The ghost in the machine

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.