Customer Reviews

The Ghost in the Machine

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When I first read this book I was stunned... and as one of the other reviewers said, baffled by why he produced that ending! (it's the ending which has "taken" one star off my rating). Always the polymath, Koestler starts by covering psychology, including Skinner's experiments with rats and subsequent theories on human nature which he pulls apart thoroughly. Koestler then comes out with the unfashionable theory that the human brain may have evolutionary flaws in it, since it was merely built on the older more primitive brains of its ancestors and the new and old parts do not always communicate well with one another. Partially because of this we have a lot of the problems of human life such as the urge to self-destruction and violence, which emanate from the older parts of the brain. He ties this in with history and if I remember, results of some shocking experiments. It has lost some of its immediacy since the end of the Cold War (nuclear bombs are still with us more than ever in Israel, Pakistan, India, China etc).

While I have simplified some of the book's ideas above, it is not always light reading, but it can be read by a layman. I think some of the subjects Koestler tackles are taboo (such as the idea humans overall are instrinsically "evil") rather than innately good, and he dismisses wishful thinking. Some people do take issue with his ideas... unfortunately some of the attacks are ad hominem... but where they aren't I suggest you examine very carefully both sides of the story. The message in this book is still pertinent enough, even if the proposed solution isn't.

(if you would like to read more on Koestler, read my review and others, about Cesarani's biography of him on this site)

A man coins not a new word without some peril; for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.

So wrote Ben Jonson, and so quoted Arthur Koestler on page 48 of his The Ghost in the Machine (1967). Koestler inserted the quotation to express the uneasiness he felt at suggesting a neologism. The very useful word he coinedholonseems to have gone tragically underappreciated, while Koestler has, I suspect, not received much in the way of scorn for his impudence (at least in this respect). Jonson was wrong. A man coins not a new word without some peril, its true. But the nature of the peril is this: if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the coiner gets not even scorn.

What is a holon? Coined from the Greek holos (whole) and the diminutive suffix -on (after the pattern of proton, electron, etc.), the term holon may be applied to any stable biological or social sub-whole which displays rule-governed behavior. Koestler writes:

Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domain of life.... The organism is to be regarded as a multi-leveled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons. Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the Janus Effect.... The concept of holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches. (Appendix I.1; scrambled somewhat for conciseness.)

The first third of Koestlers book, the section titled Order, is dedicated to the concept of the holon, and his introduction to open hierarchic system theory. The versatility and universality of the holon concept should have guaranteed its entry into the language. Its prevalence in all ordered, i.e. hierarchic, systems, and particularly biological organisms, Koestler illustrates through the parable of the two watchmakers, Mekhos and Bios. Their watches are of equal quality and of equal complexity (a thousand pieces each) but their methods of production differ. Bios builds durable sub-units of ten pieces each, ten of which can be joined together to create a secure sub-assembly of one-hundred piecesand ten sub-assemblies, of course, make one complete watch. Mekhos, on the other hand, adds one piece at a time, seriatim; as such, any interruption requires him to start afresh. Bioss method is clearly superior not just because an interruption will only set him back, at most, nine steps (versus Mekhoss possible 999), but because Bioss watches will tend to be much sturdier than Mekhoss. It is easy to show mathematically that if a watch consists of a thousand bits, and if some disturbance occurs at an average of once in every hundred assembling operationsthen Mekhos will take four thousand times longer to assemble a watch than Bios. Instead of a single day, it will take him eleven years. Consequently, Bioss business thrives, while Mekhos barely manages to scrape by.

Biological systems (Bios), in other words, are not just vortices of chance patterns constrained by deterministic mechanical laws (Mekhos); they are hierarchic systems made up of Janus-faced, quasi-independent holons. In Becoming, the second part of the book, Koestler discusses evolution in holarchic terms, citing organelles (e.g. mitochondria) and homologous organs (e.g. the human arm and the birds wing) as examples of evolutionary holonssub-units which appear, with striking similarity, across countless discrete species. Just as nearly every company has an IT department, every cell has chemical power plants which extract energy from food. And just as automobile designers do not overhaul but rather perform variations on basic components such as the engine, chassis, or suspension system, evolution progresses by making small changes to existing tried and true mechanismsthe arm of the human, the wing of the bird, the leg of the dog, and the flipper of the seal, however different in appearance or function, are all made of bones, muscles, and blood vessels.

This tendency to recycle old parts has its risks as well as its obvious benefits, however. The legacy systems dont always interact smoothly with the enhancements. This is essentially the thesis of the third part of the book, Disorder: that it is not unreasonable to assume that, considering the explosive rate of the brains development, which so widely overshot its mark, something may have gone wrong ... More precisely, that the lines of communication between the very old and the brand-new structures were not developed sufficiently to guarantee their harmonious interplay, the hierarchic co-ordination of instinct and intelligence.

In short, Koestler blames the dominance of instinct over intellectthe latters subservience to the former as physiologically manifest in the neocortexs subjection to the brains more reptilian limbic systemsfor not only humanitys spectacular social and moral cataclysms, but the halting, erratic progress of science as well. The passionate neighing of affect-based beliefs prevent us from listening to the voice of reason. This is why all moral exhortation, all efforts of persuasion by reasoned argument, are doomed to failure; they

rely on the implicit assumption that homo sapiens, though occasionally blinded by emotion, is a basically rational animal, aware of the motives of his own actions and beliefsan assumption which is untenable in the light of both historical and neurological evidence. All such appeals fall on barren ground; they could take root only if the ground were prepared by a spontaneous change in human mentality all over the worldthe equivalent of a major biological mutation.

The solution to our predicament is sketched out and advocated by Koestler in the final few pages of The Ghost in the Machine; it is, to put it succinctly, a pharmacological one. Readers will bristle at the contentious, and some might say contemptible, declaration that mankinds only hope for long-term survival is through medication, but to me the answer seems logical enough. If we agree that something has gone awry in our phylogenetic development, and it seems an anodyne enough hypothesis, then nothing short of tampering with human nature can rectify the pathology of our species, which has been so garishly demonstrated in holocaust after holocaust. And as Koestler is himself quick to point out, we tamper with our nature every day, and have done so ever since the first hunter wrapped his shivering frame into the hide of a dead animal. It could be argued that part of our problem has been tampering: Pasteur et al. tampered on a microscopic level, and with colossal repercussions. No one would seriously propose a voluntary abjuration of antibiotics, however, in order to cull the herd a bit. We can only move forward.

Lets be explicit: we are considering an overpopulated, irrational, imbalanced species equipped with the ability to manufacture weapons of genosuicidal magnitudean ability which will not evaporate:

As the devices of atomic and biological warfare become more potent and simpler to produce, their spreading to young and immature, as well as old and over-ripe, nations is inevitable. An invention, once made, cannot be dis-invented; the bomb has come to stay. Mankind has to live with it forever: not merely through the next crisis and the next one, but forever; not through the next twenty or two hundred or two thousand years, but forever. It has become part of the human condition.

The Promethean myth, Koestler goes on, has acquired an ugly twist: the giant reaching out to steal the lightning from the gods is insane. With this in mind, the advent of a suggestibility-curbing pillan artificially simulated, adaptive mutation to bridge the rift between the phylogenetically old and new brain, between instinct and intellect, emotion and reason, to counteract misplaced devotion and that militant enthusiasm, both murderous and suicidal, which we see reflected in the pages of the daily newspaperseems relatively benign. We cannot ask people to be more rational, more thoughtful, less susceptible to blind passion, bigotry, murderous devotion.

I sympathize with Koestlers proposal, but I am pessimistic as to its practicality. And I think he might have overlooked the possibility that suggestibility and subservience to the affect-based beliefs might be the very epoxies holding society togetherfor better or for worse.

Consider Heinrich Eichmann who, as Koestler observes, was not a monster or a sadist, but a conscientious bureaucrat, who considered it his duty to carry out his orders and believed in obedience as the supreme virtue; far from being a sadist, he felt physically sick on the only occasion when he watched the Zircon gas at work. He was, in other words, the perfect cog, a smoothly functioning holon in something larger than himself. He was a good citizen in a bad society. Where exactly does his sin lie? Where his pathology?

War is a ritual, a deadly ritual, not the result of aggressive self-assertion, but of self-transcending identification. Without loyalty to tribe, church, flag or ideal, there would be no wars; and loyalty is a noble thing. And Solzhenitsyn wrote:

Ideologythat is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others eyes, so that he wont hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions?

Perhaps heres a way of daring to insist that evildoers do not exist: by declaring, instead, that only bureaucrats exist. We could move up the hierarchy and blame everything on its head (Hitler in this case) but frequently the hierarchy has no headperhaps there is only an amorphous board of directors; perhaps the hierarchy is open-endedand of course no hierarchy operates in a vacuum, and no hierarchy can function without its sub-holons.

Eichmann, we feel compelled to say, was as culpable as anyonei.e., fully, or not at all. In him, perhaps, we are given a glimpse of the true nature of contemporary evil: conscientious bureaucracy; obedience as the supreme virtue. The integrative tendency, the desire to transcend the self, the desire to belong, to fit in, to function as a part of some larger organization, to serve something larger than the petty egothis is what stymies intellectual progress and permits wars and pogroms. Death camps cannot be implemented without a stable hierarchic society to carry out the plan; humans cannot exterminate one another on such a cosmic scale without first getting along.

The self-assertive behaviour of the group is based on the self-transcending behaviour of its members, which often entails sacrifice of personal interests and even of life in the interest of the group. To put it simply: the egotism of the group feeds on the altruism of its members. This is the most important revelation in Koestlers book: that the virtuous, self-denying, self-transcending, integrative urges are far more dangerous than the self-assertive ones.

And this urge to integrate, to belong, to blindly submit to the rules of the social holon you belong to, is the warp and the woof of the fabric of society. It may well be instinctualit may well be written in our genesbecause it is implicit, inescapable, a necessity in any hierarchic system. The human individual is truly Janus-faced because his or her self-assertive and integrative inclinations are at odds, true, but also mutually dependent. To do whats best for your group is in fact whats best for you; self-surrender is self-preservation. If the body dies, so do all of its cells.

What would we have had Eichmann do? We fancy that we can imagine a scenario in which his refusal to administrate the death camps (a pang of conscience prompted, in our thought experiment, by Koestlers Pill, perhaps) might have made some difference. He could have conscientiously objected, we say from the smug safety of our armchair. And then what? He probably would have been exterminated, and someone with less compunctions, someone with a stronger desire to fit in, put in his place.

Hegel has said that What experience and history teach us is thisthat people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. If this is true, it is probably unnecessary to pose this question: Have any of us learned anything from, for example, the Holocaust? How would we, as people or governments, prevent a repeat? We glibly take it for granted that nothing so horrific, and in so recent memory, can have failed to make us a little more jaded, a little less naïve, a little less susceptible to mass hysteria or national insanityand we leave it at that. Heres all weve really learned: Nazisbad. Hitlerreal bad. Case closed. But of course the next Nazis will not call themselves Nazis; the next Hitler wont have the mustache.

What we should have learned, perhaps, is that our suggestibility needs to be curbed; that each of us has an obligation to be extremely careful about which holons we allow ourselves to be subsumed by; that our integrative tendencies need to be reined and restrained. Before we resort to pharmacology, we should presumably attempt education. So maybe we should be indoctrinating our children with the belief that blindly accepting indoctrination can be disastrous. Oh. You see the problem.

Koestlers Pill, or any equivalent thereof, might well dissolve society. If we were properly critical, properly rational, all the time, if we took nothing on faith, we would never learn. The paradox is that the march of science is founded on credulity. Specialization, which has become more or less prerequisite to progress in any field, is a hierarchic branching out and narrowing down of knowledge. If every generation of physicists had to rediscover the electron, no one would have ever got to the quark; if I paused to evaluate, to impugn, to prove every one of the statements of fact Ive received from parents and professors, television and textbooks, over the course of my lifetime I would probably never have graduated from high school. In fact I am critical of very little. How could I afford to be? We stand like Newton on the shoulders of giants but only because we trust the giants enough to get up on their shoulderswhen of course they could dash us to the earth if they so desired. Jacob Empson has written (in Sleep and Dreaming):

Rather than modern Western beliefs being less mystic than those in antiquity, or in underdeveloped communities, they seem equally if not more so than some. It could be argued that the very incomprehensibility of the modern world has made us even more credulous. Many of the quite commonplace products of modern technology might as well be magic, for all that any normal person could be expected to understand how they work.

The human race is an unfathomably complex network of overlapping open-ended hierarchies; it is a juggernaut trundling forth, with no one at the helm.

And so too is each one of us. How can it be otherwise?

This is one of the best books I've read in a while. Koestler's erudition, humanity, and prose are nonpareil. Read it and make up your own mind -- it's your moral imperative.

What an enigma Arthur Koestler was! His books range from Zionism to telepathic powers, as well as novels about the Stalinist trials. The Ghost in the machine was my introduction to his writings and it is an astonishing approach to evolution -explained simply leading to frightening and telling conclusions about man and his capacity for war. It is the work of a mind that cannot keep still and keep taking one step further on. Read it and I hope that it opens this exciting and daunting author to you as well. I was never the same after reading it and it has coloured all my thinking ever since. Read it and understand the Taliban, World War One and the Ku Klux Klan. It is nothing less than an evolutionary argument for our collective insanity.

There is no doubt that Mr. Koestler explains his thoughts in immense detail and labor... This will affect you in a couple of possible ways:

- You'll love following the train of thought and appreciate even the train wrecks; or

- You'll start drifting off into visions of dancing monkeys and magical fireworks...

In all seriousness Mr. Koestler explains the reasoning and imagination behind all of his assertions and assumptions with exacting detail...

His theory is excellent and combines some mainstream stuff (from his time and relevant now) with some of the fringe ideas of various fields. The whole package is woven together with expert touch and Mr. Koestler has a rare gift of explaining things not in an "idiot-proof" fashion but down-to-earth enough to let you think about it.

The basic premise is the exploration of mankind's "darker" side -mentally speaking. The pathological human mind that 'builds splendid cathedrals and decorates them with gargoyles'; Mr. Koestler explains them as "two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint" - and indeed he makes that case with astounding persuasiveness... His concepts sound extremely plausible and seem to be well-founded on facts and ideas alike...

Stick to the heavier or rambling parts as he ties them into the overall idea eventually! You will walk away from this book having learned something...

it is a solution to the problems of social anthropology giving a pattern that describes and (!) explains social networks. The problem of Koestler is very similar to the problem of cannabis: Cannabis is kept down by the oil-industrie, Koestler by the establishment of scientists and politics. For several reasons: First he argues against the human being a machine (Skinner) and then he looks for ways out of schizophysiology, for drugs balancing the older emotional brain with the new analytical thinking neocortex. Goleman should have read him. In the years after Ghost in The Machine he looked for drugs together with T. Leary and became leading person in the PSI-society, more reasons to keep his ideas down. Nevertheless, holism is a great theory that can be applied even in the communitarism debate and is so lively written, that other scientists had to be annoyed!

Masterful in scope. An excellent discussion of the pitfalls of Behaviorism and the many facets of biology, anthropology, and evolution. Food for thought throughout. In addition to the other information in this book I believe you might find it to be an excellent foundation for, and springboard to, the hypothesis of formative causation that is explained in Rupert Sheldrake's later book "The Presence of the Past," which fits together nicely with Ghost and fills in many blanks.

This, Koestler's crowning scientific analysis of the predicament of man (at least as that predicament is seen through the flawed eyes of the behaviorist model), is an impressive achievement. Other than the works of Ernest Becker ("Denial of Death," "Escape From Evil," and "The Birth and Death of Meaning," in particular), or Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil," I know of nothing that even comes close to this panoramic, thorough and incisive, deconstruction, analysis and then synthesis of how man got into his present moral cul de sac. To say that this is a monumental critique of behaviorism and its underlying psychological models would be a gross understatement. There is simply nothing else in the intellectual universe that quite compares to it. Even to a trained Behaviorist like myself, it's clear exacting language alone puts it in an elite class of English writers comparable only to that of say, a Sir Winston Churchill. Or even for those who have heaped scorn upon Koestler's works, no one in search of a model of literary and intellectual clarity can do better than his writings. It is not accidental that Koestler's works on three occasions have been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Believe what he says or not, his exposition simply remains unsurpassed.

Unlike Becker, or Nietzsche, or even Kierkegaard, who all see man's confusing moral existence on earth as simply a monumental existential tragedy, urged along mostly by the confusion of his own narcissistic self-important, or his fear of death or his twisted drama of the web of cultural meanings and misunderstandings, Koestler sees it more as the pathological consequence of a series of specialized and cumulative evolutionary mistakes. As he puts it so well, "on the flip side of man's incredible creative abilities, is also his streak of insanity whose pathology is rooted in biology." That is to say, the pathology of the human mind: Man's belief in the unreal, in gods, devils, angels, monsters, totems and succubi; his will towards industrial scale hatred, racism, genocide and violence, and his general inability to be at peace with the imperatives of his own existence, are all rooted in brain architecture as much as in psychology. Koestler sees them as having their origins in the disconnection or misconnections between the old "instinct run," reptilian brain, and the new neo-cortex, or "rational, and abstract run," modern brain. Although Koestler was not the first to advance such a thesis, (and certainly many others have done so since 1967) no one has defended it quite as well and as elaborately as he has done here. In this, the third of a trilogy that includes "The Sleepwalkers and "The Act of Creation" (which I have also reviewed on Amazon.com), is the centerpiece of Koestler's rather prodigious work. This is the last scientific non-fiction book produced by him before he and his third wife Cynthia ended their lives in a joint act of "planned" suicide.

Koestler's story is beautifully written enough, complicated enough that no review can do it complete justice and anyway, one has to read the book carefully himself lest he run the serious risk of being misled by someone else's misinterpretations. Plus, Koestler's English is so beautiful that it would be a sin not to read every word of his text oneself. So I attempt a summary at the peril of getting some, if not most of what he says, wrong.

From the very outset, the most important suggestion one can make in trying to understand this work is to realize that Koestler, whatever else he may be, is a "pure systemic thinker." He sees the world and the whole of biology through the eyes and language of the General Systems Theory of my mentor Charles A. McClelland, or of his mentor Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The core concept of this exposition thus is a system theoretic concept coined by Koestler, and which has since become part of the General Systems Theory vernacular. It is the idea of a "holon," which described loosely, is a subsystem with the property of being able, as needed, to act completely independent of a "host," and thus able to sustain itself as a whole system. While a "holon" can (and usually does) engage in symbiotic relationships with larger super-ordinate systems, it does so purely in a synergistic way that is as much discretionary as a biological imperative.

Koestler's biological world is populated completely by organisms that are multi-level "ordered" and open hierarchical systems, connected at all levels via "holons." It goes almost without saying that he also sees man as the most elegant and complex of such "ordered" open and hierarchical systems. Once he has set up his intellectual machinery, the author spends what seems like an inordinate about of time, using elaborate examples to demonstrate the difference between the "nonlinear hierarchical systems approach" to biological evolutionary specialization and the more "linear serial mechanistic approach," between open and closed systems; between "flat" or disordered systems and ordered hierarchical ones, all as a build up to his main entree, which is to demonstrate the consequences of the grand disconnect, or misconnect, (or better yet, crude overlap) between man's old reptilian "instinct run" brain and the new neo-cortex, or "abstract, or rationally run" brain.

According to Koestler, the process of evolutionary improvements is nether pretty, nor orderly. It is beset with trial and error, fits and starts, dead ends, switchbacks, retrogression, and recycling of formerly discarded parts. And all these mishaps are more the rule than the exception. With the explosive development of the brain (which even today still remains unaccounted for), it is Koestler's view that something went horribly wrong with the connections between the old and the new brain. It is one of man's most enduring dilemmas that he has failed to reconcile the differences between the competing imperatives of his "instinctual" and his "rational" brains.

One, the "instinctual" brain, has led to the primitive behavior that characterizes the worst of man's excesses, i.e. is to racism, the genocide of the holocaust, nuclear war, religions, and more generally to a fear-based cultural and social existence. While the other, the neo-cortex based rational brain, has led to artistic and scientific creativity and discovery, and most of all, to most of human and cultural progress as we now have come to know it. In the contest between these two competing imperatives, Koestler sees the reptilian brain winning out and dominating the rational brain. And it is this dominance that he worries is continuing to lead man and civilization down a path to self-destruction.It is this disconnect that has allowed man's development in weapons technology to out run his capacity for peacemaking. It is this mismatch that is most likely to lead to a nuclear holocaust and the end of civilization.

Koestler's incredible solution to this problem is to have us re-enter Adolph Huxley's "Brave New World" of pharmacologic medication, with a vengeance. The rationale for medicating "cultural man" and its leaders, (as oppose to individuals) as a way of fixing God's biological error, is that human processes are mostly regulated by chemistry anyway, so there is nothing inherently unusual or anti-human about fixing mishaps in brain architecture via chemical manipulation.

While many of Koestler's critics howled at this suggestion, they probably did so more because they were aware that at the time, Koestler's was busy consorting with Timothy Leary as one of Leary's first experimental LSD subjects, than due to any lack of soundness of his arguments. Based on the logic and soundness of what we now know about human nature and biological processes, Koestler's suggestion does not sound quite so outlandish as it did 40 years ago. And as novel as it may still seem, it has considerable scientific merit, even if it is wholly unacceptable to our reptilian dominated cultural brain. The larger point however, is likely to give Koestler the last laugh, for if any one has not missed it, in our present Prozac run culture, Koestler's fix appears to be happening de facto, one person and group at a time, by default, anyway, no matter what his critics may say or think. Fifty stars.

I only heard about this Arthur Koestler character last year when I read a few reviews that described him as a rapist, a forgotten fashion and a quack proponent of a neo-Lamarckian Creationism, like one of those New Age gurus one falls for during late adolescence, a philosophical equivalent of the glandular fever, but to whom, once read, one develops a lifelong immunity. Koester, according to the hand clappers, has sunk into oblivion quicker than a pebble in a pond (in other words, he was rubbish).

I bought this book anyway, not just because of the great Gilbert Ryle and Sting title, but because I was bored and when I'm bored I click away on Amazon. Rather than having a little giggle with the rest of today's self assured journalist writers, I was pleasantly surprised by this Arthur Koestler. I will not go into a review here, rather, I will just like to say that this Koestler guy can think deep and weighty imponderables. I do not agree with his clunking pessimism, but I have read a ton of academic guys, like Pinker and Dennett, and the rest, and I can confidently say that this Arthur Koestler bloke is, if not better, then on a par with the `phalanx of mediocrity'. Pinker has just published an optimistic book on human nature, now in the Ghost in the Machine, there is a chapter called The Predicament of Man (you can find it on line), I have yet find an answer to Koestler simple questions. Steve Pinker, to my mind anyway, just ignores the `truths' that Koestler lists in this chapter. He wrote it 40 years ago and it's the freshest look on our sorry state I have come across. No wonder it is ignored so loudly, Koestler was that smart and there is nothing New Age about his writings.

In our culture, if you get a job writing book reviews in the New York Times or The Guardian, then you have `made it'. Arthur Koestler also dabbled in reviews, but that was one of his hobbies, rather than his 'look at me' job. Before his sojourn in the news papers, Arthur Koestler wrote a book comparable to Orwell and Huxley and The Darkness at Noon is only dated because it was of its time. To my mind, Darkness is a better piece than Huxley and Orwell.

One more moan about this fallen into oblivion business I mentioned above. The mathematician, Clifford Pickover, recently wrote a book called A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection, apart from the New Age title, Pickover listed the top ten bestselling authors from about 100 years ago and they are now forgotten. Happens to us all I suppose.

....where Koestler's solution for global conflict is so patently chemical that one is left stupefied that such a brilliant and creative mind could arrive at it.