Moreover, when Descartes makes the distinction between mind and body, he did not say that the idea of the mind is that of a ghost, although he did say that the idea of body is that of a machine. Ryle in his book, ‘The Concept of Mind’ says that Descartes’s distinction between mind and body is a myth. He argues, “I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the ghost in the machine’. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle.”¹¹ According to Ryle, Descartes’s distinction between mind and body commits a category-mistake.

As Ryle said, “my destructive purpose is to show that a family of radical category mistake is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument. Because, as is true, a person’s thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology, therefore they must be described in counterpart idioms. As the human body is a complex organized unit, so the human mind must be another complex organized unit, though one made of a different sort of stuff and with a different sort of structure. Or, again, as the human body like any other parcel of matter, is a field of causes and effects, so the mind must be another field of causes and effects, though not (Heaven be praised) mechanical causes and effects.”¹²