ghosts in the machine
What was that book about this again...?
Asked Claude:
Claude, when one cites, or mentions, the phrase "ghosts in the machine," where is that canonically from? Which writer, book, novel, or film, should be referenced as the progenitor of this?
To which it answered:
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The phrase originates with Gilbert Ryle, the British philosopher, in his 1949 book *The Concept of Mind*. He coined "the ghost in the machine" as a dismissive characterization of Cartesian dualism — the idea that a non-physical mind (the "ghost") inhabits and operates a mechanical body (the "machine"). Ryle thought this was a fundamental category mistake.
Arthur Koestler later picked it up as the title of his 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, which took the idea in a very different direction — toward questions of human self-destructiveness and the failures of evolution. From there it proliferated: the Police album Ghost in the Machine (1981), and most influentially for your world of AI discourse, Masamune Shirow's manga Ghost in the Shell (1989) and its 1995 anime film adaptation — which flipped Ryle's dismissal into a genuine question: what happens when the machine does have a ghost? But the canonical citation is Ryle, 1949. He's the source. Everything after is riff and inheritance. |
Yup. I remember Koestler now. Not Ryle, though. Okay.
[ day in progress... ]