This is just a thought experiment. I hope some of you find it as fun as I have this morning.
There is a common movie trope where the character becomes a ghost, and this is depicted when the character’s body passes through the apparent objects of the world, and when nobody can hear and respond to the character, but the character can still see the apparent world with people in it.
Now here’s the question.
What is the ghost here? Is the character the ghost? Or is the world the ghost? If you wanted to make a movie about the whole world becoming a ghost while the character remaining real, how would you depict it?
What’s interesting is how well the movie trope works. I figure 99.99% of the viewers upon seeing a character’s hand passing through the table conclude, instantly, the character is a ghost, but the world isn’t one. This is evidence of bias.
Nice, but there is one nuance. In this trope the ghost usually isn’t perceivable by the whole world but the whole world is perceivable by the ghost. The ghost loses the ability to interact with the world but he is granted the magic power of invisibility. You could make the determination of who’s the ghost based on who can see who.
Originally commented by u/[deleted] on 2016-05-16 06:54:52 (d36pie1)
I don’t see how you could make such a determination at all. Think about it. The ghostly world can appear in any which way. It’s a ghost. A ghostly world can appear as though people inside it can see each other. This is similar to how a ghost of a human can appear to have a healthy living body instead of a rotten and dead one.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-05-16 06:58:28 (d36pn18)
It took me a minute but I think I see. The character would continue interacting with what he thinks is the real world but it’s actually just the real world’s corpse. The real world is dead now and there’s a ghostly version of it continuing on without him.
This reminds me of Donnie Darko.
Originally commented by u/[deleted] on 2016-05-16 07:30:50 (d36qunw)
That’s a really good way to put it!
I’m also saying, why would a ghost be obliged to look a certain specific way? When we say something is a ghost we mean it’s in some sense fake or in some sense not a full participant in our experience, that’s all. A ghost of a dead human is not obliged to look as that specific body at its very last moment of life. So a ghost doesn’t need to follow a specific version of some expected realism. So if you’re seeing a world’s ghost, that ghost can still look beautiful and lively, it can look how it looked when alive.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2016-05-16 07:38:56 (d36r5ri)