Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind.

Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind.

In the first chapter of Ryle’s Concept of Mind, he attacks or confronts the Cartesian theory of the mind, a dualism which he (Descartes) postulates that every human being has both a body and a mind and both are strapped together. Consequently, Descartes’ theory holds that the human bodies are in space and are subject to mechanical laws. However, the minds are not of space neither are their operations subject to mechanical laws. Hence, for Descartes, the human person may be said of possessing two separate entities. These two separate entities are the body and the mind (though residing in one, that is, the body) ___the former is public or the physical and the later is the private or mental. According to Ryle, he characteristically labeled this theory as “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.”

For Ryle, the problem in understanding how the mind and body influences each other poses us with some theoretical difficulties. Thus, what the mind and body wills (for instance, hunger, illness, pain, joy, what affects the eyes and ears, and so on) has something to do with what the mind perceives. The relationship between the mind and the body remain mysterious, so much that we find it very difficult to classify which (that is the body or mind) is active or affected, since they can belong to neither of both.

Ryle in his critique against the “dogma of the ghost in the machine” rejects the theory that the mental states are distinct entities from the physical state. Ryle gave an explicit analogy of a foreigner visiting Oxford University for the first time and having taken him round the college structures, he asks: “where is the University?” Ryle’s analogy could be explained thus; the mind and the body are not separate or distinct from the other. For as the body is a complex organized unit, so the mind is a complex organized unit, though both are of different structure. Ryle pointed out the absurdity that arose from the dualism theory which is “the Ghost in the Machine and the Category-mistake.” Put differently, as the body is a field of cause and effects, so the mind must be another field of cause and effects, however, not a mechanical cause and effect.

In Ryle’s analysis of the concept of mind, he further identified the differences between the physical and the mental as differences within the common framework of the categories of things, attribute, state, cause and effect. He represents minds as things; however, these sorts of things are different from the body; the mental processes are both causes and effects, but different from the causes and effects of the body.

In addition, He attacks the common treasure of the Cartesian tradition and phenomenology, that of a mind different from the empirical world, a set of images, processes, mental events separate from the public and observable behaviors.  Ryle stated that, minds are not merely ghosts, they are themselves spectral machines. Although the human body is an engine, it is not just an ordinary engine; since parts of its workings are governed by another engine inside it.