Descartes’s myth

In the delightful opening chapter to his Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle explains that Descartes’s mind-body dualism (“ghost in the machine,” as Ryle famously put it) was a response to the mechanization of the world: “Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.”

Descartes’s chosen “escape-route” from this dilemma was to conclude that mental activities must be the results of non-mechanical processes; the laws that govern the non-spatial workings of the mind must be different from the laws that governed extended matter. As a result the “differences between the physical and mental were . . . represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of ‘thing,’ ‘stuff,’ ‘attribute,’ ‘state,’ ‘process,’ ‘change,’ ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’ Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies.” The theory was thus “a para-mechanical hypothesis . . . . Still unwittingly adhering to the grammar of mechanics, he tried to avert disaster by describing minds in what was merely an obverse vocabulary . . . . Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork.”