The Ghost Is a Machine
Metaphor has the potential to transform individuals and indeed whole societies. Poets understand that metaphor is the mainspring of power in art, for example, the human brain is a computer. Therefore, human beings are essentially computers, nothing more than biological machines.
The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the metaphor, the ghost in the machine, as a way of summing up the mind-body problem described by Descartes. An ancient duality, the consciousness is separated from matter, and the spiritual from the material. Arthur Koestler argued that the conscious mind (the ghost) was the product of a synergy of biological processes in the body and the brain (the machine). It was not a free floating, ghostly entity imprisoned in flesh and bone as he stated in his book, The Ghost in the Machine. Today, many believe that there is no such thing as a ghost, there is only the machine. But we are still haunted.
In the middle of the last century, computers were like human beings, because we deliberately engineered them to be like us. They could count, add, multiply, and do extremely complex mathematical calculations. They were effective tools used to extend human capabilities, and they did them faster and more accurately than we could. We admired their superiority and we found ourselves somewhat lacking. It would take years to solve the mathematical problems that computers could do in minutes. As computers were made more and more powerful, the comparison changed.
Computers became aspirational models. They seemed to possess better mathematical reasoning and analytical intelligence than humans did. We, therefore, began to see ourselves as less human and more machine-like. Humans assumed the qualities of the computer and computers took on human qualities.
Since then, humans were no longer like the machines, we became machines, inferior and limited by biology and death. Soulless, replaceable — we could be stripped and sold for parts — and we could become obsolete.
The dominant metaphor of our age has stolen self, soul, imagination, and freedom. Dreams are thoughts. Consciousness is an illusion and some doubt that it even exists. Many would argue there is no freedom because all truly significant choices were hardwired in us long ago. What a reductive, limited, and bleak view we have created!
The concept of the brain would be impossible without a mind comprehending it. It is the mind that discovered, named, and attempted to comprehend the brain. Not the other way around. The brain and the mind are quite different and not interchangeable — though we now have the tendency to speak of them as if they were.
Computers did not make themselves. They did not go to the moon. They did not unravel the human genome. Humans did. The statement, human beings are computers is a metaphor. It is a comparison, not a fact. While the comparison has some usefulness, humans are not machines or computers.
By worshiping the computer, humans hold themselves beneath them. It is infinitely beyond the capacity of any machine to understand, for machines have no understanding. What computers do is accumulate, focus, and project the collective power of human intelligence. Computers have made us more powerful both as a species and as individuals.
There are those who believe computers are human because they have chosen to believe in the transcendence of machines. Their dream of the future does not include human beings, a species that, as they see it, has already failed and will soon be replaced. They are blinded by the limitations of their own metaphor.
Every comparison has its limitations. Reductivism is a game of the mind as well. We know that all of human experience cannot be reduced to firing neurons, but it is useful to pretend what it might illuminate. The problem is that all of subjective human experience and its objective accomplishments could be left in the dark. Can we truly understand the nature of the mind by separating what it is from what it does? The brain is not a computer, and our concept of the biological brain would not exist without the mind. While the mind may not be a ghost, it is not a machine.
© Michael Fallon
Michael Fallon is the winner of two fellowships in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council and is the author of five published collections of poetry. His poetry chapbook, Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, won the 2021 Water Sedge Poetry Prize. His essays have appeared in The New England Review, The Concho River Review, Broad Street Literary Review, The Razor, The Northern Virginia Review, among others.
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