Ghost In The Machine Quotes & Sayings

I'm actually quite a nice person. It's to do with the way I look, an uncompromising sort of face, brusque delivery and voice, and I think the combination of all that. When I'm doing pantomime, children will scream the place down before I open my mouth. There's obviously something that really gets them. — Kate O'Mara

Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark. — Donna Tartt

If [t]he mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else. — Steven Pinker

I drug your ghost across the country, and we plotted out my death. Every city and memory we whispered "Here is where you rest." Well I was determined in Chicago but I dug my teeth into my knees And I settled for a telephone, sang into your machine: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. — Conor Oberst

Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind. — Salman Rushdie

Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing. — Alan Moore

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects - that machine, there, for instance. It's a complete ghost to me - I don't understand a thing about it and, well, it's a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron. — Vladimir Nabokov

Saturn Return is just the return of your planets to their original position. — Billy Corgan

One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide ... gather, fall, slide ... each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence. — Lisi Harrison

So much time spent believing
we had ghosts in our machines has accustomed us to haunting
ourselves. — D.J. MacLennan

It is difficult to learn what you do not enjoy. So love every bit of knowledge and enjoy every moment. — Debasish Mridha

In quantum physics, the study of material at the subatomic level, you get down to the tiniest levels. When they take these subatomic particles, put them in particle accelerators and collide them, quantum physicists discover there's nothing there. There's no one home - no ghost in the machine. — Wayne Dyer

TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIAL SCIENCE embraced not just the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage but the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine. The declaration that we can change what we don't like about ourselves became a watchword of social science. But that only raises the question "Who or what is the 'we'?" If the "we" doing the remaking are just other hunks of matter in the biological world, then any malleability of behavior we discover would be cold comfort, because we, the molders, would be biologically constrained and therefore might not mold people, or allow ourselves to be molded, in the most socially salutary way. A ghost in the machine is the ultimate liberator of human will - including the will to change society - from mechanical causation. — Steven Pinker

As a librarian, saving lives and worlds isn't in my purview, although if I could put those on my resume with a straight face, I would. Saving minds, however ... perhaps it's not as farfetched. A mind can be lost without its owner's death. A mind that no longer questions only fulfills the rudimentary aspects of its function. A mind without wonder is a mere engine, a walking parasympathetic nervous system, seeing without observing, reacting without thinking, a forgotten ghost in a passive machine. — Josh Hanagarne

When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right- hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right- hand glove, and a pair of gloves. 'She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair' is a well known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds. — Gilbert Ryle

Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable. — Gilbert Ryle

Sometimes I wish God would give me a Holy Ghost machine gun. I'd blow your head off! — Benny Hinn

How did you even know I wasn't in my room?"
"I checked on you." Finn gave me a look like I was an idiot. "I check on you every morning."
"You check on me when I'm sleeping?" I gaped at him. "Every morning?"
He nodded.
"I didn't know that."
"Why would you know that? You're sleeping," Finn pointed out. — Amanda Hocking

The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. — Gilbert Ryle

Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. . . . Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd. — Gilbert Ryle

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. — Gilbert Ryle

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can't be quantified and calculated, then it can't be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. — Jonah Lehrer

The end is never the end. A new challenge awaits. A test no man could be prepared for. A new hell he must conquer and destroy. A new level of growth he must confront himself. The machine in the ghost within. This is the journey of the man on the moon. — Kid Cudi

Then I heard your voice as clear as day,
And you told me I should concentrate,
It was all so strange,
And so surreal,
That a ghost should be so practical.
Only if for a night
And the only solution was to stand and fight,
And my body was bruised and
I was set alight,
But you came over me like some holy rite,
And although I was burning,
You're the only light
Only if for a night — Florence Welch

That we are rational agents - that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations - is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities. — David Bentley Hart

In the four years I've been doing this stuff for money, I've had less than forty-eight hours of downtime. Did you know that? And now I'm a ghost in the machine. By next week all the hacks and geeks and hats I call my friends will have forgotten who I am. That is the nature of this business. That is the Internet. — G. Willow Wilson

This doctrine, that of the ghost in the machine, strictly separates the mind or soul from the body. And by doing so it takes the soul outside the sphere of mechanical or scientific explanation. It splits the world of the mind from the world of science. It is often supposed to protect our cherished free will. — Simon Blackburn

God is inexhaustible in His gifts to men? Everywhere we see plenty and joy; only the greedy rich lay their hands on and keep in their treasuries too many of God's gifts, which might plentifully nourish hundreds and thousands of poor. Man! Believe firmly in God's inexhaustibility in His gifts, and willingly 'deal your bread to the hungry' (Isa. 58:7)? — John Of Kronstadt

You've been popping into the fire every hour?' Harry said, half laughing.
'Just for a few seconds to check if the coast was clear. — J.K. Rowling