When the epistemologists' concept of consciousness first became popular, it seems to have been in part a transformed application of the Protestant notion of conscience.Consciousness was imported to play in the mental world the role played by light in the mechanical world.

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.

It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

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

Dreamers of dreams may be pathfinders but they may be mere vagrants. Of those who depart from the pavements, only a few are explorers: the rest are mere jaywalkers

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

... my today's self perpetually slips out of any hold of it that I may try to take.

So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

The dogma of the Ghost in the machine.

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.