If you saw a ghost, would you believe in it?
I’ve been asking friends (and a couple of strangers) questions about ghosts. Specifically, I had these questions:
- If you saw a ghost, would you start believing in ghosts, or would you think you were hallucinating?
- Let’s say you go to a psychiatrist and they tell you that based on your experience of seeing ghosts, they think you might have condition X, which very rarely presents any danger to you or others. However, they can offer you some medication to stop you from seeing ghosts, if you want. Do you take it?
- Let’s assume the ghost seldom talks to you, but when it does, it tells you things that you didn’t know and that usually turn out to be true. Does that change your decision on whether to take the meds?
- (This one only if they thought they were hallucinating): Is there any experience you could have of the ghost, without anyone else perceiving it, that would give it the same ontological status for you as other people? Let’s assume it’s too enigmatic to participate in experiments like having a friend write down a random number and asking the ghost what they wrote.
I haven’t been formally tracking results, but here are some informal observations:
- A number of people said that their first response would be to assume that someone was playing a joke on them, which hadn’t even occurred to me. After that, people overwhelmingly thought that they were hallucinating. One person gave an 80% chance that ghosts existed after seeing one; only two people believed in ghosts a priori
- I found out that a lot of people have associations with the word “ghost” that I don’t. I wouldn’t assume that a ghost was unfriendly, but virtually everyone I talked to did. A number of people also focused on the visual aspect of perceiving the ghost. A better way to communicate the question probably would have been “sensed a spirit,” but this seemed to me like it might scare people people off. But who knows - maybe people would be more willing to believe in a ghost that they could sense without seeing.
- People seem to have a healthy skepticism of psychiatric pharmacology. Among all the people I spoke with, none of them were willing to take the medication (the person who came closest wanted to try psychadelics and IFS therapy first). To quote someone who summed up responses here: “nahh seems sketchy.”
- The ghost’s predictions changed zero minds. Interestingly, this was true with regards to the medication, but also wrt the existence/nonexistence of the ghost: materialists remained solidly committed to materialism.
- None of the materialists I asked could be convinced that the ghost existed without experimentation of some sort.
I’d also like to note that I’m an engineer, and most of my friends are also engineers. That’s a pretty big sampling bias.
Alright, cool, so what’s the point of this? I’m interested in how (un)willing different people are to commit to their phenomenological experiences. One person I asked assigned an 80% probability to ghosts existing based on seeing one once. A number of people said they could never be convinced that ghosts exist without experimental evidence of some sort. What consequences do these views have? Are there better or worse ways to approach “magical” experiences?
The strategy I’m most interested in is 100% commitment to empiricism/materialism (I’ll drop the “materialism” from here for brevity and to avoid unwanted misinterpretation of materialism as consumerism). I suspect this strategy is over-represented in my sampling, but it’s interesting to me for reasons beyond its popularity. The big advantage of empiricism, particularly when you 100% commit to it, is that it’s self-consistent. The empiricist argument for rejecting an experience is something like: “I compare the probability that I’m hallucinating (base rate of hallucination given my individual priors) to some prior estimate of the probability that ghosts exist and one of them wants to talk to me. I find that the first probability is far greater than the second, and conclude that I am hallucinating.”
Empricism is probably the best tool out there for being right, but here’s my best shot at an argument against committing to it: sooner or later, most people have an experience that they can’t understand or reliably replicate. Some people have many. If you use empiricism to try to understand an experience like this, you will conclude that it was a hallucination, and you will need significantly more skill and subtlety to handle the experience in (what I’d consider) a healthy way.
For example, as an empiricist you could use a lens like IFS or Core Transformation, and interpret your experience as a hallucination created intentionally by some part of yourself that you don’t have direct access to (let’s say you accept these systems as useful metaphors, since I haven’t seen any studies confirming that they are literally true). If you take the correct approach towards your parts, you should take this hallucination seriously, and you can explore it by asking it questions, etc. Maybe you run into some issues with replicability, but we’ll ignore that. Aesthetically, though, this approach isn’t very empiricist and almost feels like a loophole to me. Every material thing you interact with is a mental formation whose internal state you can’t access - this approach lets you basically interact with hallucinations like they’re material objects without making an ontological commitment. But I think this lack of commitment is limiting. When we interact with a spirit, there is a chance of being knocked flat on our backs, of being completely destroyed, of being defeated and humbled by something older and vaster than ourselves. When I interact with a part, this possibility seems pretty remote.
Now, there’s a very good chance this just means I’m doing IFS wrong or something - but that’s the point I’m trying to make. As an empiricist, I can put a great deal of time and effort into realizing increasingly nuanced conscious understanding of an idea, and if I’m very clever or have a good teacher I might eventually gain a level of understanding that allows me to interact with it skillfully. But by strategically relaxing my empiricism when I don’t feel that it’s useful, I have the opportunity to meet my phenomenological experience with openness and curiosity in a way that I just don’t think I could do if I was busy trying to figure out what makes it tick. Plus, I don’t have to deal with some of the weirdness that comes with selectively invalidating my own experiences. If you’re going to selectively invalidate your experiences, you need to be really, really careful about your priors, especially the ones related to what kinds of experiences are valid. By biasing towards updating based on experience, I can afford to be wrong more, which is slack I probably need.
Ideally, I think, I wouldn’t react to seeing a ghost by questioning its material existence in the first place - at least, not while I was having the experience. Even the question of whether something exists has a distinctly empirical flavor to me. The concept of existence itself brings in a bunch of tricky assumptions, so even just asking myself whether something exists might lead to modes of thought that aren’t useful for a mystical experience.
A blogger asked Joshu, “If you saw a ghost, would you start believing in ghosts, or would you think you were hallucinating?”
Joshu replied, “mu!”
Anyway, I don’t mean to imply that there are right or wrong answers here. Empiricism plus skillful practice is probably at least as good as mysticism at promoting wholesome choices, and it has the benefit of being more explainable to a lot of people. I’m just saying that if you did want to fuck around and find out, I wouldn’t blame you.