[Flint]STONE TAPE THEORY
- Ron Yacovetti
- Mar 18, 2024
- 14 min read
Updated: Mar 6
By Ron Yacovetti - BA Communications/Journalism
Abstract:
This essay attempts to show the potential validity of the experience known as “Stone Tape Theory'' from the perspective of Analytic Idealism, a philosophy of mind, which seems to be the only coherent explanation for it as a conscious experience to be had beyond the first person perspective of the deceased. The usual depiction of the experience by paranormalists consists of a contradiction in ideology, paradigm and their perspective applications. The Stone Tape theory consists of two key facets of residual evidence which the paranormalist typically conflates as interchangeable with regard to their nature as well as their potential to be stored within an environment for second, third and subsequent perspectives to experience. Also important to note that the phenomena known as Psychometry, also addressed in this essay, which shares a foundation for how it is said to be possible, also benefits from the ontological foundation of Analytic Idealism. These things happen. I am merely suggesting that they do not happen for the reasons that people who support them think that they do. This essay looks to stay in lockstep with the accepted definitions of Physicalism (Mainstream materialism) as well as Analytic Idealism, by which the nature of reality is mentation. It also makes priority, the prohibiting of promissory explanations, the “one day we will figure out” reasonings for the purpose of filling gaps in explanation. If and when new discoveries emerge, proper re-examination of current theory should take place.
Essay-By Ron Yacovetti (BA Communications/Journalism) with contributions from Lourdes Gonzalez - 3/2024
The idea behind the name Stone Tape Theory:
The Stone Tape Theory, first noted as “Place Memory” by 19th century thinker Charles Babbage, is the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions that transpire during emotional or traumatic occurrences, can be projected in some form of energy, which is then recorded onto or into rocks, wood, crystals and other items only then to be replayed under certain conditions or via specific triggers.
History of Stone Tape as a theory and experience:
Popular sites from around the globe have almost identical versions of what Stone Tape Theory is and some footnotes of experiences people claim to have had as a result of the net effect of this theory playing out. One such international site, https://www.mamamia.com.au/, in short states that…
“According to paranormal investigators and even some geologists, the idea that bricks and mortar can ‘tape’ what goes on around them is one explanation for ghost sightings, apparitions and things that go bump in the night.”
Also noting historically, that…
“British archaeologist and parapsychologist Thomas Charles (Lethbridge)is famous for coining the theory in 1961, but philosopher H. H. Price had raised a similar notion in 1940.”
Today’s modern day ghost hunter or paranormalist most likely holds the axiomatic belief that spirits can be or are trapped, tethered to or simply stuck in a given location, perhaps rooted in time invested, emotional ties or items within the environment, all of which is born of the original idea fostered by a theoretical idea known as “place memory”. British philosopher H.H. Price, also an idealist, proposed that there was a realm where memories or thoughts were permanently stored, a realm that mediums could tap into to receive, interpret and then share with others what a given environment had preserved. His works have much to do with the concept held today, that spirits can attach themselves to inanimate objects. In 1961, Thomas Charles Lethbridge, also a parapsychologist and explorer published “Ghost and Ghoul”, a successful endeavor which is a collection of his personal experiences with the otherworldly; stuff that we still document and tell others is happening, to this day. Mr. Lethbridge was so much a man of science that he made it a quest to find a scientific basis for such mysterious happenings. He deduced that there were things yet to be discovered about our planet and world, which could thus explain this ‘place memory’ phenomena, by suggesting that perhaps impressions or memories can actually be preserved in fields of energy. Taking into account more contemporary theories such as quantum field theory (QFT) there may be a seed of truthfulness in his conceptualizing of it. However, the material object holding onto an experienced feeling or emotion appears to be its scientific labefaction. The idea does continue to gain support as new paranormalists flood the field, the byproduct of a media and television based revolution that made it more mainstream, yet it is not likely that most of them know the theory’s origin or the backstory to the name by which we continue to know it. Stone Tape theory actually acquired its name from a 1972 BBC supernatural film which showcased this phenomena, called “The Stone Tape”.
Is the basis for Stone Tape Theory analogous to that which looks to explain Psychometry?
Indeed it seems to be the case. Psychometry, the idea that you can grok various degrees of information about a person or a place by the simple act of touching an object connected with that person or place. It is gradually gaining more notice from ghost hunting shows on television and streaming services. Mediums, most often the practitioner of the art of psychometry, are oftentimes seen gleaning details about a historic location or case with paranormal characteristics, only to then be vetted, or not, as the episode or film plays out. But how exactly did a world divided by physicalist science-minded people and spiritualists, somehow come to find support for this possibility? The idea of psychometry does share conceptual roots with Stone Tape Theory, in as much as inanimate objects are being awarded the ability to retain experiential states. Mr. Joseph Rodes Buchanan, back in the year 1842, created the term psychometry, which was understood to translate to mean “measuring the soul”. He was interested in the idea and possibility of impressions that people left on objects as a result of touching them, owning them, etc. but he had also claimed that he believed that we could unlock and interpret those imprints with the proper techniques. To my knowledge, and I am not an expert or historian of psychometry, no known technique to achieve this was ever disclosed. It is said that by the later part of the 19th century, most people who pondered about this, and believed it to be a real phenomena where the living would sense these emotions in an environment, were complacent with the idea of spirits being able to attach to objects or places. For them, it did not beg additional questions. Spooky is as spooky does.
Is there a way to allow for the experience without contradicting the physical sciences?
Yes, this I believe does have one explanation which does not find itself at odds with physics, quantum physics, chemistry, etc. It requires taking a look at the ontological primitive or non-reducible state of reality as we accept it. At this point in time, paranormalists and ghost hunters do not seem to take this step and merely accept the axiomatic idea handed down from the not so distant origins of the modern ghost hunting movement. This, I feel, is their mistake, as it was once my own, because just blindly accepting Stone Tape Theory without any awareness of how it relates, conflicts or gains support from the physical sciences leaves it vulnerable to self-categorizing it as mystically wishful thinking.
The concept that Stone Tape Theory looks to establish, I do believe to be a genuine experience. It is one had by many with similar traits to how it is experienced. Being a conscious experience it has become my newfound belief that it must be in league with things that currently provide the most foundationally strong postulated ideas with regard to studies and theories about consciousness . As a student of all things absurd as well as paranormally rooted ideas, I don't claim to know or have access to all of the concepts being floated around, so my perspective is my most educated at this time and I always reserve the right to be in need of improvement or to reconfirm what I have stated, later. So, for me, the approach to this was inspired by the typical ghost hunter understanding of how it happens, the idea that feelings have been somehow absorbed into wood, for example, which is where I feel it begins to run into explanatory problems.
What reality are we talking about and how does it matter?
The accepted worldview of science today and for many centuries now, physicalism, states that there is a 3D world of reality out there, physical in nature, all of which we just observe, with standalone existence outside of our consciousness. For the purposes of making this argument, it is vital to include this as well as define what it means. Physicalism also states that our brain allegedly creates said consciousness, which explains why we’re told that the physical world is outside of consciousness, since it is their claim that consciousness is only inside of our skull.
Now, if a physical structure like a home does exist outside of consciousness, should we grant that this is true for the sake of argument, then all physical matter, according to that paradigm, possesses no qualities. It can have numerical values or measurements meant to describe it such as weight, height, Hz, ounces, etc. but no qualities such as what it is to feel love, anger or sadness; the very things said to be felt as remnants of a location according to Stone Tape Theory. Those things, we’re told by physicalism, are created by our brain because they are conscious experiences. Whilst I do not agree that the brain creates or encloses consciousness, it is what one must accept if they agree that the world we inhabit IS actually made up of solid, physical matter.
With that in mind, the current understanding of the experience called “Stone Tape Theory” lacks explanatory power under our present day accepted view of reality (physicalism), as it suggests that phenomenal conscious experience, aka feelings or qualities of experience like despair, somehow fuse with abstract material (wood), despite physicalism (today’s worldview of “science”) insisting matter has NO experiential qualities. In other words, unless you toss out all known and reliable theories of science, wood or any material substance cannot create, absorb or hold onto a feeling or an experience.
Now, there may be an argument to be made with regard to the presence of residual phenomena as one could argue it is mechanistic sound or data, imprinted upon matter with known recording or data storing properties such as crystals or silica aerogels which can absorb sound in a narrow frequency range, similar to sound-absorbing resonators. If we grant this as a possibility, it would be limited in explanation, relegated to only being capable of mirroring the actual sounds made in the environment and recorded like a tape recorder at some point previously, which then somehow replays. But this is not what is suggested by Stone Tape Theory; at least not in its entirety.
To an extent this idea is also a convenient fiction, something that it appears or feels like nature or reality is doing when one observes it, but with a major gap in the “somehow replayed” part, with no known way to discern between when it does replay and when it does not, or even what triggers it when it does. Most times in the paranormalist’s mind, it is out of the advantage to act as if this theory is true, thus requiring little more than perhaps quoting who it was one heard it from.
The disconnect in assessing this Stone Tape issue is that paranormalists are not claiming there to be ONLY a vocal log stored. They are not saying it is simply a location based “tape recording” playing back verbatim, word for word, exactly what was said at the location years ago, such as someone screaming, “I was shot!” then that exact recording anomalously plays back today. The claim is that the emotional trauma and feelings of said trauma are imprinted upon the environment. This lacks coherence and poses a problem under physicalism, the model of reality it is postulated within, in its requiring abstract matter with no qualities to somehow inherit them as a result of human volition projecting them…resulting in a type of combination problem. Physics cannot measure love, hate, anger, etc. This is often a misconstrued concept where many laypeople in the paranormal field (I am categorically a layperson as well) will say that one CAN measure these emotions as brain scanning technology such as EEG or fMRI will display activity when those emotions are felt. These NCC’s (Neural Correlates of Consciousness) do speak to correlation with brain activity, but under analytic idealism, not to causality. Nor are they the experience of the emotion, the what it is like to feel or be in love. This explanation also paints the theorist into the same corner, with somehow birthing consciousness and/or conscious experience from abstract matter(Hard Problem of Consciousness-Chalmers 1995).
The technology only provides a 2nd perspective from across two dissociative boundaries, of the extrinsic appearance of the emotion (Kastrup 2020 D.I.D. Alters of Universal Phenomenal Consciousness). So this is clearly an insoluble problem for the casual paranormalist who claims someone was oppressed, hated their oppressor and that their hate is lingering in the crown molding of the Victorian mansion, only to be released or seep out like a gaseous toxin, which occurs for no known reason. The only way within which I can see a moment captured by the constituent parts of a structure would be if it literally played back a recording like a VHS or cassette tape would do. Someone recorded when speaking and then that recording of it is somehow played back, that IS data and that could be assigned a measurement, such as Hz, dB as well as be replayed. Any variation outside of a precise replication of a past moment would require a conscious act of volition BY the location or its constituent parts, which is too shallow in depth to warrant any closer examination of that idea; it is essentially baseless, if you will. It may not be a slam dunk to prove it cannot be possible, but it severely lacks in support of it to appear deserving of a closer look (Kastrup-”Meaning in Absurdity” - Flying spaghetti monster)
However, if everything in reality is within consciousness such as suggested by Analytic Idealism, which seems to be what makes most sense, then we no longer have this issue. We reconcile this by reframing the nature of reality from the currently accepted view, replacing it with a more coherent view which allows for this type of experience of ‘sensing of emotions left behind’ to take place and without running into problems.
Under the philosophy of Analytic Idealism, ALL reality is mental processes, and not my mental processes or yours, but as a universal cosmic consciousness outside of our individual minds (Kastrup 2020). And, it states, that reality is not actual physical stuff with standalone existence…What we see and perceive as the physical world IS out there but we do not see a mirror image of reality in its entirety. What we perceive as a physical inanimate object or another individual, is a representation OF that thing or person but not the thing (or person) in and of itself.
From this perspective “Stone Tape Theory” can be explained without any conflict such as abstract matter acquiring feelings because the wood or rock is a mental process of the world from universal consciousness, as it represents itself to us. So essentially you have one mental or emotional state (feeling associated with the trauma) influencing the other(human being sensing the presence of said emotion). We experience this in life daily with our emotions influencing our thoughts and vice versa. This is not only the only plausible way to posit the Stone Tape idea, it also poses no conflicts if mental states outside of the experiencer, within the shared transpersonal space, are impinging upon said experiencer. It is analogous to how we sense what others around us feel, just that these emotional states are not from another living person, they are from mind at large as contributed by a person or entity when dissociated from mind at large. Upon physical death, under analytic idealism, that dissociation ends, the consciousness of the individual continues on, but then assimilates back into universal phenomenal consciousness.
Even when taking into account the usual law of thermodynamics saying energy cannot be created or destroyed but can be transferred, under today’s worldview of physicalism, this Stone Tape thing runs into problems. It does state that rocks, wood, crystals, etc. can absorb and amplify energy, however this should not be conflated with qualia or qualitative experience such as love, anger, sadness because those are not data or mechanistic like a sound wave, nor are they descriptions of an experience like how loud something is in decibels, but rather, they ARE the experience to be described. They are experiential in nature.
A good way to understand what it means when I say that Analytic Idealism suggests that how we see the world isn't the world itself but a representation of the world that exists out there, is to liken it to clicking on a computer icon on your desktop, to play a video file (Hoffman/Kastrup 2020). It is not the entire process down to the most granular of details of opening a video that follows. That icon simply represents the process in as much as you need to see it to generate or have the experience OF the video. You don’t experience every line of code, file extension, etc. Analytic Idealism suggests that reality works the same way, as our senses, limited as we know to only portions of the spectrums of light, sound, etc., show us only what we need, to perceive OF the world so as to allow us to navigate it.
This concept of reality, of which we are all a part, allows for this Stone Tape-like experience to be perceived as an excitation of the subjective field being observed (in other words, a happening observed in the environment). Because…everything, under this idea of a reality consisting of mental processes, exists within consciousness.
So, someone who experienced trauma at a location, acquired that experience and the feelings which accompany it during their lifetime, and took it with them upon physical death. After passing on, their consciousness does continue with memory of experiences and who they identified themselves to be, but now as a part of a greater collective…a mind at large. It’s like ink drops landing in a river. They are always there, but no longer perceived as something discreetly separate as the smaller assimilates into the larger (Kastrup 2020). Metaphorically speaking, the feelings or thoughts we sense to be left behind, those are the ink, universal consciousness is the river(Kastrup 2021).
Given the impact of trauma on one's life, it stands to reason that those feelings could re-represent themselves (manifest) within the transpersonal space (the world we share out there) as they are associated with the location of the traumatic experience. So when a person/investigator is at a given location (let’s say an allegedly haunted location per the inspiration to rethink this Stone Tape Theory), that place is within the field of subjectivity they are experiencing as a representation of what actually is, and those traumatic excitations are behaviors OF that field. This explains how they can be observed (sensed/felt) from a second person perspective…aka by the living.
One of the most brilliant metaphors for conceptualizing the idea of differentiating between a thing in and of itself and a behavior of the field of observation is put forth by Dr. Bernardo Kastrup (PhD, PhD). The suggestion is to think of a subjective field, as mentioned above, like a pond, then a ripple across the surface of the water is akin to that sensed emotion or trauma, that behavior of the field. It can’t exist outside of the pond, it’s not its own thing. There is nothing to it BUT the pond…it’s simply a behavior of the field being observed. It’s what the pond appears to be doing. So…
The manifestation and sensing of the feeling fueled by trauma is what the house or the location being observed, seems to be doing. IF you are sensing or feeling it, that is the conscious excitation of the subjective field impinging upon your dashboard of perception, which comprises our sensory input. (Kastrup 2017).
The one other aspect of both Stone Tape Theory and Psychometry, which paranormalists will suggest in justifying their belief in these phenomena, is that the intensity of something such as trauma, being killed horrifically for example, singes itself to the material environment like a branding iron. This does not seem to be a fundamental element of the phenomena since oftentimes the medium who senses through psychometry or from getting a sensation within an environment, reports of things not so intense or traumatic such as three children with a puppy once lived there. These interpretations oftentimes also prove to be historically accurate, so intensity of experience, something we cannot measure, does not seem to be integral to the phenomena taking place.
Conclusion
So in summary, if we stick with the currently accepted idea of reality being physical, outside of consciousness and with standalone existence, Stone Tape Theory, as well as Psychometry, continues to appear to lack coherence, seemingly turning against themselves, with matter devoid of qualities suddenly taking them on. This is why I stated that both experiences, under physicalism, are almost cartoonish in nature, because in order for both to be true experiences, it requires one to abandon much of what we know to be true in reality, akin to what we do when watching a cartoon. We watch a piano land on a cartoon character’s head, see them fold up like an accordion, then unfold their body and walk it off. We abandon laws and patterns of nature, empirically true according to science. This cannot be how the paranormal justifies experience. But with reality being mental, or conscious in and of itself, then the experience of a trauma being sensed by a 2nd person perspective within an environment, can be explained without conflict. At the very least, it gains enough support to be worth entertaining it. With universal phenomenal consciousness as the ontic primitive, Stone Tape Theory, or Psychometry, can be given a serious nod of legitimacy without clashing with laws of science that are ratified, not merely speculative, purely for the comfort of retaining a long held belief.
Acknowledgments
Dr. Bernardo Kastrup - Essentia Foundation/Author/ PhD; PhD - essentiafoundation.org/ https://www.bernardokastrup.com/
Marta Jary - 2018 https://www.mamamia.com.au/stone-tape-theory-ghosts/
Brittney Anne Bos, PhD - Haunted Walk Tour Guide & Host -https://hauntedwalk.com/news/the-stone-tape-theory/
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