The human mind

ONE of the recent theories of mind that truly interested me was Gilbert Ryle's, in his well-known book, A Theory of Mind. He first launches an attack on the myth of the "ghost in the machine" - which is how he characterizes the Cartesian account of a mind inhabiting a body and directing it, with the insurmountable problem of course of explaining how something supposedly immaterial can control the body.

Finding the account of "mind" as something happening in my thoughts implausible as it leads to paradoxes - the thoughts one has can be mindful as they can be mindless - Ryle concludes that the difference between a parrot that squawks, "Good morning," and your friend who greets you, "Good morning," is not that there is something spectral happening in me that is absent from the parrot, but that I am capable of a series of performances of which the parrot is incapable. I am capable of distinguishing between friend and foe and, therefore, of greeting one and withholding it when I meet another. I am capable of varying my greeting to convey the same meaning; this, the parrot cannot do. So, mind, for Ryle, is a repertoire of capabilities, not some intangible substance inhabiting a bodily shell.