Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 16 of 138
The ghost in the machine
Each mind is an immortal soul. Bodies, as physical entities, are determined by the laws of physics; but minds have free will. Each of us as a self is identical with his or her mind. As living human beings we are composite entities, comprising both a mind and a body, but for each of us the self, the object referred to by “I,” is a mind that is somehow attached to our body. Gilbert Ryle, a twentieth-century philosopher of mind, sneered at this aspect of Descartes’ view by calling it the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine.” Each of us is a ghost (our mind) inhabiting a machine (our body).2 We know both the existence and the contents of our minds by a kind of immediate awareness, which Descartes summarizes in the most famous sentence of his philosophy, “Cogito ergo sum”: I think therefore I exist. This looks like a formal argument with “I think” as premise and “I exist” as conclusion, but I believe that Descartes intended it also to record a kind of inner inspection of the existence and the contents of the mind. I cannot be mistaken about the existence of my own consciousness, hence I cannot be mistaken about my own existence, because it is my essence to be a conscious (that is, thinking) being, a mind. Nor can I be mistaken about the contents of my mind. If it seems to me, for example, that I have a pain, then I do have a pain.