Pinker: "Ghost in the Machine"

In Pinker’s “Blank Slate,” he argued with the idea of the “ghost in the machine” which sparked my interest since he was trying to reject Rene Descartes’s idea that the mind is entirely different from the body –where the body is the “vessel” of the soul/mind. Pinker then later stated that “…when ensoulment takes place in embryonic development, which means that perhaps the most promising medical technology of the 21^st century is being debated in terms of when the ghost first enters the machine.” The idea behind this statement, regarding when the soul enters the body, somewhat confirms what I know is right and true to my beliefs.

Growing up in a religious, catholic, family, I was always taught that everything on earth was created by a higher being and that “god” created our souls. I was taught that people are born with a soul and that soul acts as kind of like our consciousness. This is one of the reasons, but not the main reason, why I cannot agree with Pinker’s argument that everything is genetically inherited from our parents. The main reason why I cannot agree with Pinker is due to Descartes’s idea that our mind is not corporeal but a separate entity, hence the psyche and the soma. Descartes basically supports my argument that the soul inside the body is its own entity that we cannot extract in to pieces unlike our physical bodies. However, if we cannot extract the “soul” from our body, then how does such entity enter our body during the embryonic development? There is no solid evidence; even neuroscience and psychology cannot explain such feat and still being challenged. In addition, in the statement “…when the ghost first enters the machine,” I assume that they are referring to the idea that the embryonic development stage is basically the development of a “vessel” in which the soul can enter. If so, Descartes’s idea plays another part here since we can see that the body and the mind are separate.