Do Ghosts Exist?

Do ghosts/spirits exist?

What's really interesting about this question is that you don't need postulate any new physics, or anything else, for that matter, for ghosts to exist, you just have to recognize and accept that fact that the body of science isn't complete. Or, to put it another way, "science doesn't know everything." Just have a look at what we have already: There is "dark matter," something nobody's ever seen or detected, despite over 100 years of looking, yet scientists say makes up over 90% of the universe. You and me included. Also, thanks to quantum mechanics, we have particles that behave like naughty children, doing one thing when you're "watching" and something quite different when you're not. (Double Slit Experiment)

The debate is still raging about what it means that you can change the outcome of a physics experiment simply by observing it. I mean, how do the particles "know" that you are looking at them anyway? Isn't that a case of human minds directly influencing matter, i.e. a "psychic power?" If not, why not?

Getting back to ghosts. What are ghosts? A common definition is that they are some form of consciousness, disconnected from a material body. Millions of people around the world claim to seeing or interacting with spirits every day, so there plenty of empirical evidence that they exist. However, it is all subjective, and there is no, really good, object evidence, so far. (Before you say "Ah ha! If it was there they would have found it by now!" Remember, they have been looking for Dark Matter for 100 years, have not found anything, yet it's still respectable to spend millions of dollars on experiments looking for it.)

Now, before you declare victory for the materialists, consider this: There is no hard, objective, evidence that consciousness exists. Yup, there is a group of respected scientists that believe the consciousness does not exist, and the thing that you call "consciousness" is merely an illusion. (The hard problem of consciousness) Even among those who agree that consciousness exists, nobody knows what it is. Since we can't detect it or measure it in any way, we have no way of knowing if consciousness is dependent on the brain or not. Thus we have the two main models: Brain as Generator and brain as Phone.

Brain as Generator says that the physical brain generates consciousness. Brain as phone says that the physical brain acts like a cell phone, a conduit through which the "spirit" interacts with the physical world. These two models are debated, but the phone model not given much credence. All the evidence that I can find for the Generator point of view, consists of noticing that damaging or stimulating various parts of the brain effect perception and consciousness, and saying that demonstrates that consciousness is created within the brain. On the other hand, is someone out there willing to argue that messing with the inside of your cell phone, so that it doesn't work so well, or not at all, proves that the voices, texts and internet content it displays are generated within the phone? If not, then the Generator model has no evidence at all.

The empirical evidence implies that consciousness survives death and does not need a physical brain to exist. (i.e. "ghosts") But we're not likely to find out more than that anytime soon, because the real question is, why is it considered rational and scientific, to ignore the vast body of empirical evidence, and ridicule anyone who attempts to do serious research in that area, in favor of a position that, admittedly, has no evidence, even anecdotal, to support it's position?