Talking with the virtual dead through AI

Cody Delistraty, We’re In a New Age of Techno-Spiritualism, NYTimes, March 30, 2025. Several paragraphs in:

A little over a century ago, Thomas Edison announced that he had been trying to invent an “apparatus” that would permit “personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Known for his contributions to the telegraph, the incandescent lightbulb and the motion picture, Edison told The American Magazine that this device would function not by any “occult” or “weird means” but instead by “scientific methods.”

As science and technology have evolved, so too have the ways in which they attempt to transcend death. Where the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of Spiritualism and pseudoscientific attempts at communing with the dead — through séances, ghost sightings and Edison’s theoretical “spirit phone” — with the invention of these A.I. avatars today, we’re now entering a new age of techno-spiritualism. [...]

A.I. used for psychological well-being is already relatively mainstream. These tend to come in the form of mental health chatbots or “companions,” [...] This latest wave of technology, however, has grief and loss specifically in its cross hairs.

Many of the companies producing A.I. avatars and chatbots have adopted the language of optimization, suggesting that their tools can help people “ease grief” or otherwise better process loss by providing a chance for postmortem conversations and closure.

There's a large potential for exploitation:

The potential risks of A.I. tools for grieving are significant, not least because the companies producing them are driven by profit — incentivized to exploit desires and delusions that may be unhealthy for their users. A recent study from the University of Cambridge, for instance, evaluated the ethics of “the digital afterlife industry” and posited that these businesses may soon realize there’s even more money to be made by requiring people to pay subscription fees or watch advertisements in order to continue interacting with their dead loved ones’ avatars, especially after hooking them on the ability to converse. [...]

Another possible dystopian scenario the Cambridge researchers imagined is a company failing (or refusing) to deactivate its “deadbots,” which could lead to survivors receiving “unsolicited notifications, reminders and updates” and instilling the feeling that they’re “being stalked by the dead.”

This mixing of reality, fantasy and enterprise is a detriment to grieving.

There's more at the link.

Depression and Grief [Claude]

I think that understanding the relationship between depression and grief is particularly important for my current investigation of depression – which, BTW, I am provisionally calling The Melancholy Project. Why is this particularly important? Because, on the one hand, grief is something we all go through more than once in life. It is necessary. But it doesn’t always tip over into depression. We need to understand why and how that happens.

Why is grief necessary? We grieve for people whom we’ve lost – though not necessarily only people. These are people with whom we’ve had a strong personal relationship. That relationship is necessarily mediated by widely-distributed neural connections. The “valence,” if you will, of those connections has to be altered.

If human memory was organized like computer memory, that would be a relatively easy process. For computer memory can organize items in discrete blocks. If Mother has died, you just access the block for Mother and change its contents. Since, however, human memory is not like that, but widely distributed over many neurons and synapses, changing them is much more difficult.

Anyhow, I consulted Claude (3.5 Sonnet) to gather some background information. While I was at it I probably should have quizzed it about different groups and societies handle grief. I can do that later. While I have not made any attempt to verify this information in the technical literature, it is consistent what I know. As always, my prompts are set in boldface while Claude’s responses are plain.

* * * * *

What do we know about the relationship between depression and grief?

The relationship between depression and grief is complex and clinically significant. While both are emotional responses to loss, they have important distinctions in their characteristics, progression, and treatment approaches.

Grief is a natural response to loss that typically follows a progression through various emotional stages. These emotions can include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. During grief, individuals often maintain their sense of self-worth and can experience positive emotions alongside their sadness, particularly when remembering their loved one.

Clinical depression, in contrast, is a mental health condition characterized by persistent feelings of hopelessness, diminished self-worth, and a reduced capacity to experience pleasure. Unlike grief, which tends to come in waves and gradually evolves, depression typically manifests as a more constant state of emotional distress that can persist regardless of circumstances.

These conditions can intersect in several ways. Prolonged or complicated grief can develop into clinical depression, particularly when the grieving person lacks adequate support systems or has a history of mental health challenges. Research indicates that approximately 40% of bereaved individuals meet the criteria for major depression one month after their loss, though this percentage typically decreases over time.

Healthcare providers must carefully differentiate between normal grief and clinical depression when determining appropriate interventions. While grief typically benefits from supportive counseling and time, clinical depression often requires professional treatment, which may include psychotherapy, medication, or a combination of both.

What makes this distinction particularly challenging is that grief and depression share several symptoms, including sleep disturbances, appetite changes, and difficulty concentrating. However, grief tends to maintain a connection to the specific loss, while depression affects multiple aspects of a person's life more pervasively.

Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]

01:38:27

I chose to write about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises for this month’s column in 3 Quarks Daily: Why Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is Not Morally Repugnant. The title is a response to an article that Inkoo Kang, a film critic, published in The Village Voice [1]:

The Wind Rises is custom-made for postwar Japan, a nation that has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the brutality of its imperial past. Nearly 70 years after Emperor Hirohito’s surrender, the Japanese military and medical institutions’ greatest evils, like the orchestration of mass rape, the use of slave labor, and experimentation on live and conscious human beings, remain absent from school textbooks.

I argued that, yes, one can read the film that way, but to do so you have to ignore some things which Miyazaki put in the film. I then point out some, but not all, of those things.

In offering her reading Kang said little about Horikoshi’s relationship with Naoko Satomi, the woman who became his wife. One thing she did say, that their marriage was sexless, is wrong, which I explained (they obviously had sex on the wedding night: 01:46:13-01:46:47). But this got me thinking, once again, about that marriage.

Cheap Melodrama

A number of critics have remarked that Satomi is not the strong assertive female lead associated with Miyazaki; she’s not like Nausicaä, Sheeta, Kiki, Fio, or Lady Eboshi, to name only the most obvious examples. She’s an artist and she’s dying of tuberculosis. While the real Horikoshi was married, his wife wasn’t tubercular and didn’t die before Japan began its war against America. Miyazaki based that aspect of his story on a short story, “The Wind Has Risen”, by Tatsuo Hori [2].

Why did Miyazaki give his protagonist such a wife? As that’s a question about Miyazaki’s intentions, we need to reframe it, as we’re not mind-readers – at any rate, I’m not. How does he use her in his story?

I’ve already pointed out how Miyazaki depicts the emergence of Horikoshi’s first successful airframe design as evolving from a dreamtime suggestion from Caproni through his initial courtship of Satomi [3]. Thus both an imagined father figure and whatever Satomi is, functionally considered (e.g. she’s not a muse), are bound to the design of that plane. What other binding does Miyazaki accomplish through her? I’m interested, not so much in what she is to Horikoshi, but, in effect, what she becomes to us.

At least one critic – alas, I forget who – noted that this aspect of the film is pure melodrama: beautiful woman, love, coughing blood, doomed marriage. Miyazaki is going for the kind of sentiment measured in tear-drenched tissues. If this were the whole film, it would be cheap melodrama. As it is, it’s cheap melodrama in service to something else.

More Chimpanzee Grief

Pansy dies:

When the scientists at the park realized Pansy’s death was imminent, they turned on video cameras, capturing intimate moments during her last hours as Blossom [a close friend], Rosie [oldest daughter] and Blossom’s son, Chippy, groomed her and comforted her as she got weaker. After she passed, the chimps examined the body, inspecting Pansy’s mouth, pulling her arm and leaning their faces close to hers. Blossom sat by Pansy’s body through the night. And when she finally moved away to sleep in a different part of the enclosure, she did so fitfully, waking and repositioning herself dozens more times than was normal. For five days after Pansy’s death, none of the other chimps would sleep on the platform where she died.

Lippo dies:

[Brian Hare] was at a bonobo orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Lipopo, a newcomer to the orphanage, died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Although the other bonobos could have moved away from his body and traveled anywhere in their very large, heavily forested enclosure, they chose to stay and groom Lipopo’s corpse. When their caretakers arrived to remove the body, the vigil morphed into a tense standoff.

In the video Hare took, Mimi, the group’s alpha female, stands guard over Lipopo’s body. When the caretakers try to push the corpse out of the enclosure with long poles, Mimi fights them, viciously. She grabs the poles with both hands, wrenching them away from Lipopo. She calls to other bonobos, who help her fend off the humans from two sides. Even when the vet arrives with a tranquilizer gun, Mimi stands her ground, her mouth open wide in a scream that’s inaudible in the silent film. Mimi wasn’t related to Lipopo. In fact, she barely knew him, Hare told me.

From the NYTimes HERE.

Dogs Mourn

From Phys-Org:

Grief is one of the basic emotions dogs experience, just like people, said Dr. Sophia Yin, a San Francisco-based veterinarian and applied animal behaviorist. Dogs also feel fear, happiness, sadness, anger, as well as possessiveness. 

Dogs who mourn may show similar signs to when they're separated for long periods of time from the individual they're bonded to, she said. Of those signs, depression is the most common, in which dogs usually sleep more than normal, move slower, eat less and don't play as much. 

The beginnings of such a strong inter-species bond between humans and dogs dates back some 15,000 years, when early man and the ancestor of today's dog roamed the Earth together.

Abandoned

Reflections

Babies, sunsets and sunrises, and reflections—all sure-fire photographic subjects capable of drawing interest even to otherwise unremarkable shots. Which is to say, they are dangerous and delicate.

Reflections, why are they interesting? There is, I suppose, the easy symmetry. Symmetry attracts our attention, perhaps for evolutionary reasons. Faces and bodies are symmetrical when see from the appropriate angle. But, while attractive, symmetry is also boring, because static and obvious.

Then there's the reality game. One in the pair is real, and one is but a reflection. If you're in the real presence, you can run your fingers over one and feel its contours, but the other has no contours, only a surface. And not even that if the reflecting medium is water.

Reflections can be elusive. Take this image (below). I know what's being reflected, and yet I had to think about the image, carefully, for a minute or so, before I could parse the central reflection.

What gave me pause were those bright verticals to the right of center. What could they be?

Chimpanzees Grieve

I’m not surprised. Both the BBC and Discover Magazine are reporting accounts of how chimpanzees deal with deaths of the old (Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Stirlingshire, Scotland) and the young (Bossou, Guinea).

I am, of course, glad that this behavior is being documented. But I’m a bit dismayed that it is being reported as news. Of course, chimpanzees grieve. They’re only human, no? Well, I suppose that’s the problem. We mustn’t anthropomorphize. And so we have to study and verify.

Still, I have this vague memory of having read that not so long ago doctors believed that neonates had no sense of pain. And so surgeons didn’t use anesthesia when operating on them. Did the little ones not scream?