In many cultures around this world, there is the view that humans have a soul that exists independently of the physical body. For Greek philosophers, the soul was also viewed as the seat of our reasoning abilities – what we would call our minds today. While Aristotle and those who followed him saw body and soul as one, Plato believed that the soul belonged in the realm of ideas, separate from this world our bodies occupy.
Afterward, many philosophers notably Muslim scholar Avicenna and the great mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, asserted that the immaterial mind (soul) and the material body were distinct entities. This concept of mind-body dualism was challenged over a century later by Gilbert Ryle, who thought of the idea of independent body and mind as seeing a ghost in a machine. Today we live in the age of electronic computers and digital technology, which provides a better analogy to describe the nature of the mind and body. In contrast to the older view, like hardware and software; they interact constantly – distinctive yet interdependent.
