Thank goodness then that the pineal gland transduces electrochemical signals to ectoplasm! (Btw I think you forgot about the philosophical troll, who has qualia when talking to an illusionist and lacks them when talking to a realist.)
The reverse troll would (claim to) have qualia when talking to a phenomenal realist, and lack them when talking to an illusionist. That would be the scariest monster of all: the politician.
Hart and Yagisawa had an idea (building on Hart's book, "The Engines of the Soul") about how ghosts could see: by absorbing, at a point, the light coming from a certain direction, and converting that energy into "psychic energy" which is measured by the degree of belief it is able to sustain. If the energy sustains true beliefs about the source of the light, it could be a kind of seeing. Here's an uncorrected proof of their fun little paper: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.csun.edu/~vcoao0fk/Ghosts.pdf
Very true and why I never believed in ghosts. If your retina is invisible, you can't capture photons. For that matter, the lens of your eye won't work. If your eardrums are incorporeal, you can't capture soundwaves.
I thought the point of philosophical ghosts is that we can imagine being bodiless, and so we are not (or at least we don't think of ourselves as being) bodies.
If that means imagining being in a void without any physical senses, so be it. I think that will still be conceivable to the people making and being persuaded by the argument -- and, importantly, those people could still see themselves identifying with such a ghost.
You may recall that I think of the mind as an abstract functional structure that happens to be instantiated by the brain, but has its own independent existence as a mathematical object. So, I can imagine existing as this alone with all physical stuff stripped away. I think I actually do have future selves which exist in such a state, but I think that for reasons not really understood the measure for such future selves is extremely small, which is why we don't expect to experience them.
i can understand a mathematical pythagoreanism but have zero idea what stripping all of the physical away would be as opposed to a reducing of the physical to a subset of the mathematical. Reduction retains, not eliminates. How would ghosts see the front but not the back of a house if there were no houses and no spatial locations for ghosts to occupy??? One option for you is what I would call a brute pythagoreanism, where we just identify every assertion with a number. So you could then answer my question by saying “777.345, that’s how.”
Maybe we're talking at cross-purposes. You introduced your article by comparing ghosts to philosophical zombies, so I take you to be talking about philosophical-thought-experiment-ghosts as opposed to the ghosts of ghost stories. P-ghosts can be blind. They don't have to have any interaction at all with the physical world. They probably don't go in for haunting, for example. They just exist in a void, perhaps.
So, to get a bit more concrete (or, abstract, I guess), in terms of what I actually believe: I think that there is a coarse-graining of the causal dynamics of my brain that sufficiently captures what I identify with that I would be happy enough to call it "me". Right now, this causal structure is being fed sensory information that ultimately comes from physical interaction with the physical world. But we could simulate these dynamics on a computer and give it simulated sensory input and it would still have similar dynamics. The whole simulated system (mind + whatever generates sensory input) is an abstract structure that I think has an independent mathematical existence.
Now, you could say that the simulated environment is just the physical world for this mind, and the means by which the sensory input is fed into the mind is effectively its "body". Well, OK. But I think we could just not simulate the world at all and just feed no sensory data into the mind, and at least for a while it would still be thinking and feeling emotions and so on and would be enough like me that I'd call it "me". And again, the abstract structure of this simulation also has an independent mathematical existence.
When I think about what my future holds, I think about all the possible mathematical structures that contain observers that are enough like me that I would be happy to identify with them. They have my memories and beliefs and attributes etc. What I expect to experience then depends on a measure defined over those structures and observers. Empirically, this measure appears to favour entire physical worlds and not just versions of me in a void, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some infinitesimal probability that I'll find myself a ghost in a void tomorrow.
what are physical things such that your pythagoreanism isn’t reducing any of them but instead eliminating all them? Is it just what i called “brute pythagoreanism”?
What you call brute pythagoreanism is just identifying every assertion with a number, which seems pretty out of left-field to me. That certainly doesn't feel like my view, even if maybe there is way to mapping my view to something like that following something like a Godel-encoding (I don't know).
To me, what is physical is indexical. I take my sensory data to be telling me about a structure that I'm embedded in and in causal interaction with. What is physical to me is this structure and its parts. I think ultimately it's all mathematical and abstract from an objective point of view, but from a POV within the structure it's physical.
As long as I'm embedded in a physical world, then the coarse-grained causal structure of my brain I identify with is not quite physical, just because it is a coarse-grained abstraction. If I go and try to peer into my brain with a microscope I'll see quarks and electrons, not an abstract causal structure.
But I guess if we consider that abstract causal structure in its own terms, and consider it as isolated in a void, then by my own definition that abstract causal structure would just be the physics of that possible world, and so it would be physical in that sense.
I think maybe we are getting to some sort of agreement, or at least understanding. On days that I am a pythagorean, I'm this kind: the mental reduces to a subset of the physical, which in turn reduces to a subset of the mathematical, (which in turn reduces to pure hot kinky sets). Every time you mention brains, I hear you as endorsing this kind of pythagoreanism. Now, on to ghosts and zombies. Ghost and zombie arguments target not just standard physicalism, but also this brand of pythagoreanism. Is it possible for there to be the physical aspects of a person without the mental (zombies) or the mental without the physical (ghosts)? Note this formulation is just about zombie persons and ghost persons. Another formulation would be about entire zombie worlds and entire ghost worlds. My article here is just focusing on the person version, and I wasn't thinking about pythagoreanism until you popped into the comments. But now that we're being pythagoreans (as a treat) probably the ghost world version is the most pertinent. Is it possible for there to be a world that is just like the current one, but has NO physical properties, only mental and mathematical ones. If you think the way the mind reduces to the mathematical is via something-something-brains, it sounds like you have a physical layer (which happens to reduce to a mathematical layer) and so isn't any defense of a ghost world. Sounds like you're not a very good friend to ghosts!
I just brought my views into it because you said I had to be pro-ghosts or anti-ghosts, so I was trying to work out which I should be.
But forget about me. From the point of view of a Cartesian dualist, then, I don't see what's the problem with just accepting that ghosts are blind, and don't see things from a particular point in space. So, how is this an argument against dualism? Or is it even supposed to be?
either it’s entirely nonspatial or it’s an extensionless point . as addressed in the article, extensionless points can’t see shapes, because of rays converging to a single point. they can’t see shapes on the screen of the cartesian theater either.
Who said anything about an extensionless point seeing via rays of light? When the mind sees stuff, it's via the visual system. Information is transmitted from the brain via the pineal gland/magic. Perhaps it uses a serial stream of bits via the TLS protocol. An extensionless point should be able to pick up a sequence of on/off signals encoding a shape.
Hmm, although I guess figment can't get through such a narrow bottleneck. So I'll revise. The Cartesian theatre must be entirely on the soul side of the divide.
I think you’re onto something there. Descartes did invent analytic geometry after all, and thought our grasp of shape via the intellect was way better than the crap the body delivers up—non-intellectual sensory ideas are confused for him. Arguably he didn’t solve the problem to his own satisfaction. And really, the kind of bit stream idea you’re floating here needed Leibniz to come along and invent binary. Poor Descartes!
The logic is sound, and it was this way until late 20th century fantasy and game explosion.
There are now many “harder” explanations, from authors who have delved into science and kept the fantasy.
a. Separate location, near but unachievable. Think: your mind is an observer in a train car 1. Passenger can see himself and the world through window. Ghost is in the car 2, can only see the world.
b. Unmeasured spectrum. Imagine a ghost that exists in frequencies that we ignore.
c. Split mind. Persona in your subconscious.
d. New dimensions entirely. Someone is sitting in the 4D corner of your room right now, and can’t merge into your 3D room well, only accidental shadows and “energy” etc.
All of this makes for good fodder for new generations of mystic writing. Science is king, of course. I’m not advocating for any paranormal “explanations”, only picking on very dry and narrow “visible light” topic.
Eyes are just lenses with photosensitive receivers. Lenses are just one method of “seeing.” Lensless imaging technology is pretty far along at places like MIT and Cal Tech. Law enforcement has lensless instruments that can see through walls. NASA uses a lensless passive sensor for “seeing” black holes in far galaxies. Light is just radio waves, but farther up the spectrum to what we call “visible.” Assuming existence of a disembodied entity, you’d also need to assume perception of visible spectrum RF energy in terms of disturbance patterns, rather than “pictures.” Advanced defense tech can recognize radiated energy patterns and draw detailed images from a correlating database. Ghostly imaging mechanisms opens the discussion to all sorts of pseudo-quantum physics and metaphysical philosophy. I’m just a guy in a lab with machines that blink and beep.
Pretty sure the author blocked me for this comment as it probably disturbed the vibe she was going for. Either that or I simply annoyed her. Her Substack hasn’t appeared in my feed since I posted it.
My bad. I obviously confused you with another author, probably the one who restacked your article to get comments from her followers. Your piece is very good, I just threw in my two cents on lensless imaging as an instrumentation engineering brain fart.
Ha, philosophical ghosts — never heard of that one! But they shouldn’t need to be blind if they’re magical. So they’re conceivable just as magic in general can be conceived. Same for philosophical zombies since in a natural world mind must be a causal dynamic in order to exist. To me the “conceivability” argument seems like a place where philosophers have tricked themselves by conflating epistemology for ontology. Just because something is conceivable (epistemology) doesn’t mean it’s possible (ontology).
Wow. I can literally feel, right now, what it would be like to be a ghost made of qualia, absorbing photon qualia.
I feel sorry though for the zombie photons post-qualia-absorption. But perhaps zombie photons recover their qualia through some quantum effect. Yes, that must be it. Phew.
Thank goodness then that the pineal gland transduces electrochemical signals to ectoplasm! (Btw I think you forgot about the philosophical troll, who has qualia when talking to an illusionist and lacks them when talking to a realist.)
i’m going to remember the troll for now on. thanks!
What about the reverse? What do you call the reverse troll?
"cringe"
The reverse troll would (claim to) have qualia when talking to a phenomenal realist, and lack them when talking to an illusionist. That would be the scariest monster of all: the politician.
now i’m hungry for waffles.
Great read! Stimulating, never thought of ghosts and zombies as opposites. The werewolf 🤣
It seems photons must have mental properties or be primarily mental or something like that. Yes, that must be it! Ah, so simple.
the photons put their qualia in you when they enter your mind holes
Hart and Yagisawa had an idea (building on Hart's book, "The Engines of the Soul") about how ghosts could see: by absorbing, at a point, the light coming from a certain direction, and converting that energy into "psychic energy" which is measured by the degree of belief it is able to sustain. If the energy sustains true beliefs about the source of the light, it could be a kind of seeing. Here's an uncorrected proof of their fun little paper: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.csun.edu/~vcoao0fk/Ghosts.pdf
thanks Dean! that’s very cool (dad joke intended)
Very true and why I never believed in ghosts. If your retina is invisible, you can't capture photons. For that matter, the lens of your eye won't work. If your eardrums are incorporeal, you can't capture soundwaves.
Nice post.
But, let them be blind then?
I thought the point of philosophical ghosts is that we can imagine being bodiless, and so we are not (or at least we don't think of ourselves as being) bodies.
If that means imagining being in a void without any physical senses, so be it. I think that will still be conceivable to the people making and being persuaded by the argument -- and, importantly, those people could still see themselves identifying with such a ghost.
it’s all or nothing, man. are you with ghosts, or against ghost?
Me, personally? I'm probably with them, TBH.
You may recall that I think of the mind as an abstract functional structure that happens to be instantiated by the brain, but has its own independent existence as a mathematical object. So, I can imagine existing as this alone with all physical stuff stripped away. I think I actually do have future selves which exist in such a state, but I think that for reasons not really understood the measure for such future selves is extremely small, which is why we don't expect to experience them.
i can understand a mathematical pythagoreanism but have zero idea what stripping all of the physical away would be as opposed to a reducing of the physical to a subset of the mathematical. Reduction retains, not eliminates. How would ghosts see the front but not the back of a house if there were no houses and no spatial locations for ghosts to occupy??? One option for you is what I would call a brute pythagoreanism, where we just identify every assertion with a number. So you could then answer my question by saying “777.345, that’s how.”
I refer you to my first comment!
"But, let them be blind then?"
Maybe we're talking at cross-purposes. You introduced your article by comparing ghosts to philosophical zombies, so I take you to be talking about philosophical-thought-experiment-ghosts as opposed to the ghosts of ghost stories. P-ghosts can be blind. They don't have to have any interaction at all with the physical world. They probably don't go in for haunting, for example. They just exist in a void, perhaps.
So, to get a bit more concrete (or, abstract, I guess), in terms of what I actually believe: I think that there is a coarse-graining of the causal dynamics of my brain that sufficiently captures what I identify with that I would be happy enough to call it "me". Right now, this causal structure is being fed sensory information that ultimately comes from physical interaction with the physical world. But we could simulate these dynamics on a computer and give it simulated sensory input and it would still have similar dynamics. The whole simulated system (mind + whatever generates sensory input) is an abstract structure that I think has an independent mathematical existence.
Now, you could say that the simulated environment is just the physical world for this mind, and the means by which the sensory input is fed into the mind is effectively its "body". Well, OK. But I think we could just not simulate the world at all and just feed no sensory data into the mind, and at least for a while it would still be thinking and feeling emotions and so on and would be enough like me that I'd call it "me". And again, the abstract structure of this simulation also has an independent mathematical existence.
When I think about what my future holds, I think about all the possible mathematical structures that contain observers that are enough like me that I would be happy to identify with them. They have my memories and beliefs and attributes etc. What I expect to experience then depends on a measure defined over those structures and observers. Empirically, this measure appears to favour entire physical worlds and not just versions of me in a void, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some infinitesimal probability that I'll find myself a ghost in a void tomorrow.
what are physical things such that your pythagoreanism isn’t reducing any of them but instead eliminating all them? Is it just what i called “brute pythagoreanism”?
What you call brute pythagoreanism is just identifying every assertion with a number, which seems pretty out of left-field to me. That certainly doesn't feel like my view, even if maybe there is way to mapping my view to something like that following something like a Godel-encoding (I don't know).
To me, what is physical is indexical. I take my sensory data to be telling me about a structure that I'm embedded in and in causal interaction with. What is physical to me is this structure and its parts. I think ultimately it's all mathematical and abstract from an objective point of view, but from a POV within the structure it's physical.
As long as I'm embedded in a physical world, then the coarse-grained causal structure of my brain I identify with is not quite physical, just because it is a coarse-grained abstraction. If I go and try to peer into my brain with a microscope I'll see quarks and electrons, not an abstract causal structure.
But I guess if we consider that abstract causal structure in its own terms, and consider it as isolated in a void, then by my own definition that abstract causal structure would just be the physics of that possible world, and so it would be physical in that sense.
I think maybe we are getting to some sort of agreement, or at least understanding. On days that I am a pythagorean, I'm this kind: the mental reduces to a subset of the physical, which in turn reduces to a subset of the mathematical, (which in turn reduces to pure hot kinky sets). Every time you mention brains, I hear you as endorsing this kind of pythagoreanism. Now, on to ghosts and zombies. Ghost and zombie arguments target not just standard physicalism, but also this brand of pythagoreanism. Is it possible for there to be the physical aspects of a person without the mental (zombies) or the mental without the physical (ghosts)? Note this formulation is just about zombie persons and ghost persons. Another formulation would be about entire zombie worlds and entire ghost worlds. My article here is just focusing on the person version, and I wasn't thinking about pythagoreanism until you popped into the comments. But now that we're being pythagoreans (as a treat) probably the ghost world version is the most pertinent. Is it possible for there to be a world that is just like the current one, but has NO physical properties, only mental and mathematical ones. If you think the way the mind reduces to the mathematical is via something-something-brains, it sounds like you have a physical layer (which happens to reduce to a mathematical layer) and so isn't any defense of a ghost world. Sounds like you're not a very good friend to ghosts!
Fair enough!
I just brought my views into it because you said I had to be pro-ghosts or anti-ghosts, so I was trying to work out which I should be.
But forget about me. From the point of view of a Cartesian dualist, then, I don't see what's the problem with just accepting that ghosts are blind, and don't see things from a particular point in space. So, how is this an argument against dualism? Or is it even supposed to be?
either it’s entirely nonspatial or it’s an extensionless point . as addressed in the article, extensionless points can’t see shapes, because of rays converging to a single point. they can’t see shapes on the screen of the cartesian theater either.
Who said anything about an extensionless point seeing via rays of light? When the mind sees stuff, it's via the visual system. Information is transmitted from the brain via the pineal gland/magic. Perhaps it uses a serial stream of bits via the TLS protocol. An extensionless point should be able to pick up a sequence of on/off signals encoding a shape.
Hmm, although I guess figment can't get through such a narrow bottleneck. So I'll revise. The Cartesian theatre must be entirely on the soul side of the divide.
I think you’re onto something there. Descartes did invent analytic geometry after all, and thought our grasp of shape via the intellect was way better than the crap the body delivers up—non-intellectual sensory ideas are confused for him. Arguably he didn’t solve the problem to his own satisfaction. And really, the kind of bit stream idea you’re floating here needed Leibniz to come along and invent binary. Poor Descartes!
The logic is sound, and it was this way until late 20th century fantasy and game explosion.
There are now many “harder” explanations, from authors who have delved into science and kept the fantasy.
a. Separate location, near but unachievable. Think: your mind is an observer in a train car 1. Passenger can see himself and the world through window. Ghost is in the car 2, can only see the world.
b. Unmeasured spectrum. Imagine a ghost that exists in frequencies that we ignore.
c. Split mind. Persona in your subconscious.
d. New dimensions entirely. Someone is sitting in the 4D corner of your room right now, and can’t merge into your 3D room well, only accidental shadows and “energy” etc.
All of this makes for good fodder for new generations of mystic writing. Science is king, of course. I’m not advocating for any paranormal “explanations”, only picking on very dry and narrow “visible light” topic.
👻
Eyes are just lenses with photosensitive receivers. Lenses are just one method of “seeing.” Lensless imaging technology is pretty far along at places like MIT and Cal Tech. Law enforcement has lensless instruments that can see through walls. NASA uses a lensless passive sensor for “seeing” black holes in far galaxies. Light is just radio waves, but farther up the spectrum to what we call “visible.” Assuming existence of a disembodied entity, you’d also need to assume perception of visible spectrum RF energy in terms of disturbance patterns, rather than “pictures.” Advanced defense tech can recognize radiated energy patterns and draw detailed images from a correlating database. Ghostly imaging mechanisms opens the discussion to all sorts of pseudo-quantum physics and metaphysical philosophy. I’m just a guy in a lab with machines that blink and beep.
Pretty sure the author blocked me for this comment as it probably disturbed the vibe she was going for. Either that or I simply annoyed her. Her Substack hasn’t appeared in my feed since I posted it.
misgendering the author isn’t winning you any points
My bad. I obviously confused you with another author, probably the one who restacked your article to get comments from her followers. Your piece is very good, I just threw in my two cents on lensless imaging as an instrumentation engineering brain fart.
Ha, philosophical ghosts — never heard of that one! But they shouldn’t need to be blind if they’re magical. So they’re conceivable just as magic in general can be conceived. Same for philosophical zombies since in a natural world mind must be a causal dynamic in order to exist. To me the “conceivability” argument seems like a place where philosophers have tricked themselves by conflating epistemology for ontology. Just because something is conceivable (epistemology) doesn’t mean it’s possible (ontology).
Pete and I have been over at notes on this so let’s put it here too.
https://substack.com/@ericwilliamborg/note/c-104653558?r=5674xw&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Wow. I can literally feel, right now, what it would be like to be a ghost made of qualia, absorbing photon qualia.
I feel sorry though for the zombie photons post-qualia-absorption. But perhaps zombie photons recover their qualia through some quantum effect. Yes, that must be it. Phew.