We were already weird about the afterlife. AI just made us more so

When nine-year-old Cole Sear whispers his famous line about seeing dead people in that flat, petrified voice, it’s supposed to be one of the scariest moments in The Sixth Sense, one of the highest-grossing films of 1999. It worked on me, too, before I did the thing psychologists do to every good scary thing: explain why it works, and thereby ruin it. At the time, I was just starting my PhD in developmental psychology. My thesis project? How children think about the afterlife.For whatever reason — an overactive imagination, or growing up near a spooky old pioneer graveyard in Virginia — I’d been obsessed with ghosts since childhood. By the time I was Cole’s age, I’d binged the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series and haunted the ghosts and hauntings aisle of my local library. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had one obsessive foot in the ethereal otherworld.Basically, it all scares the bejesus out of me. But I still can’t get enough of it.What actually unsettled audiences in The Sixth Sense wasn’t the ghosts, per se – it was making them so palpable. The rest of us perceive the dead around us, too, just less literally. We keep putting ourselves into the shoes of people who no longer have shoes, or feet, or brains for that matter. We ask what they’d think of us now. We apologise to them, sometimes out loud, alone, in cars.Haley Joel Osment as Cole Sear, the boy who sees dead people, including Bruce Willis’ Dr Malcolm Crowe, in The Sixth Sense.M. Night Shyamalan built a career-making twist on a premise that’s more or less true, minus the full-bodied apparitions, in the theatre of your own skull.The dead don’t simply disappear in a puff of smoke, even when cremated. They linger, often despite themselves. We don’t have to believe in ghosts to be haunted.At the University of Otago in New Zealand, my colleagues and I study exactly how this all works at our afterlife beliefs lab. I should say upfront that we are not setting out to prove or disprove heaven, hell, or whether you’ll “survive” death. We specialise in how the living think about the minds of the dead, not whether the dead actually have minds. Whether your great-aunt is presently enjoying a cocktail on a pink cloud is something else entirely, for parapsychologists to investigate. What interests us, arguably, is stranger still. Your brain does not care whether your great-aunt still exists. It just keeps running her as if she does.Ghosts are just like us (and that’s the problem)Let’s start with the most basic move your mind makes around death: it keeps guessing what the dead person is thinking, in the present tense. Cognitively, this is no different from guessing what your spouse is thinking when they sigh loudly at dinner, except the person doing the thinking no longer has a brain.Fiction has always understood this attributional compulsion better than science has. Hamlet’s father shows up specifically to complain about being murdered, as though death had rudely upended his bucket list. Patrick Swayze’s ghost in Ghost spends the entire film trying to get one message to the woman he loves, unbothered by having no body but very bothered by the risk of being misunderstood.Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost.Paramount PicturesSuch stories are built on the basic premise that the dead remain mentally active. Consider a “simple” question we ask participants in our studies: can your dead loved ones still see? We mostly get the same answer from believers: yes, obviously. But it’s unclear why they are so certain of ongoing perceptual experiences after death. Pushed into an uncomfortable corner – what exactly are they seeing with, now that their eyes have decomposed and their visual cortex is gone – people tend to short-circuit, or invoke discarnate eyes, which just begs more questions.Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice.Courtesy of Warner Bros. PicturesMost of us agree, if pressed, that a functioning brain is required for every twinge and ripple of subjective experience. Yet fiction can’t stop giving ghosts working minds anyway. The ghosts in Beetlejuice eat and argue and get furious about home décor; Robin Williams’ character in What Dreams May Come explores a lush, sensory afterlife. This isn’t just sloppy screenwriting – it’s the same glitch researchers find in ordinary people.In one of my early studies, even non-believers occasionally reasoned that a dead person “knew” he was dead. Because, obviously. In a more recent experiment, Jamin Halberstadt and I found that, when told a ghost is in the room, then left alone with the lights flicking on and off unexpectedly, even participants who said ghosts are make-believe showed a greater physiological stress response than those who heard nothing about a ghost.Psychologist and author Jesse Bering: “For as long as I can remember, I’ve had one obsessive foot in the ethereal otherworld.″⁣Where ghosts come fromPixar has been running informal afterlife-information campaigns targeting children for a decade. Coco is structured around grief counsellors’ favourite takeaway: our loved ones survive death because we keep thinking of them. The movie’s Land of the Dead – where you exist in cheerful skeletal form until nobody living remembers your name, at which point you suffer the alarmingly named “Final Death” – dramatises this exactly.Coco, says Jesse Bering, “is structured around grief counsellors’ favourite takeaway: our loved ones survive death because we keep thinking of them.”APIn Soul, the unborn soul (Tina Fey) tells the dead soul (Jamie Foxx) that in this liminal state one cannot taste or smell – “things the body does” – while seeing, hearing and thinking presumably aren’t. That sentiment – abstract thoughts and feelings as immortal, psychobiological states as mortal – echoed what kids (and adults) told me in my own studies, where we used a puppet show in which a mouse gets killed by an alligator. Can he still taste the grass he ate, remember what he learnt that day, or love his Mum?Even children privileged the loftier, “nonbodily” states as surviving death – even though it’s all bodily, really. These films betray how constrained the human imagination is when picturing the afterlife without a built-in commonsense dualism, as developmental psychologists call this penchant for belief in souls.What’s genuinely unresolved is whether three- and four-year-olds reach for an afterlife on their own, the way infants reach for language, or pick it up from Coco, from church, from grandma. Untangling nature from Pixar is harder than it sounds.An evolutionary alibi for ghostsAfterlife belief shows up in nearly every culture ever studied. The specific nature of the belief is largely irrelevant; it makes no difference whether the soul ascends, descends, recycles or slumbers. The point is that it’s likened to personal consciousness, some mindful part of the individual, and is almost always moralistic.One explanation is what Dominic Johnson and I termed the “supernatural punishment hypothesis.” It’s dramatised in A Christmas Carol. Marley’s ghost shows up not to comfort Scrooge but in chains, forged out of his own selfishness, to frighten him straight.The Good Place runs the same logic through a spreadsheet: every rude or selfish thing you do gets tallied against you for eternity. In my own studies, telling participants a ghost had been seen in their testing room made them less likely to cheat on an unrelated money task. A similar effect showed up in children told about a friendly invisible presence (“Princess Alice”).The idea is that believing the watchful dead were keeping score nudged our ancestors towards co-operation. Nobody needs an actual ghost filing the paperwork for the belief to have done real work. Natural selection doesn’t reward an organism’s grip on reality; it rewards genetic fitness. What looks superstitious may be a baked-in adaptive illusion, or what the late Daniel Dennett called an “evolved misbelief”.Dead house rulesThere’s an unspoken rule against badmouthing someone at their own funeral. When the rule is violated, that gets people’s attention. Across five seasons of Six Feet Under, the writers mined this discomfort around death etiquette.Six Feet Under mines our discomfort around death etiquette.The Lovely Bones dug even deeper, letting its murdered narrator watch her family and silently grade how well they’re grieving her. And don’t get me started on 13 Reasons Why, in which vulnerable teens probably couldn’t help but picture mourners weeping at their funerals, bullies getting their comeuppance, or friends and family finally appreciating them.Katherine Langford in 13 Reasons Why.NetflixOnly recently have researchers started studying how people’s lives get revised after their deaths. One of my students is looking into whether we quietly upgrade a dead person’s last stated opinion, as though their banal patter is revealed as wisdom only after the fact. As Nietzsche wrote, “Men after death are understood worse than men of the moment, but heard better.” Then there’s the so-called frozen-in-time effect.Evaluations of the dead resist change more than evaluations of the living, and we’re prone to reject posthumous information that’s inconsistent with our prior view. Michael Jackson and Mother Teresa are cases in point.Haunted real estate and the business of not letting goNowhere does this afterlife psychology get monetised as efficiently as in housing. Ask any real estate agent: a house loses value the moment buyers learn someone died in it, even years ago. Poltergeist built an entire franchise around this on the closely related fear that a house can be haunted by unfinished business. Ordinary buyers feel this instinctively, an effect psychologists call essentialism, the stubborn sense that death leaves an invisible residue. The funeral industry runs the same instinct in reverse, persuading grieving people that a mahogany box costing several thousand dollars honours someone who no longer has a brain to appreciate it.Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson in Be Right Back an episode of Black Mirror.NetflixThen there’s the newer wrinkle, the one that will keep psychologists like me busy for decades. Black Mirror’s 2013 episode Be Right Back imagined a grieving woman rebuilding her dead boyfriend from his old texts, first as a chatbot, then as his reconfigured body. It aired as speculative horror. It isn’t so speculative any more.Feeding a dead relative’s messages into an AI to keep talking to them, sometimes called “digital necromancy”, is something people are already doing. Grief researchers are only starting to catch up with what this sparkling new technology does to a mind that already struggles to comprehend permanent loss.Cole Sear had to whisper his line in a dark theatre to make our skin crawl. People are basically saying the equivalent out loud to their iPhones now, and pretty soon nobody will even be flinching.Jesse Bering’s latest book is The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson (University of Chicago Press). He appears at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas on August 22 and 23.To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.