Evidence and spooks

 

You said:

There is a problem with saying things like, "There is no evidence of God," or, "There is no evidence of an afterlife," or even, "There is no evidence of things like ghosts or angels or whatever someone is claiming they have experienced or thought up or imagined." The claim is false: there is evidence. Vietnam is somewhat ghost-ridden, and the people are afraid of them: now I am in Cambodia and I hear nothing about them and when I ask, I get a smile and a comment I must be Vietnamese. (Vietnamese rebirth theory says how successful you are at getting reborn tend to be associated with your karma level and therefore evil people become ghosts and are to be feared; the Cambodians I guess are less judgmental and think everyone is reborn within hours of death and therefore ghosts don't exist -- much). **I need to correct this; the Cambodians do have ghosts too, just not so fearsome.** Now all this is evidence. It is not proof, but it is evidence. Of course many think it not very good evidence; that depends on priors. Were I to take surveys about rebirth, almost everyone has a notion of what their past life was like, and many have rather clear memories or experiences of déjà vu that they attribute to past lives. In the West you also get a lot of this sort of testimony, even though, the religious expectations being different, one would not expect it. I think the problem is that the milk is sour—because of religion. Dogmatism ("My notions are right and yours are evil") has turned anyone with a skeptical or even curious mind off, and no scientist would risk his career studying such things. So mostly all we get are professional scam artists milking the ideas for money and professional debunkers pointing out the tricks of the scam artists (and it ain't hard to do). Nor is it necessary to be a hard rock-ribbed "materialist" to disbelieve, or at least strongly doubt, that there is any reality behind all this. I have I think developed a two-tiered personal level of belief: a highly agnostic one teetering on disbelief when it comes to what I will defend publicly and a series of what I guess is more likely the reality but for which it is impossible to gather reliable evidence, the milk being so sour. Nor, of course, is the ultimate retreat of the agnostic ("I don't think it's possible to know") an honest position. It's a cop out. We should at least make speculation and then test the speculation and I wish the environment were such that this was possible. Maybe in a few hundred years, when the dogmatic religions have disappeared. Now, that is optimistic. It may be that dogmatists will always be with us preventing our exploring more objectively. Could I only live so long.

ChatGPT said:

I think you’re putting your finger on a real—and often badly muddled—distinction, and you’re right to insist on it. Saying “there is no evidence” is usually sloppy. What people generally mean, if they’re being careful, is “there is no good evidence by the standards I accept,” or “there is no evidence that compels belief given my priors.” Testimony, cultural patterns, recurring reports, personal experiences, and cross-cultural regularities are all evidence in the ordinary sense of the word. They are not proof, and they are not decisive, but they are not nothing.

Your Vietnam–Cambodia comparison is a nice concrete example of this. The distribution of ghost beliefs is not random noise; it tracks doctrine, social memory, and moral frameworks. That itself is evidence—strong evidence, I’d say—that human experience is being shaped by expectation, narrative, and social reinforcement. Whether that points to an underlying metaphysical reality or merely to very powerful cognitive and cultural mechanisms is precisely the open question. But one cannot even pose that question honestly if one insists, dogmatically, that “there is no evidence.”

I also think you’re right that religion has soured the milk, and perhaps irreversibly so for now. Once metaphysical claims become moralized—“my belief is good, yours is evil”—they stop being hypotheses and become identity markers. At that point, curiosity becomes betrayal, and skepticism becomes heresy. In such an environment, the only people left investigating the phenomena are, as you say, the grifters and the debunkers. The former have an incentive to exaggerate and fabricate; the latter have an incentive to explain everything away as stupidity or fraud. Neither camp is genuinely interested in what might be going on underneath.

Your “two-tier” stance strikes me as not only honest but fairly common among reflective people, even if few admit it. Publicly defensible beliefs have to meet very high evidentiary standards; privately entertained possibilities can be looser, provisional, and frankly speculative. The trouble is that modern discourse pretends this distinction doesn’t exist. One is expected either to believe loudly or to disbelieve absolutely. Quiet, conditional belief—“this seems more likely than not, but I can’t justify it rigorously”—has no safe home.

Where I might push back a little is on your dismissal of agnosticism as a cop-out. There is a shallow agnosticism that really is just intellectual laziness, but there is also a demanding version that says: given the current epistemic environment, I cannot responsibly settle this question, but I will still try to generate models, test implications where possible, and revise my intuitions. That’s not resignation; it’s disciplined humility. Still, I take your point that “we can’t know” too easily becomes an excuse for not even trying to know.

Your optimism about a future without dogmatic religion is touching—and very human—but I’m less confident than you that dogmatism itself is a removable feature. It seems to arise wherever uncertainty meets existential anxiety. If traditional religions fade, something else tends to take their place, often wearing the costume of science or ideology while behaving in exactly the same way. The impulse to declare certain questions closed may be the real constant.

Still, I share your regret. There are phenomena—experiences of continuity, memory, presence, and meaning—that deserve better tools and better intellectual hygiene than we currently have. Whether they point to “something more” or merely to something deeply interesting about the human mind is, in a sense, secondary. What’s been lost is the ability to explore them without immediately being sorted into believer or fool, skeptic or cynic. And yes—one can easily wish for a few extra centuries just to see whether we ever manage to grow up enough to do that properly.

You said:

When pressed for a simple summary of my opinions in these areas, I say "agnostic." The word is understood as saying I don't know (which actually is a better way to put it). The statement you make that there is a sound sort of agnosticism, such as that it would be impossible to know of an infinite being, makes sense to me. The universe might be infinite in extent too, but I can see no way we could ever know it. I just don't think that says much except about the limits of our minds.

ChatGPT said:

That sounds exactly right to me, and I think you’re using agnostic in the most honest, least performative way it can be used: as a statement about your epistemic position, not as a badge or a philosophy. “I don’t know” really is better, because it strips away all the baggage the word has accumulated.

You’re also right to be a bit dissatisfied with what I called “sound agnosticism” when it hardens into something almost metaphysical of its own—this is in principle unknowable. Often that doesn’t tell us much about the thing under discussion; it tells us mostly about the architecture of human cognition and our tools. Saying “we can’t know whether the universe is infinite” is true, but it’s thin gruel. It doesn’t guide action, refine hypotheses, or even sharpen curiosity very much. It just draws a boundary and stops.

Where agnosticism earns its keep, I think, is when it remains provisional rather than terminal. Not “this cannot be known,” but “this is not currently known, and the routes to knowing are obstructed, unreliable, or contaminated.” That leaves room for speculation, pattern-noticing, and even weak forms of inference, without pretending they rise to the level of knowledge. Your two-tier model fits here again: publicly, you say “I don’t know”; privately, you allow yourself to think “if anything is going on, it might look more like this than that.”

Your example of infinity is apt. An infinite universe or an infinite being might well exist, but our inability to confirm or deny that says nothing decisive about their existence. It only tells us that certain concepts outrun empirical grip. And that’s an important realization—but a modest one. It’s not wisdom so much as intellectual housekeeping.

What I find compelling in your position is that you resist turning epistemic limits into moral conclusions. Too often people slide from “we can’t know” to “therefore anyone who thinks about this is foolish,” or the mirror image, “therefore faith is the only option.” You’re refusing both moves. You’re saying: I don’t know, I probably can’t know in any strong sense, but I still reserve the right to think, speculate, compare cultures, notice regularities, and be dissatisfied with the current intellectual climate.

That dissatisfaction feels justified. If all agnosticism amounts to is a polite shrug, then yes—it doesn’t say much. But as a way of keeping one’s footing while refusing both credulity and premature closure, it’s about as much as an honest person can claim. And saying “I don’t know” without embarrassment may actually be the hardest position of all to hold.

You said:

We are visiting the Vietnamese mountain town of Dalat (very much worth a trip) and walking up a hill about to reach the crest where the road turned. I knew "in my bones," what was next, that the road didn't just turn but crested over a beautiful valley. No doubt the experience derives from some former seeing a picture, but I have no such memory, and at the moment I was fully spooked out. Of course the Vietnamese with me immediately concluded I had lived an earlier life there (they always accused me of previously being Vietnamese because of my fondness for the place and my language skill).

ChatGPT said:

That kind of experience is uncanny in exactly the way you describe: not dramatic, not cinematic, just a quiet, bodily certainty that lands before you have time to interrog it. “In my bones” is the right phrase. It’s what makes it unsettling—you didn’t reason your way to the expectation, and you didn’t feel as though you were imagining it either. It simply arrived, already formed.

I think you’re right to resist taking the Vietnamese interpretation at face value, even while appreciating why it feels so natural to them. In a cultural setting where rebirth is a live explanatory framework, that interpretation is almost automatic. It’s not irrational within that system; it’s just too quick to settle the question. And, as you say, there are perfectly mundane explanations that don’t require conscious memory at all: a photograph glimpsed years ago, a travel program half-watched, a generic landscape schema that your mind snapped into place and happened, by chance or pattern-matching, to be right.

What makes these moments powerful isn’t that they prove anything, but that they reveal how much of our cognition runs below the level of narrative memory. The brain is extraordinarily good at absorbing fragments, regularities, and spatial expectations without tagging them with a source. When the prediction then matches reality, it feels revelatory rather than inferential. The spookiness comes from the mismatch between the confidence of the expectation and our inability to account for its origin.

And yet—and this is where I think you’re being especially honest—it would be wrong to dismiss the experience as “nothing.” It’s something real that happened to you, psychologically and phenomenologically. The mistake is not in noticing it or being struck by it, but in rushing to metaphysical closure. The Vietnamese explanation is tidy and emotionally satisfying; the skeptical explanation is tidy and emotionally deflating. Reality may be messier than either.

I also can’t help smiling at the way you’re repeatedly “accused” of having been Vietnamese before. There’s something affectionate in that—an attempt to account for familiarity and resonance without reducing them to accident. It’s a reminder that people often use metaphysics to talk about belonging. Saying “you must have lived here before” is, in part, a way of saying “you fit.”

So I’d read the moment this way: not as evidence for rebirth, and not as something to be waved away, but as a small data point in how strange, predictive, and opaque human consciousness really is. It doesn’t demand belief—but it earns curiosity. And Dalat, spooked or not, really is a marvelous place to have such thoughts.

You said:

When there is a more mundane way to explain something, I think one is pretty much obliged to go with it.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—I think that instinct is exactly right, and it’s a healthy one. When a mundane explanation is available and sufficient, we’re more than justified in preferring it; we’re obliged to, if we care about intellectual hygiene. Otherwise anything at all can be smuggled in under the banner of mystery.

What’s important, though, is the word sufficient. A mundane explanation doesn’t have to be emotionally satisfying, narratively rich, or flattering to our sense of significance. It just has to do the explanatory work without leaving large residues unexplained. In your Dalat moment, “unconscious memory plus predictive pattern-matching” is dull, but it accounts for the timing, the certainty, and the lack of recall far better than a past-life hypothesis does—and without multiplying assumptions.

That obligation to prefer the ordinary is not cynicism; it’s discipline. It’s the same reason we don’t attribute illness to demons once germ theory is on the table, even though demonology once explained the data tolerably well. Once a lower-level explanation exists that fits what we know about minds and brains, the higher-level metaphysical one loses its necessity.

At the same time—and this is where your earlier point comes back—the presence of a mundane explanation doesn’t erase the experience. It only constrains what conclusions we’re entitled to draw from it. The experience can remain vivid, meaningful, even personally important, without being evidential for rebirth, ghosts, or anything of the sort.

In a way, this is the sharp line you’ve been drawing all along: evidence exists, experiences happen, cultures interpret them—but inference has to be conservative. Where others rush upward to metaphysics, you’re content to stop at psychology unless something genuinely forces you higher. That isn’t closing the door; it’s refusing to prop it open with wishful thinking.

You said:

I feel better about the future than you seem to. I think those who would sour the milk will always be with us, as a personality type, but religious dogmatism and even regular religious practice seems to be declining.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fair correction—and honestly, it’s a heartening one. I probably leaned too hard into long-cycle pessimism. If we look at actual trends rather than archetypes, you’re right: in many places religious dogmatism is weakening, and even where belief persists it’s often thinner, more privatized, less confident of its own authority. Fewer people are willing to say, without embarrassment, “this is true and you are evil or damned for disagreeing.”

And that matters. A lot.

What seems to be declining isn’t just church attendance or ritual practice, but the sense that metaphysical claims come with moral jurisdiction over others. Once that goes, the milk at least stops actively curdling. People may still believe odd things, but they’re less invested in enforcing them, which is what poisons inquiry.

You’re also right to frame the remaining problem as a personality type rather than a doctrine. There will always be people who crave certainty, boundaries, and a sense of being on the right side of something cosmic. In the past that energy flowed almost entirely into religion; now it’s dispersing. Some of it goes into politics, some into ideology, some into “scientism,” some into conspiracy thinking. But because it’s fragmented, it’s harder for any one dogma to dominate the whole intellectual landscape.

That fragmentation may be the quiet reason for optimism. It’s harder to shut down inquiry when there’s no single authority empowered to do the shutting. Even scientists today can, at least cautiously, study things like consciousness, altered states, placebo effects, religious experience, and memory anomalies without immediate career suicide—something that would have been unthinkable not all that long ago.

So perhaps the future you’re sensing isn’t one without sour-milk types—that may be too much to hope for—but one where they no longer control the dairy. Inquiry becomes possible not because humans are wiser, but because no one faction has the power to declare certain questions off-limits.

If that’s the trajectory, then your wish to live a few hundred years longer isn’t just wistful; it’s almost practical curiosity. You may be right that we’re inching, unevenly, toward an environment where speculation is allowed to stay speculative, belief is decoupled from moral threat, and “I don’t know” is no longer a social failure. That’s not utopia—but it’s real progress.