Are ghosts people?

To finally live up to the name of this blog, I think it was high time I went onto another rant about some inane but (hopefully) interesting topic and idea. So here you go, My latest train of thought and rant.

It’s been quite some time since my last post, but this one should be much more interesting than my previous ones.

I grew up in a culture that believes that spirits and ghosts are ephemeral but conscious beings: entities that cannot be greatly impacted by the laws of nature, but possess sentience and the power to exert an influence on nature. They are the result of human deaths (mostly), but are independent of the motives and desires of humanity itself. As such, they are unknown players in the game of life, and whether they are considered allies or threats depend on the disposition and personality of the person they are supposed to embody.

For many people, ghosts and spirits have taken on a dichotomous characterization. Thanks to the influence of popular culture, spirits and ghosts now come in two distinct flavors: they are either malicious, dangerous elements that must be excised from the natural plane of existence, or are benevolent entities that in some way will help others as a quest for redemption or a display of kindness.

But because I have too much time on my hands, I was struck by a few questions about spirits and ghosts. The first (Question 1) was this:

“Are ghosts people? If so, what makes them the same person as they are supposed to be?”

This question may seem absurd to many people, but it is rooted in the philosophical question of identity: what makes us us? What makes you, the reader, the same person 5 years ago, or even 5 minutes ago?

In Macbeth (the play), Macbeth sees the ghost of his father, who warns him of the impending drama and danger that he will face throughout the story. Yet, had Macbeth been educated in philosophy instead of warfare and politics, I wonder if he would have taken a moment to pause and ask himself if that ghost really was his father.

Once again, if you think this is ludicrous, consider the fact that in real life, we frequently have situations in which we have to ascertain whether a person really is who we expect them to be. How do you determine if a sleepwalker is still responsible for his actions when sleepwalking? Why can you reasonably say that a rape victim who consented when drugged or drunk was not the same person as when they were sober? What differentiates identical twins or clones?

But let’s tackle first the reason as to why people would want to think that ghosts are the spirits of people that have passed. In most cultures, ghostly phenomena is often depicted as a form of living after death. The most common representation is the concept of a ‘soul’, the kernel of personhood in which a person is composed of.

The soul is used as the basis of identity due to two properties; it is indestructible and immutable. It is indestructible in the sense that it can never be destroyed or removed, thus providing identity the permanence we seek. Secondly, it is immutable in the sense that it cannot be modified. While also contributing to the sense of permanence, the soul’s immutability is crucial to our ability to declare whether a person is the same at different places and different times. Because the soul doesn’t change at all, we can confidently say that a person that has a particular soul at any point in time and space will be the same person!

The interesting fact about this conception of ghosts and souls is that this is only one way of understanding personhood. In practicum, this definition and its implications are not measurable and hence not useful for situations such as amnesia, unconsciousness, Alzheimer’s, etc. Because there was no robust and objective way to measure or detect a soul, it seems unnecessary to assume that souls even exist as an actual object that allows for the existence of ghosts and spirits.

Beyond the usefulness argument, let’s consider the idea of the soul being the kernel for personhood. While it is acceptable on a surface-level, when you begin considering a variety of situations, you might start to find that it is difficult to justify that the soul remains the true kernel of personhood.

First, let’s assume that an evil poltergeist exist. Using the soul theory, we would thus assume that the soul is that of an evil soul. This is common, especially in horror movies, where ghosts are malicious creatures, embodying the emotions of hate, rage, and distrust. These ghosts are said to be the tortured souls of the dead, whose lives were marred by a painful history and memories of sadness and rage.

Several people would explain this by using the idea that the soul was corrupted from the soul of the original person. While a convenient plot device, it destroys our ability to claim then that the poltergeist is the same person as it was supposed to be. As the basis of identity, the soul should be indestructible and immutable. Thus, it should be incorruptible. Any direct change to the soul would thus remove our ability to say whether it is the same person.

(Besides, I always thought that the explanation was a weak one, as though they were making the statement that people can become evil through instances of misery. After all, we are more than our pain. On the flipside, we are also more than our virtue. Similar stories of completely benevolent ghosts, while not as bad (because it is not as common), would certainly not be accurate of the person that they are supposed to be. But that is a discussion for another time.)

So what does this mean to the soul theory for ghosts?

I think that our popular conceptions of spirits and ghosts show that we aren’t really conceptualizing ghosts via souls. Instead, we are using a concept that allows us to have ghosts come in the form that captures specific essences of a person that allows us to reason that they are the same person, but at the same time allows us to freeze them in a specific frame of behavior and thought, similar to that of a snapshot, or maybe even a memory.

Enter John Locke, who proposed a radical idea for the theory of personhood. He rejected the idea of relying on concepts such as souls, and instead argued for a Memory theory of personhood. In other words, what makes you you is not that you have your soul, but you have your thoughts and memories that define you. You are able to comprehend yourself as a thinking intelligent being who knows that you are the same thinking intelligent being at different times and places. Granted, he made it very clear that he was referring living beings, but I think for this post, we should explore how this idea applies to spirits and non-living things.

This was revolutionary in many ways. It opened a possible solution to questions such as responsibility of people who have no memory of their actions, and allows us more nuance in saying whether a person 10 years ago is the same as a person today. Yet, as much as I can search for, I have yet to find anyone apply this theory on ghosts themselves.

So if a soul is not useful enough for our purposes, and memories are more promising. How does that translate to ghosts? What makes the ghost of someone the same person as when they were alive?

I guess, what I am trying to say is, there is so much exploration that can be done if we are to force ourselves to think about ghosts and spirits in another way.

So, if we are use memories as the basis of how we understand personhood, it brings many interesting implications to our stories and ideas about spirits. If a person is that specific person only because of their memories, then a ghost is the same person if and only if they possess the same memories.

So let’s assume we come across the ideal candidate ghost. It is a spirit that, when tested extensively, appears to have all the memories of the person it is supposed to be. Can we say for certain then that it is the same person as it is supposed to be? By Locke’s (modified) definition, we can. There is nothing that prevents us from using this (modified) theory to say that the ghost and its dead are the same person.

So here comes question no. 2:

“Does a ghost have the same memories as the person they are supposed to be?”

While the first question tackles the question of whether a ghost is a person normatively, this second question tackles the question of whether a ghost is a person descriptively. The easiest way to differentiate these two questions is by asking the questions in this form:

Normative: SHOULD WE THINK that ghosts are the same persons as they are supposed to be? Why?

Descriptive: ARE ghosts the same persons as they are supposed to be? Why?

So far, we have considered using souls as the basis of identity for humans and, by extension, ghosts. However, we found that to be problematic and not representative of how we truly conceptualize spirits. Then, we turn to Locke and employ memory and consciousness as the basis of identity, with greater success. The next step would be to investigate if it is the case that ghosts are the same persons as they are supposed to be via having the same memories.

I think there is a lot of potential evidence for this fact.  Ghosts and spirits are commonly portrayed as being of a singular intent, emotion, or ideal. This is very reminiscent of our ideas of other people’s identities, in which we define them as how we remember them.

This is important, because this is the key in which we determine whether ghosts are the same persons as they are supposed to be.

As Locke puts it, the knowledge that you currently are the same person at the different time and space is the key factor in determining your identity. We have usually interpreted this to mean that you are the same person as you were 5 years ago because you have the memories of being that person up to the point where you are now, PLUS all the memories of that the person 5 years ago has.

Of course, some of you might now be (rightly) having problems with this rule; it definitely opens a whole can of worms that this rant will not discuss (until next time!). But for our purposes, it should suffice.

So what is the evidence we have of ghosts being the same person as they are supposed to be? Is there a way we can test these ghosts and see if they have the memories or the consciousness to recognize that they as an intelligent thinking being is the same intelligent thinking being before they were dead?

The answer to this question differs greatly from each incarnation of a ghost. Some will be like our poltergeist, a spirit who puts possesses the husk of a person but could no more remember details of their previous lives as a drunk of their sober times. Some spirits will be so cognizant of this fact that they will even realize and accept that they are no longer living. It would seem that only some of them are the same person as they were supposed to be.

However, I present an alternate hypothesis; that a ghost in any situation could not have the capacity nor the ability to remember being the same person as they are supposed to be, because they are themselves the memories, not the experiencer themselves.

Consider what it means to be a ghost. A ghost is a being in likeness of the dead that is not greatly affected by the laws of nature, yet they can exert some influence on nature itself. The closet analog we have of that in practicum are memories. These bits of information of our living history are not greatly affected by Nature, yet they exert a tremendous amount of influence on our nature, that is our attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions. In fact, the analog is so similar, that I wonder if it is unnecessary to differentiate between them at all.

Some people may argue that ghosts are more greatly unaffected by nature than our memories, which is vulnerable to our biases, physical damage to the brain, etc… However, if we assume a ghost to be the embodiment of the collective memories of a group of people of an object, then this argument is accounted for. Memories may be vulnerable to change, but if several people share the same memory, then it becomes unlikely that the memory is greatly affected by one instance of nature.

My second move is to explain the possibility that ghosts are not experiencers of events, and hence not thinking beings, lending more strength to the idea that they are just the memories of the experiencer.

At a surface-level, we can conceptualize thinking beings to be entities that are able to react to stimuli, learn from their history, and consciously experience their world. I chose to prioritize these three conditions because they seem to encompass what most people accept are needed to be a thinking being. Ghosts will not be able to fulfill these three conditions completely.

The first condition, to react to stimuli, is simple often to fulfil, and indeed ghosts are able to do so, based on the consistent ruleset that make up their existence. They can phase through solid objects, sure, but they can also react to what they see, hear, and feel. As such, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and consider them to have fulfilled the first condition.

Moving on the second condition, learning from their history. Here, the condition is much more problematic. Ghosts are defined by ideas of permanence and invariance, being unable to grow, change, or learn much. For example, we can see that, in many ghost movies, the ghosts can play the piano, but they never did learn how to play other instruments, despite being in existence for millennia. This suggests a startling lack of growth and change seems to be a core feature of being a ghost.

And what about the third condition, that is the ability to experience their world. Disregarding the debate of p-zombies, the fact that ghosts are once again, by their nature, defined as being unable to experience their world, lends credence to the idea that they are not experiencers.

So what does that leave us? The idea that the ghosts are really just the memories of the original experiencer. If we are more convinced by this idea than the idea that they are the person in life that they are supposed, then we would come to the conclusion that descriptively, we cannot say ghosts are the original person.

So every instance of a ghost or spirit you see is more likely a copy of the memories of a person than the actual experiencer of those memories. It seems that death really does reclaim all, and leaves us only paltry comfort.