, the famous magician, said, “If anybody can come back from the dead it’s me, man. I’m coming.” And he never got in touch with anyone. No one ever heard from him. He had a secret word between he and his mother that he said, “I’ll give you the secret word when I come back.” And do you know what the secret word is? Nobody knows, it was secret and he never came back.

But what happens to humans? Our brains are so active. We imagine so many things and we’re always looking for cause and effect. That is to say, when you hear a bump in the night, you want to know what caused it. You want to know what brought it on. And the first thing you might imagine is that there’s somebody or some entity out there causing this effect, the bump, but you can’t see it.

So then we intuitively or instinctively, for ancient reasons, put a pattern on it. We imagine it has an agent, as we call it, but there’s something out there, some agent is causing this. But it could be the wind blew and knocked the candle over and there’s no ghost; just get over it. Don’t be afraid of that.

Now when it comes to life after death, I’ve thought about this quite a bit and what happens, what are you like when you’re dead? If you watch people age, like my grandmother, my beloved grandmother. She was so smart when I was a little kid. She collected wildflowers. She was very skilled as an artist. She could draw landscapes and she was like a naturalist.

Traditionally, she would draw detailed pictures of flowers depicting their very detailed parts, petals, stamen, pistols, and so on. But as she got older, she got dementia. She could not remember things. She didn’t recognize me. And so she eventually died of old age.

And I just don’t see any evidence that she would suddenly be a young person as an after dead ghost entity. It looks like to me this life is all you get. This is it. There’s nothing afterwards. So what you’ve got to do is live this life as best you can. That’s the way to go.

And if it does turn out there’s an afterlife and we all turn young again and can play rugby or whatever it is we want to do, so much the better. But I see no evidence for it. And for your son, there are no ghosts, sorry. And your friends who believe in ghosts, you can outwit them. You’ll be ahead of them because you will not waste energy running around looking for ghosts.

Instead, you’ll close the window to keep the candle from blowing over or whatever made your friend believe in a ghost. Carry on. I’m sorry, but it seems to be apparently this is all you get...