Ghost in the Machine

Many fictions draw on this theme, especially in the cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner explored replicant robots that were gifted with memories and were otherwise indistinguishable from humans; Armitage III and Ghost in the Shell are two anime treatments of the same basic plot. The Matrix explores Descartes' hypothesis more closely; what if we're merely being subjected to an incredibly detailed simulation of "reality?"

Descartes thus asked himself, "How can I prove that I really exist, if everything may just be an artificial illusion around me?" His answer, "I think, therefore I am."

His point being, the soul is the identity; the body and its senses are irrelevant.

The plot is somewhat like this: A serial killer works in a computer shop. He steals his victim's address books, and kills people listed in them, one at time. Now, one lady forgets her address book to a computer shop - she bought a program called Paper Warrior that scans an address book and puts it into a digital form - handy, that.

Now, this serial killer guy wants ends up into a car accident and dies. Or, not really. He turns into an electronic entity that lives in the power grid and electronic devices. He takes the recently-scanned address book, and uses his mad skillz to kill people in various ways.

And in the end, <spoiler type=rot13>gur onq thl trgf genccrq va argjbex naq vf qevira vagb n yvarne nppryrengbe naq zntarg svryq qrfgeblf uvz.</spoiler>

BAD movie, pretty predictable and not great feats of acting... Even kids with bad grades in physics and computing stuff would groan at the absurdities of the movie. =) However, the concept of the movie is pretty interesting and it features some cool stuff of its era (old VR equipment, old Windows boxes in the computer shop, etc...)

Half-decent excuse to spend a night...

He also spoke of it as the horse inside the locomotive. The general idea is that the thing we can see apparently doing the work (the brain, the locomotive) is believed to be fundamentally insufficient to do what it seems to be doing, so something else is postulated inside it. Both of his expressions were intended to point up the absurdity of this.

Ryle's demolition of this idea was so thorough that it is almost impossible for any philosopher or scientist to be taken quite seriously if they still maintain the division.

Arthur Koestler boldly entitled a book The Ghost in the Machine, but that's rather the point, he was not a very good philosopher.

However, Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles did maintain an overt form of dualism, and their joint book The Self and its Brain espoused this. Popper defended the logic of different categories of "world", while the physiologist Eccles tried to connect mind and brain in modern terms.

Today the main successor of Ryle in the strongly anti-cartesian line is Daniel Dennett, especially in his Consciousness Explained. Most of his opponents who hold that there exist some kinds of true mental fauna (often called qualia) would nevertheless agree that the mental is a property of the brain, not of a separate ghostly Mind sitting in a "cartesian theatre".