Are there Ghosts inside the machine?

Question

UI have just answered a question on ghosts someone else posted and it made me think (which is always dangerous)..

Ghosts are seamingly ubiquitious, every religion, culture, country and belief system has them, and have done for seamingly forever; despite all attempts by science to de-bunk them, their legend endures.

However, we are now all sat at computers, we never know who is at the other end of the line in Answers: could there be the ghosts of computer users on line right now? Answering as if they were regular Jo's?

Come forward, step into the light....

Answer 1

Philosophy has had more to do with ghosts than you might imagine.

The phrase, "the ghost in the machine" dates from 1937 when a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle published his book The Concept of Mind, which was an attack on the belief that mind and matter are two fundamantally different 'substances'. Ryle ridiculed that as belief in a "ghost in the machine" - the ghost being 'mind' and the machine being the brain.

Mind - matter dualism, or 'substance dualism', dates from 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes' work Discourse on Method - the work in which the even more famous phrase "I think, therefore I am" appears.

But philosophy's link with ghosts or spirits goes much further back. In fact it goes all the way back to the very first known philosopher, Thales of Miletus. According to Aristotle, Thales held that "all things are full of spirits".

Of course, I have skipped over the whole era of the Middle Ages in which philosophers were obliged to pre-suppose the existence of spirits.

Anthropologists, scientists who study human societies, have found that almost all primitive societies have, or have had, a belief that all things, all natural objects as well as all living things, are inhabited by spirits. For primitive man, it seems, the whole world and everything in it was, in a very real sense, spiritual.

What did Ryle want us to say about the mind? He argued that we should redefine mental things as actual and potential behaviours. For example, a belief that apples are good to eat should be redefined as actual or potential behaviour in accordance with the fact that apples are good to eat.

Since Ryle's time, the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has developed. Some AI philosophers hold that it is possible that a sufficiently complex computer might have a conscious mind. Others reject that as inherently impossible (see John Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument).

So philosophy is still very much in search of "the ghost in the machine".

Answer 2

Aren't we ALL ghosts in the grand machine of LIFE? Prop up our mortal remains and all you get at the end of a life's journey is a whispering ghost singing Nothingness to Being. So for now, who cares if an Apple or an Apparition is on the other end of the machine; as long as we can still feel the loving vibes of being alive.

Answer 3

If you can an artificial intelligence a ghost, then yes, there's a ghost in every machine.

Answer 4

Human's not too different with Ghosts. For what you scare to ghosts, then the ghosts rather fear to you. Ghost never use gun,or bomb, knives or etc. Human using that's all, to scaring the human.

Answer 5

we are interior. Like a grasp of puppets, which you would be able to talk. We animate this shell. So the "I" is interior. we are the suggestions of this build. The suggestions is a extra actual based outdoors of the suggestions, that that's the spirit (the suggestions). The receptors may be the strings, in a feeling.

Answer 6

that could be the reason , for so many of the stupid questions that you witness now on Yahoo answers.

Im surprised one of the questions isnt

' im a ghost , how do i get out of this machine '
lol

Answer 7

No, but there are ghosts in the shell.

Answer 8

Spectres of Marx- Derrida....

Answer 9

there is no ghost.