The Ghost in the Machine: Halloween Edition
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This year’s Halloween gathering is, mercifully, not about pumpkins, jump scares, or the existential dread of having to explain the distinction between quarks and qualia. No, we have something far more unsettling: the question of whether you are, in fact, a person at all, or merely a very expensive machine that occasionally complains about the weather.
The phrase "the Ghost in the Machine" was coined by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949) as a withering critique of Descartes' dualism. Ryle's point was that the mind is to the body what a university is to its building: not a ghost in the walls, but the dispositions and activities of the people who occupy it. The "ghost" is a misdescription.
But let’s not rush to exorcise the ghost just yet. Descartes, for all his dualist baggage, gave us cogito ergo sum; the one certainty that survives even if every sense is deceiving you. And if you’re going to spend a Halloween night questioning the nature of the self, it seems only fair to start with the man who made the self into a problem.
Then we have Frank Jackson’s neuroscientist Mary, who knows every physical fact about how we process colour but has never seen red. When she finally steps out of the black-and-white room, does she learn something new? If so, physicalism might be incomplete.
And of course, no Halloween gathering would be complete without Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974). The paper asks whether there is some subjective, first-person quality to experience, a “what-it-is-likeness” that no degree of objective, third-person description can capture. If you’re a bat, the world is sonar and shadow; if you’re a human, it’s coffee and mild anxiety. The mechanisms are objective; the experience is not. Whether that difference matters, or whether it’s just the ghost talking, is precisely what we’ll be arguing about.
So: are we machines? Are we ghosts? Are we both? Are we neither, and therefore in even more trouble than Descartes supposed? Bring your objections, and your half-formed intuitions. The ghost, if there is one, is already in the machine. The question is whether you’re the ghost, the machine, or simply a bat.
Do dress up.
Reading list:
1. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1641.pdf
2. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949)
https://archive.org/details/gilbert-ryle-concept-of-mind
3. Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia (1982)
https://www.sfu.ca/~jillmc/JacksonfromJStore.pdf
4. Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974)
https://philosophy.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/365/2020/03/Nagel-What-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat.pdf
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