A Quote by Gilbert Ryle
The dogma of the Ghost in the machine.
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Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.
The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.
Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.
Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.
When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds.
Every comedian has a moment in his life when he realizes he's a little bit different from everyone else. It's like being the only guy in a movie who sees the ghost. The ghost talks to you and you talk to him. Then you turn to your friend and say, "Hey. Do you see that ghost? And he says, What ghost?"
If all individuals were conditioned to machine efficiency in the performance of their duties there would have to be at least one person outside the machine to give the necessary orders; if the machine absorbed or eliminated all those outside the machine, the machine will slow down and stop forever.
Who is all-powerful in the world? Who is most dreadful in the world? The machine. Who is most fair, most wealthy, and all-wise? The machine. What is the earth? A machine. What is the sky? A machine. What is man? A machine. A machine.
I think you have to find how the machine can work for you. That's what I mean by "attaching yourself to the machine," 'cause the machine is going to be there, and you can rage against the machine, which is cool, but there's ways that you can benefit off the machine if you're savvy enough and you're sharp enough, smart enough. We all got to live and eat.
Sometimes I wish God would give me a Holy Ghost machine gun. I'd blow your head off!
My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but none the less a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car.
People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.
It's only a dogma that hells exists; it isn't a dogma that there's anybody in it.
One of the very first ghost stories I read - and that was in a forest rest house, where it is a bit scarier - was by M.R. James. He is one of the pioneers of ghost stories. And the book was called 'Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary.'
The urgent need today is to develop and support leaders on every level of government who are independent of the bossism of every political machine - the big-city machine, the liberal Democrat machine, and the Republican kingmaker machine.
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