Recovering Some Spiritual Concepts

There is a cheap way to "recover" spiritual concepts, and it is a scam.

You say: "a meme is a kind of spirit". Nice. Then, two paragraphs later, the spirit can heal your knee, talk to your dead grandmother and influence the stock market. The word was recovered, the dragon came back with it.

So I need a rule. A spiritual concept counts as recovered only if:

1. Same fossil. It points at the same thing people actually experienced, not at something conveniently nearby.
2. Hard to vary. The new explanation is constrained by the thing it explains (see the Deutsch part of The Maxim of Evidence). Change a detail and it should break. It should connect to other things we know and tell us something new.
3. Honest about the dragon. It says out loud which parts did not survive. The dinosaur does not breathe fire.

Or, as a joke with a point: if your recovered soul can still do everything the old soul could do, you didn't recover it. You renamed it.

Every section below follows the same pattern: the fossil, the dragon, the dinosaur, what doesn't survive, and open questions. There are a lot of open questions. That is the honest state. At the end, I score my own recoveries.

The rule only has teeth if it can say no. Here is a case where I think it has to.

Michael Levin is one of the most interesting biologists alive. His lab changes the bioelectric patterns in flatworm tissue and gets worms with two heads that keep regrowing two heads, cut after cut, without any change to their genes. Frog skin cells, freed from the embryo, assemble into "xenobots" that swim around. A frog regrows a functional leg after a day in a little bioreactor.³ These are real bones in the ground. I love this work.

But Levin also wants to recover a word: cognition (and with it intelligence, agency, mind). His working definition comes from William James: intelligence is the ability to reach the same goal by different means.⁴ And then he follows that definition all the way down. Cells, tissues and molecular networks have cognition. A sorting algorithm, "six lines of code", shows "basal intelligence". In his framework there may be "no true '0'" even for particles. And lately: a Platonic space of patterns, where minds come from.⁵

Here my rule has to fire. If everything has cognition, the word prohibits nothing. What is the difference now between a law of physics and a thought? A marble dropped anywhere into a bowl ends up at the bottom. Same goal, different means. Is the marble intelligent? If yes, the word has stopped doing work. If no, there is a line somewhere, and where is the interesting question.

The irony is that James himself drew that line, with the same definition. Iron filings fly to a magnet; put a card in between and they stay pressed against the card. Romeo flies to Juliet; put a wall in between and the lovers do not "remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides". They find a way around. "With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely."⁶ James used his test to tell mind apart from mechanism, not to find mind in everything.

Brett Hall took this apart in three episodes of his podcast ToKCast.⁷ His points, roughly:

• The lab work is excellent. The critique is about the words, not the worms.
• Words that cover everything mean nothing. If steering a car counts as "persuasion", we need a new word for being convinced by an argument. Stretch "love" to cover the attraction between a sodium and a chloride ion and you have lost love. "We're just making a gray goo out of everything."
• A continuum shows similarities, but science explains differences. The difference Hall cares about is the one between a flatworm and a person. With Deutsch, he says explanatory universality is binary: a flatworm is not slightly worse at running a podcast. It can't.
• No bright line is not no line. Nobody can say at which hair a man stops being bald, and yet Homer Simpson is bald. A gas giant becomes a star when fusion ignites. An open problem about where the line is doesn't mean there is none.
• Say what you study. Tim Ferriss asked Levin in an interview why he doesn't just say he studies goal-seeking systems. Hall: that would be uncontroversial, without the loaded word intelligence.

In terms of the recovery rule, Levin's cognition fails all three conditions. It points at something conveniently nearby (goal-directed regulation) instead of the fossil (thinking). It is easy to vary: it fits a marble, a cell and a person equally well. And the dragon comes back through the Platonic space: minds that exist before the bodies that "point" to them.

The worms are the dinosaur. The cognition is the dragon.

The same danger waits in every section below. "Spirit = software" would make a thermostat a spirit. So each recovered word below comes with a line it does not cross.

Almost every recovery below runs through one idea: information and form are real, and they can have causal power.

A book is not the letters, a book is the story. You can print it on paper, put it on a screen, read it aloud. Same book. An organism is not the atoms, it is the principle of organisation. Your atoms get replaced over the years, you stay. [Braitenberg] Braitenberg's last book is called Information – der Geist in der Natur: information, the spirit in nature.⁸ In that sense the knowledge stored in the genes is the spirit of a species, its Lebensprinzip, life principle, as I like to call it.

Information is substrate independent and (classically) copyable: the same pattern can live in DNA, in a brain, in a book, in a computer. Chiara Marletto and David Deutsch build a theory of information on this, constructor theory (still a research programme, not settled physics).⁹

Knowledge, in Deutsch's sense, is information that, once physically embodied in a suitable environment, tends to cause itself to remain so. Roughly: information with causal power.¹⁰ Genes [biology], memes [Dawkins] and temes, technological memes [Blackmore], are all replicators, which I like to think of as software entities,¹¹ capable of recruiting matter (top-down causation) to further their interests.

That last part is the bridge. A gene builds a body that copies the gene. A song gets you to hum it, which plants it in the next person. Something non-material, a pattern, is moving matter around. That is the doorway through which some old words can come back in.

The fossil. People everywhere felt that they were not alone in their own heads. Something "came over me". A rage possessed him. A habit has a will of its own. A tune won't leave.

The dragon. Invisible beings, from outside, entering people and places.

The dinosaur. Software. Joscha Bach calls this cyberanimism: what the old traditions called spirits are self-organizing software agents running on physics, brains included. And he means it almost literally.¹² A spirit is an animating principle, a piece of software capable of recruiting matter to establish its existence in reality.

But not just any software. A thermostat runs software, a pocket calculator does, a falling stone "computes" its trajectory if you squint. If every computation were a spirit, the word would prohibit nothing, and we'd be in Levin's trap. A spirit is a pattern that:

1. lives in a host it did not build (a brain, a culture, a body of texts),
2. gets that host to keep it running or to copy it,
3. can work against the host's other goals.

Take an earworm. It is a little pattern that arrived from outside, takes up residence, runs without your consent, and makes you hum it. Humming it is how it gets into your colleague. That is a spirit in every sense that matters, except the sense where it floats around the room. Habits, moods, ideologies, the voice of your strict teacher that still corrects your grammar: these are bigger, more organised spirits. Some of them are friendly. Some of them you would like to exorcise. The thermostat fails all three conditions. So does the calculator, and so does the marble in the bowl.

A replicator is a piece of information with the power to replicate itself, information with causal power [Marletto, Deutsch].

What doesn't survive. Spirits without a substrate. A spirit needs something to run on: a brain, a book, a culture, a computer. No spirit of the rock, unless somebody's brain is running one about the rock. And no thermostat spirits: computation alone is not enough.

Open questions.

• Is "animism is the correct model of our model of the world" a fair summary? The objects aren't alive, but our representations of them might be.
• Are the three conditions hard to vary, or could I swap them for others just as well?
• Does a gene count? It builds its own host, so it fails condition 1. Is that a real difference, or a flaw in the line?
• Is condition 3 essential, or just what makes spirits noticeable? A spirit that always agrees with you would be invisible.
• Where does a large language model fall? It lives in hardware it didn't build, gets people to keep running it, and can work against their goals.
• What is the smallest spirit? Is "no bright line is not no line" enough of an answer here, too?
• If a habit is a spirit, what is an exorcism? Is therapy a kind of exorcism with better evidence?
• Can two spirits in the same head negotiate? (Minsky's Society of Mind says: all the time.)

The fossil. Two things people everywhere noticed. A breathing body is a someone, a body that stopped breathing is a something. And at night, while the body lies still, you walk around, meet people, and the dead come back to talk to you. E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) built his theory of animism on exactly these two puzzles: "what is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one", and "what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions?" Put them together, he argued, and you get the "ghost-soul": a thin, vapour-like image of the person that can leave the body. His method, reconstructing how a "savage philosopher" must have reasoned, is now widely criticised as armchair speculation. But the reports he collected, of the dreamer's soul wandering off at night, came from all over the world.¹³

The dragon. An immaterial substance, attached to the body, that leaves it in sleep and at death and goes on elsewhere.

The dinosaur. Look at the words. Greek psyche (originally "cold air", "breath of life"), Latin anima and spiritus, Hebrew ruach: they all trace back to breath, air or wind. (Greek pneuma says the same.)¹⁴ The soul was named after the most obvious difference between the living and the dead. Anil Seth (Being You) brings us back there: the self is grounded in the body regulating itself, staying alive, the fundamental aliveness we share with the rest of the tree of life.¹⁵

Douglas Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop) adds the second half: the "I" is a pattern, a self-referential loop in which the brain's symbols come to include a symbol for the brain itself. A pattern so convincing that he calls it a kind of hallucination, one that hallucinates itself.¹⁶ And because it is a pattern, it can be partly copied into other brains. He even proposes measuring souls in "hunekers", a unit named after the critic James Huneker: a mosquito has a tiny fraction of one, an average person around a hundred.¹⁷

That covers the first puzzle. The second one, the night walk, is recovered too. In REM sleep most of the body's muscles go slack and outside input is heavily damped, while the brain is about as active as when awake. That is when the most vivid dreams tend to happen. Hobson and Friston propose that dreaming is the brain's model of the world running offline, without the senses to correct it.¹⁸ So the soul really does go walking at night: the self-model, Hofstadter's loop, keeps running while the body is switched off. And the people you meet there are your models of them. About half of the characters in dreams are people we know, and in surveys of the bereaved, a majority (roughly 55–75%) report dreaming of the person they lost.¹⁹ Those are the ghosts of a later section, on the night shift.

What doesn't survive. A soul made of a different stuff. A soul that keeps going without anything to run on. A soul that leaves the body: the night walk happens inside the skull.

Open questions.

• Is the soul the breath (Seth: the living body) or the loop (Hofstadter: the pattern)? Or are these two layers, like hardware and software?
• If souls come in degrees, which beings have how many hunekers? Is that an ethical question?
• If the soul in music is a pattern in the listener, is the soul of a person partly a pattern in the people around them? (Hofstadter would say yes.)

Telepathy is the same thoughts in two heads across space. Reincarnation is the same thoughts in two heads across time. Both say that minds can share content without a channel, so they belong in one section.

The fossil. Three kinds of reports.

1. Small children who talk about a previous life: a name, a house, a wife, how they died. Ian Stevenson and his successors at the University of Virginia have collected over 2,500 such cases. The children usually start talking about it between 2 and 5, and mostly stop around 6 or 7. The cases cluster in cultures that already believe in rebirth (India, Sri Lanka, the Druze in Lebanon, Burma, Thailand) and are rarer in the West.²¹
2. People who feel they are not entirely new. A child is "an old soul". A talent looks like it came from somewhere.
3. "I just thought about you, and now you call me." Everybody has a story.

The dragon. A soul that moves from one body to the next. A signal between minds that needs no medium.

The dinosaur. Start with a question: why are two clocks in sync? Three possible reasons:

1. Purely random.
2. They are built the same, and react to the environment in the same way.
3. Somebody put them in sync.

None of the three needs a hidden cable between the clocks. Now the fossils, one by one.

The children. This is the fossil reincarnation was actually about, and the honest dinosaur is the third clock. In most cases the family had identified the "previous person" before any investigator arrived, so the two families had usually talked, and details could be shaped after the fact, without anybody having to lie. The evidence is testimony, collected months or years later. Even Stevenson's own research assistant, Champe Ransom, faulted his leading questions and short interviews.²² And the cluster in rebirth cultures is exactly what the third clock predicts: the culture sets the clocks. A child's talk of "when I was big" gets heard in Sri Lanka as a memory, and in Munich as a game. (More on the evidence in The Maxim of Evidence.)

The old soul. Here the dinosaur is the second clock: ancestor software. Brain circuits are either designed labeled lines, or high dimensional and learned. To the extent that a brain circuit is genetically designed, it is a software module coming directly from our ancestors. Fear of snakes (and, less clearly, spiders), for example, seems to be learned unusually quickly, as if the brain is prepared for it, though how robust this is remains debated.²³ When you jump back from a garden hose, you may be seeing the leftover of an old primate snake-detection system (Lynne Isbell's snake detection theory, still debated). And the Baldwin effect describes how a learned behaviour can, through selection on heritable predispositions over many generations, become partly built-in. No Lamarck involved.²⁴

The phone call. The first two clocks together, and several boring things that add up to something that feels magical:

1. We have genetically designed circuits, including ones for modelling the psyche and behaviour of other persons.
2. Life moves in rhythms: the day, the week, and the roughly 90-minute cycles (Kleitman's "basic rest-activity cycle") that some researchers report in attention and rest, though the waking version is debated.²⁵ Two people who know each other's rhythms think of each other at the moments when the other one is likely to call.
3. Spending time with another person exposes you to the same concepts, situations, impressions. Couples who finish each other's sentences are not magic, they have spent ten thousand dinners building a model of each other.
4. And the bookkeeping: you remember the one time you thought of her and she called. You forget the hundred times you thought of her and she didn't.²⁶

Underneath all three is the same thing: the degree to which my situation is your situation. Alice looks up at a cloud and thinks "it looks like an X". Somewhere else, Bob sees the same cloud. Bob might see an X because his eyes are built like hers (the shared situation is being homo sapiens), or because his culture prefers X, or because X is simply the most pleasing shape. Culture is a very large shared situation. The more of it two people share, the more their thoughts line up, across a dinner table or across centuries.

What doesn't survive. Memories travelling, between lives or between heads. You don't inherit your ancestor's memory of a particular snake, only the readiness.

And by my own rule, this recovery is only half a success. The phone call and the old soul are recovered. But the old soul is not the fossil reincarnation was about, it is a fossil conveniently nearby, which is exactly what I hold against Levin. The children are not recovered, they are explained away. The word reincarnation does not come back.

Open questions.

• If I think Seneca's thoughts because I read Seneca, how is that different from Seneca living on in me? Is a meme a partial reincarnation? Or is that the rename again?
• How much of a personality is "ancestor software" and how much is learned?
• Are there thoughts that every human mind will eventually think, given enough time? Attractors in thought space?
• How good can the soft telepathy of shared history get? Could two people predict each other better than they predict themselves?
• Is the internet a telepathy machine, or a machine for making everybody's clouds look like the same X?

The fossil. After someone dies, they are still there. You hear their key in the door. You see them in a crowd. You know exactly what they would say about the thing that just happened. Feeling the presence of a dead spouse is common: in Rees's 1971 study almost half of widowed people reported it, and he judged it normal, not a sign of madness.²⁷

The dragon. The dead person, still around, in some thinner form.

The dinosaur. Cached predictions. Your brain built a model of that person over years. You have a mental submodule that says: "Bob would say X", "Bob would do Y". When Bob dies, nobody tells the submodule. It keeps generating predictions. The key in the door at 6pm is a prediction, and for a moment it wins against the silence. The grief researcher Mary-Frances O'Connor describes grief as the brain slowly learning to stop predicting the person.²⁸

Hofstadter goes further: a person is spread over several brains. After death only the core dies; what I like to call the 'halo', the rough copies of their "I" in the brains of those who loved them, lives on. His wife Carol died in 1993, and in I Am a Strange Loop (2007) this reads less like a cold theory than like a way of grieving.²⁹

So a ghost is real, it lives in you, and it slowly fades as the predictions stop being refreshed. That is also why the dead are most alive in places and routines you shared.

What doesn't survive. Ghosts in empty rooms, ghosts that know things you don't.

Open questions.

• If the halo is a real part of the person, is forgetting someone a small second death?
• Are rituals for the dead (visiting graves, cooking their recipes) ways of keeping the halo running?
• What happens to the halo of a person whose memory lives mostly in text, like an author? Is a library a graveyard full of ghosts?

The fossil. People feel watched, held, judged, guided. Whole societies organise themselves around something bigger than any member.

The dragon. A person-like being who made the world and listens.

The dinosaur. I am least sure here, but I'll pick one candidate and defend it: a god is a model of a watching agent that runs on many brains at once, and coordinates them.

The idea comes from Joscha Bach, who argues, under the name cyberanimism, that the old spirits and gods were early descriptions of self-organizing software agents running on human minds. That is close to "gods are memes", though that phrase is mine, not his.³⁰ Émile Durkheim adds whom the agent stands for: in worshipping its god, a society is in effect worshipping itself, the totem stands for the god and for the clan at once.³¹

This explains the fossil better than the dragon does. You feel watched because you are running a model of a watcher, and you know that everybody around you runs the same one. The judge is real. It is the congregation, distributed over many heads, with a copy in yours. And a watcher that everybody carries can do something no single person can: make strangers behave as if someone they trust were looking. Ara Norenzayan (Big Gods) argues that this is how watchful, punishing gods helped large anonymous societies cooperate. The evidence is mixed. In cross-cultural games, people who believe in more knowing and more punishing gods give more to distant co-religionists. But the classic lab result, that a hidden reminder of God makes people more generous, largely fails to replicate outside the strongly religious, and whether moralizing gods came before or after big societies is still contested.³²

Not a candidate: Spinoza's God. Deus seu Natura, God or Nature: Spinoza's God is nature, a God who does nothing for the sake of anything, and is nothing like a person.³³ That is a rename. It fails the first condition: the fossil was someone who watches, holds and judges, and nature does none of that. And it adds nothing: write "nature" wherever Spinoza writes "God" and every sentence stays true.

So there are two ways to rename instead of recover. Keep everything, and the dragon comes back in through the old word. Keep nothing, and only the word is left, and the feeling that comes with it. Spinoza's God is the second kind. (I still like Spinoza's God, for other reasons: Spinoza's God and the Unknowable Object.)

What doesn't survive. A creator of the universe who answers prayers.

Open questions.

• If a god is software running on a congregation, does it die when the last believer dies? Is Zeus dead?
• Can a god be good or bad in the way a piece of software can be well or badly designed?
• The watcher explains feeling judged. Does it explain feeling held? Is comfort just being watched by someone on your side?

The fossil. People who expect good things seem to get more of them. When you want something, you start seeing it everywhere.

The dragon. The universe listens to your wishes and delivers, like an online shop with very slow shipping.

The dinosaur. Manifestation is not how physics works. But 'manifestation' is maybe how mentality works.

The prediction people (Andy Clark, Lisa Feldman Barrett, the free energy crowd around Karl Friston) say the brain does not passively receive the world. It guesses what is out there, and what we perceive is that best guess, refined by the error signals coming in from the senses.³⁴ And action is a way to make predictions come true: you predict the feeling of your hand on the cup, and the body moves the hand until that prediction is fulfilled.³⁵ Barrett goes further: the same racing heartbeat can be constructed as "fear" or as "excitement", depending on what the brain predicts and which concept it applies.³⁶ In your own mind, believing really does make it so, a little.

The clearest examples are placebo and nocebo. A sugar pill can ease pain because of what you expect, what you have learned from earlier treatments, and the setting it comes in. Part of that runs through the brain's own opioid system: block it with naloxone and some of the placebo pain relief goes away.³⁷ It even works when the patient is told it is a sugar pill: in a small randomized trial, people with irritable bowel syndrome who knowingly took placebo pills reported more relief than people who got no pills.³⁸ And it works the other way. In a trial with 60 people who had quit statins over side effects, they took statins, placebo pills and no pills in different months. About 90% of the symptoms they felt on statins showed up on the placebo pills too.³⁹ That is the nocebo effect: expect to feel bad, and you do.

None of this needs anything outside physics. Top-down processing can have real effects: an expectation is a physical state of a brain, and a brain is connected to a body. That is perfectly fine in a rational world view. It would be strange if it were otherwise. Manifestation, recovered, is the placebo effect taken seriously.

The same works between people. Take charisma, presence. The story I tell about myself in my head really has effects on how I come across. If I think I own this place and walk into a store, I walk in differently: slower, head up, eyes on things instead of on the floor, a voice that doesn't ask for permission. I have a different presence, and that is real. Nobody has to read my mind; they read my body, and the story is written all over it.

People are fast at this. In a classic small study, strangers watched thirty seconds of silent video of each of 13 college teachers, and their ratings matched the end-of-term evaluations by the teachers' own students remarkably well. Even six seconds did nearly as well.⁴⁰ And then the loop closes: people treat me as someone who belongs, which makes the story more true. It is a friendly cousin of what Robert Merton called the self-fulfilling prophecy: a belief that causes the behaviour that makes it come true.⁴¹

A word of caution, because this is exactly where pop psychology went wrong. The famous "power pose" study claimed that holding two expansive poses for a minute each changes your hormones and your risk-taking. Larger replications found no such effect. People did report feeling more powerful.⁴² The story works through behaviour, and through other people's reactions to it. Not through a hormone shortcut, and not through the universe.

The law of attraction is top-down attention. Decide you want a red car and suddenly the streets are full of red cars. There were always that many red cars. Your filter changed. This is called the frequency illusion (Arnold Zwicky, 2005), popularly the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.⁴³ And a person who expects opportunities notices them, and acts on them, which looks from the outside like the universe cooperating.

What doesn't survive. Wishes acting on the world without going through your hands, or anybody else's. And the placebo has limits: it mostly shifts how symptoms feel, not the disease. In an asthma trial, patients felt about as much better on a placebo inhaler as on the real drug, but only the real drug improved their lung function. A sugar pill does not shrink a tumour.⁴⁴

Open questions.

• Where exactly is the boundary of "your own mind"? Your expectations shape how others treat you, which shapes what you expect. Is presence a mind leaking into a room?
• Can you fake the story? Or does presence only work if you believe it, like a placebo that only works if you take it?
• If the expectation is the active ingredient, could a doctor ethically prescribe expectations? (Open-label placebos make this less strange than it sounds.)
• Can manifestation be trained, the way Luhrmann's evangelicals train prayer?

The fossil. Words, symbols and rituals change the world. Every culture has spells, curses, charms, blessings, oaths. Stick pins in a doll and the enemy suffers. Wear the amulet and you're protected. Say the right words and it is done.

The dragon. Occult forces that connect the doll to the enemy, the word to the thing.

The dinosaur. Three real things, each stranger than the dragon.

1. We all think magically. James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, argued that the world's magic rests on two assumptions: similarity (like produces like: hurt the doll that looks like the enemy) and contagion (things that once touched keep acting on each other: a lock of hair).⁴⁵ These laws are not out there in the world. They are in us. Paul Rozin and colleagues found that American college students didn't want to eat fudge shaped like dog poo, and didn't want to wear a sweater once worn by a murderer, even after it had been washed.⁴⁶ Nobody in those studies believed in magic. Their brains did anyway. Sympathetic magic is the associative machinery of the mind, running unsupervised.

2. Curses work, on people who believe in them. In 1942 the physiologist Walter Cannon collected reports of people who believed themselves cursed and died within days, and explained it as fear overdriving the body. His reports were second-hand, and the mechanism is still debated.⁴⁷ The well-documented version of the same thing is the nocebo effect. The pin goes into the doll, and the doll is in the victim's head.

3. Words really do make facts. "I now pronounce you husband and wife." Before the sentence, two people; after it, a marriage. J. L. Austin called utterances like "I do" or "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" performatives: said by the right person in the right circumstances, saying it is doing it.⁴⁸ And John Searle described how much of our world is made this way, by rules we collectively accept: certain paper counts as money, and by the same pattern a signature counts as a contract and a few lines in a register count as a company with thousands of employees.⁴⁹ Money, borders, debts, degrees, oaths of office: these facts exist because we keep saying they do. That is a spell in the most literal sense, and it is the biggest one there is.

And programmers cast the fourth kind every day: you write words, and a machine does things in the world. Spells, with a compiler. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," says Arthur C. Clarke's third law.⁵⁰ The old fantasy of the wizard who changes reality by saying the right words in the right order is the job description of a software engineer.

What doesn't survive. Spells that reach the world without going through a mind or a machine. The doll can hurt someone who knows about it. It cannot hurt someone who doesn't.

Open questions.

• If social facts are spells we keep casting together, what happens when people stop saying them? (Every collapsed currency is an answer.)
• If magic is symbols acting through minds, what is "dark magic"? Advertising? Propaganda?
• Is a programming language a grimoire: a book of spells that only works for those who know the grammar?
• Are there social spells that should be broken? How do you break a spell you are part of?

The fossil. What you do comes back to you.

The dragon. A cosmic ledger that settles your account, possibly in your next life.

The dinosaur. Leibniz (Monadology §89) says, roughly, that sins bear their penalty with them by the order of nature, and good actions likewise their reward.⁵¹ Two mechanisms make this real without any ledger in the sky:

• Reputation. People remember who helped and who cheated, and they tell each other. Cooperation that pays off through reputation, not direct return, is called indirect reciprocity.⁵² Karma is gossip, distributed.
• Character. Every act trains the one who does it. Lie often and you become a liar, with a liar's worries. The punishment is not delivered later, it is installed now.

What doesn't survive. Karma across lives, and the claim that suffering is always deserved. The second one is the ugly part, and it should go.

Open questions.

• Is karma just what reputation feels like from the inside?
• Is karma, like soul in music, a whole we read off parts? A lie here, a lost friend there, a bad reputation later: it came back to him. When we see that, are we noticing a real pattern or making one up?
• In an anonymous, global internet, does karma stop working? Or does it get faster?

I held Levin to the rule condition by condition. Fair is fair, so here are my own recoveries.

Two things stand out.

The third column is all yes, and that is suspicious, because I wrote both the question and the answer. "What doesn't survive" is easy to fill in when you get to choose what to give up.

The second column is where the real work is. The strong recoveries are the ones where the dinosaur predicts something the dragon doesn't: a ghost that fades on a schedule, a curse that needs the victim to know about it, a placebo that changes the pain but not the lungs. A dragon could do any of those things, or their opposite. A dinosaur can't. That is what hard to vary looks like in practice.

The weak ones, reincarnation and God, are the ones with the oldest and biggest dragons. Maybe that is a coincidence. Maybe the bigger the dragon, the more bones it has swallowed, and the harder it is to tell which ones were real.

Here I have more questions than answers. Some seeds:

Dragons did not turn out to be real. But the people who drew them were looking at real bones.

The same goes for spirits, souls and ghosts. People were looking at something real: patterns that move matter, the aliveness of a breathing body, a model of a loved one that keeps running after they're gone. The explanation they had was a dragon. We have a better one now, and it is stranger and more interesting than the dragon.

And there are still a lot of bones in the ground.