Ghosts, Luck, And Curses

Yes, I’m discussing ghosts, luck, and curses – and just in time for Halloween.  Utter nonsense, you say?  We’ll see.  These things are more related – and possible – than you think.  What exactly is a ghost?  The Merriam-Webster web site defines a ghost as a disembodied soul.[1]  I’m going to use the term spirit instead of soul and focus on the consciousness aspect of it in this discussion.  So I would expect a spirit to contain a person’s thoughts, feelings, and memories but without physical sensations or requirements such as hunger or tiredness.  In my opinion, a spirit is what we generally interact with when we interact with someone on a psychological or intellectual level.

If I forget something, like where I put my car keys, I still consider my spirit to be intact.  I also don’t consider my spirit lessened if I stop being angry at someone, if my headache goes away, or if I’m not hungry at the moment.  How much can a person forget or not feel before we consider their spirit to not be a spirit?  A lot, I think.  What are the minimum requirements of being considered a spirit?  In the field of artificial intelligence, there’s something called the Turing test in which a human and a computer communicate with each other only by text.[2]  If a judge for the test cannot successfully determine which participant is the human, then the computer has passed the test.  So we kind of want a Turing test for spirits or ghosts.

While alive, we all have effects on our environment that have varying degrees of permanence.  We might (e.g.) leave muddy footprints in the kitchen, paint the bedroom walls, or plant flowers outside in the yard.  But we also might interact with our environment on a more subconscious level, becoming one with the environment in a way.  Many animals and entire species do this naturally without thinking so much like we do, doing what the environment rewards them to do and avoiding things that cause pain or loss.  The environment might respond in a similar way to them, so that the animals form a system with their environment.  As humans are also animals, we can expect subtle effects to exist in the environment after our departure.  Maybe the flowers we planted outside are still growing after we are gone.  Or if we were careless in life, the items we placed where they might fall might in fact still fall when vibrated by a passing truck or train.  Someone may judge that such an item falling was actually caused to fall by the ghost of the deceased, still careless or clumsy in the afterlife.  Did the deceased person’s effects on their environment pass the Turing test?  That’s one interpretation.

We also experience our own effects while living.  Some people seem lucky.  Maybe they change their environment in hidden ways to benefit them as if by magic.  Or maybe they learn to act in a way to receive benefits with no apparent causal condition.  So we can kind of make our own luck to some extent.

Curses are similar to luck, but maybe it’s the “cursed” who is made to act through some hidden or subconscious means, instead of the environment.  In other words, we might have hidden effects on each other.  So maybe a Voodoo priest tells someone they are cursed, and the “cursed” person might believe it and become a victim by subconsciously causing their own problems.  Numerous television show episodes have illustrated this possibility over the years.  The environment itself might also have subconscious effects or other hidden effects on us, not tied to a specific (or any?) deceased person.  As a result, we might label such a place as evil or cursed.

Some marketing people might resort to using a similar kind of subconscious manipulation, to try to trick us into buying products.  Such marketers might try to appeal to our emotions such as fear, in a way we are not consciously aware of.  Politicians in the United States may resort to the same tricks.  A common tactic is for them to say very negative things about their political opponents.  So if you happen to be looking for a scary Halloween costume but with a modern twist, consider dressing as a manipulative marketer or politician.  Some people say that ghosts are not real.  Negative marketers and political campaigners, are – unfortunately – quite real.  Now that’s scary.

References

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghost

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

(c) Copyright 2018 by Mike Ferrell