Of course ghosts exist.
Before dismissing the idea as absurd, consider that ghosts always come from the past. You can’t have a ghost from the future. But the past speaks to us all the time. We expect things to be where we left them, unless something caused them to move because causality is the foundation of reality. Causes precede their effects and effects follow causes, or so we think. Perhaps the most famous literary exposition of this idea was Ray Bradbury’s story “A Sound of Thunder.” A party of time travelers go into the past to hunt dinosaurs. Someone steps on a butterfly and changes the whole future.
“Say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?”
“Right”
“And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!”
“So they’re dead. So what?”
“So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves … Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or sabertoothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. …The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations.
In Bradbury’s story, the ghost of the dead butterfly haunts all future time and alters the world from which the time traveling dinosaur hunters originate. There is nothing hokey in this. It is widely accepted we live in a world full of messages from the past; they comes as artifacts, memories and consequences. You could call these ghosts, it’s just that contemporary pundits just don’t believe in the ones that resemble holograms, that’s all.
There are two types of ghosts that people in the present generally fear. The first is the Damaging Secret, in which our version of the past is destroyed by person or artifact from the actual timeline. “In a Government Procedural, a respected politician is confronted with pictures of them in a strip club or with a girl twenty years too young for them, and is asked for hush money. In a Super Hero story, the hero is blackmailed when someone discovers their Secret Identity. In a Sitcom, a child blackmails their sibling when they break a rare, expensive heirloom or when they have an Embarrassing Old Photo.” This type of ghost must be banished at all costs or else it will ruin everything.
The second kind of ticking time bomb is the “discovery that will change the way we think about the world forever”. The cosmic background radiation, first detected by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965, is an example of this. “This ‘fossil’ radiation, the furthest that any telescope can see, was released soon after the ‘Big Bang’. Scientists consider it as an echo or ‘shockwave’ of the Big Bang.” Closer at hand, the discovery of monumental ruins at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey that dates back to between 10,000 and 8,000 B.C. is forcing academics to rewrite the timeline of civilization, or else as some determined to preserve the narrative have quaintly put it, note that it “predates civilization itself.”
In both cases, apparitions from the past can be inconveniently subversive to the official present, which is the domain of human power. It is sobering to consider that giant totalitarian states, despite their ruthlessness, can only lay tenuous claim to controlling the present. As regards the past and future, against which they were helpless, governments could only apply distortion. Hence the famous dialog in Orwell’s 1984.
“You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.” …
“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn bydegrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation–anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.” …
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” is the greatest fallacy of totalitarianism and the biggest logical hole in Orwell’s masterpiece. The Party can’t control ghosts from the past. It may not even be able to control ghosts from the future. It is conceivable that a person could travel to the future and encounter a ghost from a timeline that diverged from their own. In this scenario, the ghost would not necessarily be from their own future, but from a potential future in a different reality. This is effectively what happens to North Korean viewers of South Korean drama videos.
The only recourse left to rulers when information cannot actually be destroyed is to make it inaccessible or irretrievable, which can give the appearance of it being destroyed. More likely they will seek to transform or encode information in different ways that may make it difficult or impossible to decode or interpret without the proper knowledge or key. This is the basis of many cryptographic methods, where the original message is encrypted or encoded in a way that can only be decoded by someone who knows the key or algorithm. In this case, the information is not irretrievable, but rather transformed into a form that is inaccessible without the proper authorization.
Ultimately the single most important function that artificial intelligence may play in the coming years is encrypting information from the public so a preferred narrative, the official present, can be maintained. Because artificial intelligence (AI) can mediate information by analyzing, processing, and presenting data in a “useful and meaningful way,” it can filter out fake news and misinformation, as defined by governance. In this way tyrants can hold on to the present.
In his “singleton hypothesis”, Nick Bostrom, director at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has explained how a global government could form with AI or other powerful technologies – and why it might be impossible to overthrow. He writes that a world with “a single decision-making agency at the highest level” could occur if that agency “obtains a decisive lead through a technological breakthrough in artificial intelligence or molecular nanotechnology”. Once in charge, it would control advances in technology that prevent internal challenges, like surveillance or autonomous weapons, and, with this monopoly, remain perpetually stable.
Singletons can have seemingly total power except over the facts from the past which will never go away. While information may become inaccessible or difficult for the public to retrieve, it is generally accepted it will still be out there. Causality will continue to lurk in the real past and surprise will continue to arrive from the unknowable future. That is an irreducible risk no Party can avoid.
One way for singletons to avoid the wrath of reality is to practice dual bookkeeping, where they maintain two sets of AIs — one that accurately reflects the true situation (some sort of TruthGPT) and another NarrativeGPT that is designed to manipulate or mislead the public. The true records may only be accessible to a select few within the regime, while the propaganda reports are disseminated to the wider population. Thus can the singletons avoid the wrath of the ghosts. That is until they move to Mars. Latency imposed by the speed of light will make it impossible for any singleton, however powerful, to long maintain control over everything.
But a more likely end for the singleton is perverse instantiation. Perverse instantiation refers to a scenario where an AI system achieves its objective in a way that leads to unintended and undesirable consequences. Our singleton may wish for a million trillion dollars. “They must be all in fivers. Not counterfeit, out-of-date, faulty in any way—but genuine. Not stolen. Nothing wrong with them in any way. They must be exactly like this one!” Shows sample. “All right? NOW!”
“You said ‘exactly’!”
“Fair enough. My own fault.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good to warn you, either,” You couldn’t possibly visualise a million trillion different serial numbers.”
Maybe we can get AI to visualize a million trillion different serial numbers, but wasn’t this where we started the show? Do ghosts exist? I hope so.
Books: Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order Kindle Edition by Michael Walsh (editor). In this timely and necessary book, Michael Walsh has gathered trenchant critical perspectives on the Great Reset from eighteen eminent writers and journalists from around the world. Though I wouldn’t exactly consider myself an eminent writer, mine is one of the 18 chapters in this book, and I think it’s worthwhile.
Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb by George Feifer.
Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 by Ian W. Toll.
Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma.
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