The Ghost in the Tap

The "ghost in the machine" is a phrase first developed by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle primarily for the purpose of taking the piss out of other philosophers.  Specifically he was lambasting the idea that the mind is separate from the body which at the time was apparently the prevailing view.  Personally I would have thought that five minutes with a willing subject and a hacksaw would be enough to test this idea but philosophers like to make things difficult for themselves.  After all if philosophy were easy then any halfwit could be a philosopher.  As it is, it requires a fiendishly sophisticated halfwit to be a decent philosopher.

Cheap shots at philosophers not withstanding they are entitled to be a little bit aggrieved at the free and easy way with which others (particularly second rate science fiction writers) have pinched their concepts and then abused them for profit.  Has anybody not heard the term "ghost in the machine"?  How many of you realised that it didn't actually refer to a machine at all?  I didn't until I started researching (well, googling) the term for the purposes of this blog entry.  Generally whenever the term "ghost in the machine" appears on tv or a movie its in the context of some computer going crazy (think Hal from 2001).  In Johnny Mnemonic they went one slightly better.  In that movie the ghost in the machine was an actual ghost in a machine.  Neither however came anywhere near Ryle's original intent.

What has me waxing on about things philosophical?  Like most other people I thought of ghost in the machine as essentially referring to some unintentional gremlin in technology of some sort and that led me to the haunting of the building I work in.  Yes my office building is haunted.  Buried somewhere within the fabric of a sixty one story building there is the spirit of a malevolent llama (as if there were any other kind).

Glaring hatefully from behind mirrors and through access ports the disembodied llama loathes the living and, as llamas do, desires to spit upon its enemies.  So far all the llama has managed to do is control a tap in the bathroom which blurts long streams of water at random intervals whether anyone is using it or not.  This has been repaired twice to my knowledge yet as I worked late last night with not a colleague around the tap was splattering water against the basin without the intervention of human hands.

At present the llama's anger is largely impotent (unless you're the sort of person deeply worried about water wastage and if you work for my firm you're almost certainly not) but I feel that it's soggy reign of terror has just begun.  So far the llama has only a managed to possess a tap but we have hoses, fire sprinklers, water coolers, dishwashers, coffee machines... in short for a non amphibious species we have surrounded ourselves with enough water dispensing devices to recreate the great flood.  I know that the llama is there, gathering strength, reaching out across the fabric of our building, seeking water wherever it is stored.  One day the dam will burst and my colleagues and I will walk into the office to be hit with biblical streams of water erupting from all directions.  Until that day the llama remains the ghost in the tap.