Ghosts, Gods, Spirits, and Companion AI: Talking with Non-Human Others Across the World

Throughout history and across cultures, people have interacted with invisible others. They have called them gods, ghosts, spirits, the dead and so forth. Humans have also experienced invisible others as responding in ways that are often (but not always) experientially consistent across time and space. They hear voices, see visions, feel presence and force. This class explores the relationship between specific psychological experiences and specific social practices through which these experiences are interpreted and cultivated. Often, these practices and ideas are intertwined with human health and medical healing, with loneliness, pain and death. We will not presume that invisible others are real or not real: the goal of the class is to understand them as real experiences. And we will ask: how do new forms of interacting with AI characters seem like and unlike these older forms? Students will explore these questions by using the practices themselves, and by reading a combination of ethnographic literature, medical science and psychological experiments.