The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist

The reasoning mistake that Yvain and a lot of people here are making is: they think that if someone is scared in a supposedly haunted house there must be a believe in ghosts hidden somewhere inside his brain. What happens in reality is that the mind is hardwired to be scared when certain conditions are met. Being out in the dark is scary, not because you have a believe in ghosts but because there used to be predators roaming about in the ancestral environment and so the brain triggers accordingly. Now this whole ghost issue is probably a post-factum rationalization. Our verbal reasoning just pops out with an explanation of why we are scared(I was scared without a reason so I must have a believe in ghosts somewhere in my mind!). The real reason is below the surface and inacessible because we lack the ability for introspection.

I did a similar experiment on myself when I went on an organized trip to Israel. When we stopped at the Whaling (Western) Wall, I decided to test out my rationality. As you know, you're suppose to write down a wish on a piece of paper and put it in the wall i.e. another way of praying. I decided to write down "I wish my family would die in 2 weeks," and put it in the wall to see if I can do it.

To my surprise, I did feel a bit weird, a little anxious, but after a while I was fine. It is hard to overcome the emotions induced by our biases, but can be done with practice.

Just curious, would anyone not write the note (that I wrote)? Assuming you'd be compensated for your effort to write it and put it in the wall.

Has anyone had the opposite experience where a rational realization has an immediate emotional impact? For example, as a child I was quite afraid of the dark and would have to switch lights off in a particular order to ensure I was never subjected to too much darkness. I vividly remember the exact moment I overcame this fear. I was in the bathroom at the sink trying to avoid looking in the mirror because I had just watched a horror movie involving mirrors. It suddenly occurred to me that all my life I had been looking in the mirror without fear and that nothing had changed except my own disposition. This epiphany rushed through me. I suddenly realized that all such "supernatural" things were my own superstitions and not "out there" in the world. The world was concrete and could not change in inexplicable, "supernatural" ways (the concept of which was almost completely associated with camera trickery in movies for me - i.e., if it was dark something might happen, if I look away and look back something might be there, etc). I immediately lost my fear of the dark and it never returned. It could be, of course, that this loss of fear had been building over time and only in this moment did I manage to disassociate the rituals I had built around it, etc, rather than it being the case that this rational epiphany led to my loss of fear.

There are no ghosts, but there are things besides ghosts to be afraid of. Haunted houses are approximately equivalent to abandoned houses, and abandoned houses may contain human criminals, wild animals, infestations, and other unknown dangers. Ghosts are a psychological stand-in for risks that you aren't individually aware of.

I recall a study (unfortunately I don't have a citation handy) which looked into the environmental factors which produce unease and make people believe that areas are haunted. The main ones were low light, cold drafts, and unidentifiable sounds - all things which, at least in the ancestral environment, could indicate a place that is dangerous.

Is it silly to be scared by a horror movie, since it's just a made-up story? It seems like the same kind of effect - there must be some level of cognition that isn't affected by the "no, it's just a made-up story" filter and simply reacts to what's going through your head and senses.

(For example, consider this classic "test of faith in science": hold a pendulum's bob up to your nose, release it, then let it swing back at you. Because energy is conserved, the bob won't break your nose on the return trip - but good luck overriding the reflex to move your face away.)

I think the dynamic at work here is System 1 versus System 2 thinking. System 2 is at work while you write this post and consider things from a distance. It accepts and believes that there are no ghosts.

Once you're in the "haunted house" itself though, System 1 comes in to play much more. System 1 is what makes you jump before you've consciously recognized that there was a sound or sight to react to. Depending on many factors, you may or may not be able to recover and override System 1 with System 2. If you were able to stay even though you felt like running, and if you did this enough, eventually System 1 would react differently. This is the basis of what is known as exposure in cognitive behavioral therapy, wherein you gradually expose yourself to (e.g.) phobias in order to acclimatize yourself to the phenomenon, realize that the phobia is unjustified, and change your automatic (System 1) reactions.

Another thing to consider is the fact that being tired, or "half-asleep", or in that twilight state one might manage to maintain when getting up to use the restroom or fetch water at night, is different from being in a state of normal waking consciousness.

Even if the skeptics attempting to spend the night in the "haunted" house don't plan on actually sleeping, unless they're already night-shift workers or have otherwise pre-configured their body clocks so that they'll be awake all night, they are likely to at some point during the night start suffering impaired judgment. I suspect that the nearer a person gets physiologically to a state where their brain might initiate dreaming, the more difficult it becomes to maintain rationality.

I've noticed that when I get up at night after having been asleep, even in my own familiar apartment, I have a type and level of wariness that is not present during my normal waking conscious state. E.g., I find myself reluctant to stare into mirrors or peer behind the shower curtain, or look out the window, and I also find myself practically running back to bed after getting up because of an unnerving feeling that something might "get" me and that somehow being under the covers will make me "safe".

Having done a fair bit of brainhacking in my life, I am now at the point where when I'm in this state I can recognize it as "that nighttime thing" and not take it too seriously, but it nevertheless continues to affect my behavior a little. I am curious now about whether it might be interesting to try getting up in the middle of the night and forcing myself to do all the things that make me jumpy, and whether this might be the sort of pre-exercise that might help someone stay in a "haunted" house overnight (presuming for the moment that we are not talking about a house that harbors escaped murderers or rabid squirrels).

Many of the comments focus on the fact that there are other fears to account for, and that is definitely worth pointing out. However, If Yvain (or anyone) still feels that they would be scared after controlling for them, then his point is valid even if others wouldn't be scared.

I don't see the problem with calling it another level of "belief", since the emotional level seems to be acting as if it "believes" that ghosts are dangerous. It's just that the system that has this belief is in poor communication with the system that has contradicting beliefs (how to best "communicate" and fix this is an interesting topic which is worth it's own post).

I don't see anything significantly difference between fear and ghosts and fears that are "hard wired by evolution" in people, and we all have those. It seems that his point that we can't be modeled as agents that believe one thing (though they may profess otherwise) is not only valid, but important, since it affects everyone at some level.

I think that this post nicely hammers home the point that our minds are complicated, messy entities, and it can sometimes lead us astray to try to put sharp boundaries upon them, such as "I believe X" or "I do not believe X".

I remember being about 12 and walking around a very large basement and house at night, and being scared of ghosts whilst at the same time knowing that ghosts don't exist. In fact if I were to walk around that same big, scary basement again, I'm sure I would still be irrationally scared of ghosts, in a completely automatic and unstoppable way.

It also takes time and persistence to not just overcome irrational emotions, but also to really change your mind about a statement of fact, long after you accept a new point of view. You can often consciously correct the conclusions you make, but you can't as easily steer the underlying process that generates your thoughts. Are you actually thinking about your dragon? Facing a new fact, becoming proficient with it without being persistently haunted by your previous mistaken belief, is an important step in the learning process. This duty can't be written off for the inbuilt instincts, and maybe many of those instincts should fall in line as well.

Certainty in the rational conclusion is how I overcame a number of irrational fears. The fear has actually gone away with practice. But generally, the point is valid, as there are just preprogrammed things to which your organism reacts, and this is not necessarily a statement about you. In other cases, you probably should follow the urge, if the context itself is valuable to you. For example, it might be inhumane to not flinch from the sight of dead bodies, even if you know that they are just a very realistic illusion produced by a computer program.

So although it's correct to say that the skeptics' emotions overwhelmed their rationality, they wouldn't have those emotions unless they thought on some level that ghosts were worth getting scared about.

I disagree. We have the emotions because our brain is designed to react with alarm to nearby strange sounds. It has nothing to do with ghosts. It's simply the primitive brain circuitry firing.

Regarding the fan did you read this section? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death#Fan-related_hyperthermia_research It seems that in fact a fan can cause death, although not by the reasons believed. So indeed, sleeping with a fan on a very hot night could prove fatal.

Not sure if I can articulate this well, but I wonder if you're focusing too much on ghosts while evaluating this thought experiment? Couldn't option three be rephrased as; "There may be something in this environment which can hurt me. All defence systems on!", without the fear being specifically of ghosts? In other words, couldn't your subconscious be picturing scary thing, and not, specifically, ghost?

I don't think it is so much magical thinking or superstition as it is that emotions tend to get aligned with beliefs, but it takes time. And to realign your emotions you need to "deprogram" the now-unconscious memories causing the fear. Just how often do you get the opportunity to face the fear of ghosts that you caught from ghost stories and horror movies when you were younger?

I watched too much Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and so on myself - despite being more at home in the dark than anyone else I have ever met, I still have a visceral feeling that something is about to jump out at me whenever I'm out at night.

Of course, this reinforces (or is reinforced by, depending on how you approach it) the evolutionary fear of the dark, mostly inspired by night hunting predators.

And this still leaves the problem of the popularity of horror movies.

aren't you ignoring the fact that the rumors of ghosts could very well be a misidentification of other causes? if everyone believes there to be a ghost because 3 people disappeared but what actually happened is that a crazed maniac dragged them off into the woods then our fear is justified. Imagine our ancestors telling an anecdote not to go near the watering hole at a certain time because if you go at that time you'll disappear and all that will be found of you is bloody scraps (big cats were in the area at the time). They might come up with a story about demons in order to scare children into not going to the water hole at that time (say the middle of the night). Even though the identified cause is wrong it still pays to believe it, since we lack any other causes to believe in. We might not know of all the potential causes of death, so we ascribe all unidentified ones to "the midnight witch who eats naughty children". Avoiding this witch based on the stories of others from the area is natural.

I think that, to a certain extent, if you know that a large number of people in your tribe have come to a specific conclusion based on available evidence, then even if you haven't come to that same conclusion, there is a natural tendency to "keep an open mind" about it, to keep a working hypothesis of a model where they are right and you are wrong, and to occasionally test that hypothesis.

Even though you have rationally worked out that there are no ghosts through a process of rational thinking, you do know that a lot of people have come to the conclusions that there are ghosts through non-rational thinking, and there is some non-zero chance that somehow their methods of reasoning might turn out to be correct. That is, there is always a possibility that in some fundamental way your entire method of looking at the universe and analyzing data might be somehow flawed in a way theirs is not.

It's hard to ever set a precise probability value on that, although it seems very unlikely, but your survival instincts are keyed to avoid low-possibility danger events (in a way that your resource-gathering instincts are not). It's fundamentally much easier to knowingly gamble with your money then to knowingly gamble with your life, in other words.

Hmm... I would probably explain the threshold for staying in the house not as an implicit expected probability computation, but an evaluation of the price of the discomfort associated with staying in a location that you find spooky. At least for me, I think that the part of my mind that knows that ghosts do not exist would have no trouble controlling whether or not I remain in the house or not. However, it might well decide that it is not worth the $10 that I would receive to spend the entire night in a place where some other piece of my mind is constantly yelling at me to run away screaming.

The haunted rationalist is probably an example of a physiological response tied to a shared cultural delusion. In strange places, when we are alone, we often can feel nervous or fearful. I remember feeling this way when I was alone in our church growing up, or when I was alone in our own house for the first time as a teenager.

There's probably a physiological reason for this. Perhaps we produce more adrenaline when left alone after a period of close cohabitation with others. This would be a useful evolutionary trait allowing us to be more aware of our surroundings.

Tie this initial physiological reaction in with "shared cultural delusions" such as ghosts and you may get a negative feedback loop going. Small amount of additional adrenaline produced leads our body to be more attuned to "fight or flight" situations. We hear unfamiliar noise. Our minds involuntarily tie in shared cultural delusion, and our bodies produce more adrenaline. Before you know it, you're running out of the mansion screaming.

In hotels, perhaps two things dampen this. 1) We don't feel alone. We know other humans are nearby. 2) We can easily explain unfamiliar noises, cutting out feedback loop. Despite this, people have much harder times sleeping in hotel rooms than at home. This may be evidence of the initial physiological reaction I mentioned before.

Interestingly enough, there's another area that this occurs. Alien abductions and sleep paralysis. See http://crash.ihug.co.nz/~marshall/delusion.htm .

Hope this helps the discussion.

David

Take the bet

I worry when writing this that I may be alone among Less Wrong community members, and that the rest of the community would remain in the mansion with minimal discomfort. If "run screaming out of the mansion" is too dramatic for you, will you agree that you might, after the floorboards get especially creaky, feel a tiny urge to light a candle or turn on a flashlight? Even that is enough to preserve the point I am trying to make here.

Evidence - I wouldn't run, but then I don't picture ghosts as murderous, and I would turn on the light, if only so I could see the ghost. I'm pretty sure I would have analogous reactions for, say, mad axe-murderers, though.

I worry when writing this that I may be alone among Less Wrong community members, and that the rest of the community would remain in the mansion with minimal discomfort. If "run screaming out of the mansion" is too dramatic for you, will you agree that you might, after the floorboards get especially creaky, feel a tiny urge to light a candle or turn on a flashlight? Even that is enough to preserve the point I am trying to make here.

Absolutely. You're a wimp. But I'll grant the flashlight, in the dark I'd be scared of running into spiders. Those things creep me out!

If I believed in ghosts and wanted to investigate a haunted mansion I think it would be in my best interest to persuade myself temporarily to not believe in ghosts for the length of the investigation. In fact, I'd benefit only if I turned myself into a Narnia-style sceptic about them (one who wouldn't believe or alieve in them in spite of the evidence). Given what I think are the rules of how ghosts are supposed to work [1] I would assume that a ghost out to kill me couldn't do so by physical violence (e.g., lifting and throwing a kitchen knife -- unless it was a poltergeist) but would instead try to scare me to death (e.g., by causing a heart attack, a human factor accident or suicide). Armed with that knowledge I'd want persuade myself to reject the belief in ghosts on a gut level so as to lower my fear and prevent death. However, by doing so I would also lose my incentive to investigate haunted mansions in the first place, so I_{pre-ghost sceptic} would have to find a way to precommit to the investigation and to revert back to having a belief in ghosts afterwards. A monetary bet could work for the former.

[1] As absorbed by me from popular culture. Admittedly, if I did believe in ghosts would probably have followed ghost lore and would now have a somewhat different set of assumptions about "ghost rules".