Communicating with the deceased.
Wind phones have an important origin story that on the one hand provide a form of counseling resources, but also raise important research issue for grief counseling and public health.
Can AI and its chat bots give the world digital wind phones. Would it be consoling, productive, or detrimental?
Taoist and Buddhist temples both use offerings such as incense, food, and candles as part of their rituals.
These offerings symbolize respect for the divine and are a way to ask for blessings or show gratitude. Honoring the dead might elicit conversations, however one-sided.
At its simplest, a wind phone is a rotary or push-button phone located in a secluded spot in nature, usually within a booth-type structure and often next to a chair or bench. The phone line is disconnected.
People use the wind phone to “call” and have a one-way conversation with deceased loved ones. Here they can say the things left unsaid. Wind phones offer a setting for the person to tell the story of their grief, to reminiscence and to continue to connect to the person who is gone. For many, it is a deeply moving, life-affirming experience.
About 200 wind phones are scattered throughout the United States. Wind phones are open to the public, free of charge and usually found in parks, along walking trails and on church grounds. Typically, they are built by those who want to honor a lost loved one.
The wind phone began in Japan in 2010, when Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer, built a phone booth in his yard so he could “talk” with a deceased relative. Months later, the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami hit; in a matter of minutes, more than 20,000 people died.
Sasaki opened the phone booth to his neighbors, who urgently needed a place to express their grief. Word spread, and soon people came on pilgrimage from around Japan to speak through the “phone of the wind” to those they loved.
Since then, wind phones have spread throughout the world.
www.smithsonianmag.com/...?
In the decade since Sasaki created the “Phone of the Wind,” the project has turned into a movement with broad cultural implications. In 2019, writer and director Kristen Gerweck released a highly lauded short film fictionalizing a story about seven strangers connected by a cliff-side phone. Saski himself wrote a now out-of-print book about the experience, which also inspired at least two novels from North American writers.
www.thisiscolossal.com/...
Obsessive use of chatbots has been linked to chatbot psychosis[80] in people already prone to delusional and conspiratorial thinking. This is caused in part by chatbots "hallucinating" information,[81] as they are designed for engagement, and to keep people talking.[82]
Commentators and researchers have proposed several contributing factors for the phenomenon, focusing on both the design of the technology and the psychology of its users. Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist at Stanford, said that what the chatbots are saying can worsen existing delusions and cause "enormous harm".[12]
Food has been offered to the dead throughout history, from prehistoric man through to the Celts, Egyptians, Romans, Japanese, Chinese, and even in the Catholic church. Dining with the dead is an ancient tradition that honors our divine ancestors regardless of culture or creed.
www.festivalofthedead.com/…
A Feast With the Dead: How to Hold a Pagan Dumb Supper for Samhain
You don't need a seance or formal ritual to speak to the dead
