The ghost in the machine

While browsing recently in one of those bookshops with more scented candles than books, I came across an irresistible title on the ‘Wellness’ table: How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend. I didn’t buy it. At my age, I’ve abandoned hope that any of my body parts might become affectionate companions. My back is aching, my knees are on strike, and as for my brain, we’re on speaking terms, but I wouldn’t call our relationship ‘best friends’.

Still, the title lingered with me. It suggests that you and your brain are two separate creatures, currently in a strained relationship, and the book promises to teach you how to win your brain over. And this way of speaking is everywhere:

• ‘My brain hates me’.

• ‘My brain won’t let me focus’.

• ‘Tell your brain it’s safe’.

• ‘Train your brain the way you train a puppy’.

• ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body’.

These phrases are so familiar that we forget how bizarre they are. They smuggle into everyday speech an invisible lodger, a ghostly resident somewhere behind the eyes, issuing orders, filing complaints, or begging for alternative accommodation. We talk as if there is a ‘you’ and a brain, a ghost and a machine. And the more we deny that we believe in ghosts, the more insistently they appear.

To understand why this language comes so easily, we must revisit an old debate. Classical dualism holds that the mind (or soul) is distinct from the brain or body. Plato pictured the mind as an immortal charioteer steering a mortal horse.

René Descartes sharpened the distinction into two substances: res cogitans (a thinking part that exists outside the body) and res extensa (the body).

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ to mock Descartes. Ryle called dualism a category mistake: treating the mind as a non-physical thing (a ghost) lodged inside a physical body (a machine). Modern science nodded vigorously. There is no ghost, it said, only neurons. Thinking may appear to be magical, but it is just a biological process. The self does not have a separate existence; it is whatever the brain does. ‘Monism’ became the scientific default.

Unfortunately, we do not all think like scientists. For most people, Ryle’s exorcism was unsuccessful. The ghost keeps wandering back because it reflects how life feels. The weight of memory, the ache of grief, and the stubbornness of desire are not easy explained by neurophysiology. And because these experiences resist easy description, we invent dualistic linguistic shortcuts. Saying ‘my brain won’t let me sleep’ is far easier than describing the looping tangle of stress, memory, metabolism, fear, and habit that produces insomnia.

If monism were intuitive, our language would reflect it. Instead, dualism leaks in everywhere. Even scientists talk like dualists. Neuroscientists warn that ‘your brain wants to keep you safe’, as though the brain were a helicopter parent. Psychologists urge you to ‘teach your brain new habits’, as if the brain were an underperforming student. Cognitive scientists talk about ‘the self-model’, inadvertently conjuring up a tiny administrator living in your head updating internal spreadsheets. This is not science; it is simply dualism dressed in a lab coat.

The most consequential modern dualism appears not in philosophy seminars but in operating theatres. In gender medicine, the inner self, the ghost, is treated as the ‘real’ person. The body is simply a correctable error.

This is not an argument against caring. People who suffer from gender dysphoria deserve help and compassion, not slogans. The problem is the metaphysical muddle that too often leaves them without good options. When we treat the body as a mistake and the inner ghost as infallible, we are staging a philosophical and theological conflict while pretending it is merely clinical medicine.

It seems that, for all our modern certainty, the ancient idea of the soul simply refuses to disappear. We keep smuggling it back under gentler names—identity, consciousness, agency, personhood, ‘the real me’. By ‘soul’, I do not mean a stowaway hiding in the skull, but the depth and coherence of a person, the interior life that no MRI or algorithm can meaningfully represent.

Not everything in human nature can be flattened into physiology. We know this simply by living. We remember, regret, forgive, hope, break, heal, and love in ways that exceed the vocabulary of neuroscience. And when we deny that inner depth, we risk erasing the very experiences that make human life intelligible. The ghost reappears not because we are stupid or superstitious but because reductive monism is too small to house a whole human being.

Religion takes this depth seriously, not as a tiny spirit steering the body like a puppeteer, but as the recognition that every person is a unity of body and soul. In most religious traditions, the soul is not an intruder but the organising principle of a life, the form of a human being rather than a tenant occupying a body. Body and soul belong together; they speak the same language.

And because religion insists on the unity of the person, it offers something our culture quietly longs for: a way to honour the mystery of being human without chopping us up into competing parts. It teaches that depth is not division, and that the self, however turbulent, is still one being rather than a ghost fighting a machine.

The persistence of dualistic language is not a sign of intellectual confusion but an indicator that scientific monism, while correct about our biology, is incomplete as an account of the person. We cannot banish the ghost entirely because we need what the ghost represents. It is how we understand responsibility, dignity, aspiration, failure, love and hope. It is how we recognise persons rather than mechanisms. But if we mistake the ghost for a miniature person, or pretend it does not exist at all, we trivialise the very thing that gives human life its depth.

One thing is certain. Despite our best attempts, the ghost refuses to move out, perhaps because it is not really a visitor. There is, in the end, only one of us here, body, brain, mind, soul, not a ghost in a machine, but a single, fragile, formidable human being. And recognising that is the beginning of real wisdom.