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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Thought Question
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Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 18:16:32 GMT
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In article <3gj9gg$qpo@newsbf02.news.aol.com> jrstern@aol.com (JRStern) writes:

>Ryle, as a behaviorist philosopher (_the_ behaviorist philosopher) does 
>not exactly believe that consciousness extends outside your mind, so 
>much as that there is no consciousness inside your mind.  [...]

>Ryle criticizes introspection, primarily because he thinks there's 
>nothing to introspect.  In some works he asserts that the mind is 
>definitely not a set of brain states.  In others, he asserts that the 
>states may be internal or external (few philosophers seem to be terrible 
>consistent, over time).  [...]

>I only know Ryle from second-hand sources.  The times I've picked up his 
>main work, The Concept of Mind, I've seen stuff like the above, and gone 
>on to higher priority material.  Ryle coined the phrase "the Ghost in 
>the Machine" for Cartesian dualism.  It's catchy, but maybe a bit too 
>facil.  Ryle is also big on "category mistakes".  [...]

I didn't think I'd ever be in the buisiness of defending Ryle,
but suppose that the usual view of the mind was along the lines
of Cartesian dualism.  Suppose people thought the mind was a
thing (kind of like rocks and trees and neurons) but made out
of different, non-material, stuff.  (Apologies for this 
over-simplistic account of Descartes.)  Now suppose you believed
in something like the systems reply: the mind is some aspect
of the operation of a system that includes the brain.  

Of course, there isn't some spearate entity called the system.
If you were showing people how it all worked, you would say some
things about different parts of the brain, and so forth.  If someone
asked "but where's the system" and seemed to think it should be 
in there along w/ the cortex, the neurons and the rest, you'd think
they were confused.  This is the kind of thing Ryle calls a 
category mistake.

Now, it's not entirely clear that the system is much worse off
than the cortex.  Maybe we can show someone the system is by
showing all the things that are part of it.  But the problem
would still remain for the mind.

So Ryle was writing against a particular view.  If we agree that
dualism is wrong and confused, we might well find Ryle's attack on
it useful.  However, even if we agree that dualism is wrong and
confused, we may think Ryle went too far in some ways.  If we also
think dualism is not a very widely held view (at least among those
with whom we're interested in discussing such things), we may be
inclined to pay more attention to his excesses.

-- jd
