Ghosts Made of People

The materialist inherits a two storey house. Matter downstairs. Upstairs, a mezzanine of dubious tenants: minds, meanings, nations, prices, laws.

The embarrassment is that the tenants do things. Economies crash onto matter. Laws imprison bodies. Meanings launch ships. Four centuries of officially one storey ontology have run on unexplained downward causation from a floor that officially is not there.

Altitude

Six Birds replaces the two storeys with altitude, and gives it a definition precise enough to prove things about.

Call G a ghost relative to layer L when four things hold. G is carried entirely by L stuff. G's dynamics are lawful and reproducible. G keeps all of L's distinctions. And G's own distinctions cannot be defined in L's vocabulary.

That is not a metaphor. It is a theorem, proved on a finite repeated game. Play the game many times and reputations, norms and conventions appear. The institutional state, the coarsest summary of history that predicts the future, cannot be defined from the game's own vocabulary. And leaving it out costs you, by an exactly priced amount.

The economy

So the economy is literally a ghost made of people. Real: it passes its audits, it has its own state and its own law. Made of us: every one of its events is carried by human acts. And invisible in the lower vocabulary: no shortcut over person level descriptions computes it. It has to be run to be had.

We built it. We constitute it. And we meet it the way one meets a ghost: through instruments, by its effects, never face to face.

Looking up, looking down

Now read the same theorem downward. We are the ghosts of the quantum layer. Carried by it entirely, lawful, and not computable by any shortcut over quantum vocabulary. The autonomy of chemistry, biology and psychology is this, given a mechanism.

There is an asymmetry, and it gives the haunting its direction. A richer process always casts shadows on a coarser description. Looking downward, you see your own shadows everywhere. Looking upward, the missing distinctions need not be recoverable from the shadow. You cannot even see the questions.

Every layer lives in a house whose upper floors are, to it, unoccupied. And it is itself the unoccupied upper floor of the house below.

Matter is what a layer calls its floor, and spirit is what it calls its ceiling, and both words report the speaker's address, not the building's inventory.

Downward causation stops being embarrassing

Of course the ghost moves matter. Its matter is what its law transports, through a carried channel. That is what being a layer is. The mystery was an artifact of demanding that the ghost's law be visible on the floor it haunts, which is exactly what the theorem forbids.

The materialist was right that there is no second kind of stuff. The anti materialist was right that the mezzanine tenants are real. Both were wrong to think those claims opposed.

One guard rail. Ghosthood is typed and audited. Every ghost in this article passes gates and pays budgets. Astrology also proposes ghosts. Audit is what tells them apart.

Drawn from To Worship a Stone with Six Birds: Reality as Closure, the philosophical companion to the Six Birds papers. The technical results it rests on are in the papers.