The Ghost in the Machine

Ryle coined 'the ghost in the machine' in 1949 to ridicule the Cartesian dualism he was dismantling: the picture of the human being as a composite of mechanical body and non-physical mind, yoked in a union neither physics nor metaphysics could explain. Three-quarters of a century later, the ghost has returned — not in the costume of immaterial substance, but in functionally identical form: the demand that, alongside the machine's computational operations, something additional must occur for the behavior to count as genuinely intelligent. The new Cartesianism accepts the description of the machinery and then asks for a further entity — consciousness, understanding, the inner theatre. Ryle's diagnosis applies with undiminished force: the demand for the ghost is not a demand for evidence but a demand for metaphysics, and metaphysics, in this case, obscures rather than illuminates the phenomenon.