I have to start by pointing out a serious rift between why I was recommended this book and why I kept reading it: a philosophy major drunkenly trying to defend free will told me I might be impressed by the book's arguments, and I took it as a challenge. I'd love to see an intelligent response to determinism, a sharp knife to poke at the thick skin of my convictions.To be frank, I did not find that in this book.Koestler's arguments against determinism are, to my perspective, peripheral to the bulk of his thesis, which is that evolution has landed man in a blind alley by giving him an exponential growth of cortex that he hasn't yet figured out how to use in concert with the older and more slowly developed subcortical structures. Yet the determinism arguments are treated as foundational in light of the strongly behaviourist tendencies of the scientific era against which he was battling. The result is that he ends up debating a macro-level stimulus-response caricature of determinism that few determinists today hold as sufficient-- a straw man by current standards but, sure, admirable and fairly unique for psychological science circa 1960. It could even be that such relentless (and at the least witty and delightful to read) attacks on behaviourism helped to open bright minds to the cognitive revolution, so we won't hold that against him. But we will hold it against that philosophy major for bringing a knife to a gunfight, and encourage him to read some newer books....Much of the remainder was a fascinating read, however. Koestler takes us through evolutionary theory and hierarchical systems theory, tying the two together to look at the larger whole of humanity in terms of some evolutionary phenomena.One of his focuses is on the "blind alley" in evolution, in which a species becomes overspecialized for its environment and then can't adapt properly to new changes in that environment. In the history of evolution, this has happened a number of times, but nature has a way of getting out of it: paedomorphism, basically extending the growth phase of development and evolving off younger forms of the species. This is a process that Koestler calls reculer pour mieux sauter (roughly: taking a step back to jump better), and it's one of the more interesting of the ideas he applies to other levels of the human hierarchical system. For example, he cites this process as the means to creativity in both art and science. Breakthroughs are obtained by breaking down the existing state of thought and working from older ideas in combination with new knowledge (and thus is hit upon the very reason I read old and outdated books like this one).In a later thread of his theoretical mixology, Koestler takes a closer look at the structure of hierarchical systems, in which each element is both a whole on its level and a part of the level above it-- a duality which he calls a holon and which term is probably this book's most enduring contribution. A holon in a hierarchical system embodies a fundamental tension between integrative (i.e., parts of a whole) and self-assertive (i.e., each part is a whole in itself) tendencies. He not only explains humour, art, and science as lying along a continuous spectrum on this dimension, but also proposes that most of human woe can be explained by the dichotomy. Specifically, that whereas overexpression of the self-assertive tendency can lead to small scale violence, overexpression of the integrative tendency moves the behaviour one step up in the hierarchy and leads to large-scale violence. So nationalism, religion, cults, etc., are a submission of the "wholeness" of the part to the benefit of the larger whole, and lead to destruction on a broader scale. I'm not generally one for such broad theorizing, but I love this idea.After hitting that broad and impressive peak, he reels the magnifying glass back down to the level of the individual human and argues that we've evolved into a sick blind alley that makes us prone to the delusions inherent in closed systems. A closed system doesn't behave hierarchically, but locks its parts into the part role and leaves the larger closed system the only whole, rejects opinions from outside the system, and so on. Whether these delusions are expressed in terms of mental illness or social illnesses like nationalism/religion, the result is the same and it is not good. Also generally on board with this idea, and at this point I began to develop expectations about where he was going with it...And then suddenly the message begins a glorious spiral of WTF so far off the mark of the natural extension I'd extrapolated from the book's brilliant middle portion that it took me and my incredulity an entire two weeks to read the last few chapters. Basically, Koestler sketches the need for a drug to "unlock the potentials of the underused cortex" by somehow allowing more distributed communication with subcortical structures, and thereby evading the closed system that amplifies the part/whole tension and leads to our madness as a species-- a madness defined by what he calls the absolute certainty of self-destruction by nuclear war. If the leaps in this synopsis are hard to follow, I'm sorry, but his elaboration doesn't do much better. The 1960's come through loud and clear in these pages, and it's such a pity that he ends on this note, to the tune of my repeating the word NOPE. Not to mention that in the same breath as he expounds on the virtues of such a drug, he deeply misunderstands Huxley's proposal for the virtues of hallucinogens. If there's an afterlife, I hope Mr. Huxley and Mr. Koestler have by now discussed, over magical heaven tea, that they completely agree about what drugs can and cannot do with the contents of a human brain, because wow what a misreading of Huxley. BUT I DIGRESS. Take the last bit with a grain of salt and forgive Koestler the hubris of assigning a much-deplored relic of psychology's past as his arch-nemesis, and this is a profoundly interesting extrapolation of known scientific processes to new milieus, with at worst thought-provoking and at best insightful results. With the reality of those elements however, it's hard not to take the rest with at least a half-grain of the same salt. If one's foundational assumptions are outdated, it's difficult not to question the validity of anything built on them. Nevertheless, it was delicious and surprisingly far-ranging food for thought and I'm glad I got into a drunken debate with a philosophy major. Even though he's wrong.
This is well worth reading but it's still a bit of a disappointment. The first book in the Act of Creation is one of my favourite books so I had high expectations for Ghost in the Machine and it begins very promisingly. Koestler's criticism of Behaviourism and his section on the 'Poverty of Psychology' are spot on. The Holon is an incredibly useful idea which I had already understood intuitively and it was a delight to see it explained so well. Things go downhill soon after, however. There's a very tedious section on evolution in the centre of the book; a lengthy tirade against the 'Darwinian orthodoxy' that proposes some odd Larmarckian nonsense. Reading this section, it occurred to me that as much as I love him, Koestler is an insufferable contrarian. He is admirably forward-thinking but also way too eager to dismiss rigid methodology and rationality in pursuit of the most grandiose, heretical ideas he can think of. It only sometimes pays off.The final chapter is pretty odd. Koestler comes across as profoundly disillusioned with humankind. He thinks we are fundamentally flawed and bound to destroy ourselves. The only way out, he suggests, is to drug the population!
Do You like book The Ghost In The Machine (1990)?
This was working up to be a pretty interesting analysis of the mind and its layers of emotional and logical tendencies...it just took so long to get anywhere and as soon as the tables and diagrams came out, I lost interest.In terms of being about human impulse to violence, or an ancestral memory of primitive behaviour, I might give it another go one day...One thing I think makes me start books like this is the debate that repression might induce primitive outbursts, or the plastic environments and time-schedules we put ourselves in frustrate our desire for action and complication in life. That 'thing' that can be missing sometimes...It definitely explains how unhinged people can be instead of just the good ol celebratory madness.
—Mira
A nonpareil example of interdisciplinary writing. The year in the think tank for Koestler issued in an amazing book. The challenges to straightforward Darwinian evolution put forth by a man of letters are more cogent than those put forward by many better-trained scientists (true, he was utilitizing and synthesizing information gained directly from scientists in that think tank experiment). A missed classic. If the science he puts forward here is repeatable, this is going to be one of those examples where genius got mistaken as quaintness.
—W.B.
Via years of research at various symposiums and tutorials, Ghost in the Machine sees Athur Koestler take on some of the big topics of evolutionary biology and philosophy of mind. The book starts out with some fairly straightforward refutations of behavioursm. Although Koestler's couldn't have known at the time, these might have been left out altogether since the theory will have gone out of fashion 20 years later. But it's what follows after the examination of behaviourism that's integral to the main thesis: here we find Koestler unveiling his set-piece, a neologism which defines and describes any physical or mental unit which behaves both as a part and as a whole - a 'holon' as he calls it. Since the first chapters are almost exclusively preoccupied with refuting behaviourism, and given the title, you'd expect the holon to be brought to bear on some dualistic theory of mind. Instead, the book goes off into various evolutionary controversies. The main argument here hinges on the idea that mutations don't occur independently from the rest of an organism, they occur as part of a whole, with the whole reordering itself around it – this is supposed to explain how hatchlings inexplicably come with the various tools to break out of its shell at the same time as having been fertilised inside one. But these evolved organs are also self-contained units, like an engine in a car, which Koestler seems to suggest is why we see certain organs (e.g. eyes, limbs) reappearing throughout the animal kingdom. As it happens, I'm not sure the holon theory really accounts for any of this. It doesn't seem to follow from the concept that, on the part level, a unit will harmonise itself around it, and the whole harmonise around it. Something could be both a part and whole without doing a cohesive whole or integrative part. The evolutionary angle to this book, unsurprisingly, requires specific biological principles to become intelligible. Koestler is probably on safer ground when he finds that the problem of war/genocide (something he had personal experience of during WW2) can be directly explained in terms of the holon. Such catastrophes, we are told, occur where the whole becomes overly harmonised or 'integrative' rather than the result of overly-individualistic social units. Excessive individuation sometimes produces serial killers, it is granted, but this is a far lesser evil than the co-operation involved in large-scale slaughter.Where exactly the balance lies between individuality and socialisation is not made clear. The holon innovation, which takes up about the first 150 pages of the book, is in fact, quickly abandoned from this point. For the rest of the book, we get topics such as 'The Peril of Man' which could be a chapter from an Erich Fromm book, 'The Stage and the Actor' we might be an essay by Erving Goffman, and some speculation about the roots of creativity and laughter, which are only vaguely related to the metaphysical ideas that have come before. As Koestler states from the start, he has taken a few years out to interact with lecturers and attend symposiums, and much of what is presented reads like an attempt to exteriorise in print all the disparate ideas he's come across.As the final chapter approaches, we begin with some grave premonitions about nuclear destruction, and the threat to mankind from within is presented in the same poetical and apocalyptic terms that can be found in most popular science-psychology books of the period. It is within the last 35 pages that we learn what Ghost in the Machine has been all about – it turns out to have been the prelude to an argument for transhumanism. But Koestler, unlike most transhumanists, does not see the next evolutionary step in man's future to be cybernetic. The key to cementing our long-term co-operation lies in pharmacology; the self-administering of medicine which will enable the newly evolved part of the brain and the old mammalian brain to get on together, or at the least, for the neocortex to finally rein the instinct-driven mind in. And, since it isn't explained, we must assume that the 'ghost' in the machine is the new layer of neural matter sitting on top of the old rote-learning substance beneath it.The problem with all this, aside from the introducing the solution so late in the process, is that we don't get any sense of how any of this is going to happen: it is simply the business of biologists to invent something and make it snappy. The ethical and logical issues that such a solution might entail (e.g. inequality of access, testing medicines on beings who cannot consent) are not broached – surprising, since, we might wonder what the role of any broadly-educated thinker who deems the typically expansive philosophical dilemmas insignificant. Koestler does tell us a lot, about biology, psychology, physics, chemistry, etc. but – having read all 339 pages of this – I'm still not convinced he explains their respective controversies any better than one of the many popularist experts in each field.N.B. Fans of Terrence Mckenna may notice the embryo of many of his ideas here. Paedomorphosis (where a creature reaches an evolutionary blind alley, returning to some earlier ancestral form so as to resume development) was probably the influence if not the linchpin for McKenna's archaic revivalism. There's also some bits (possibly originally lifted from Pierre Teilhard) about humanity being 'pulled' through history, and also many intimations about evolution tending towards ever greater complexity. You can imagine a young Mckenna reading all this - along with some Joseph Pearce - and everything fitting into place as he discovers the material which will last him his entire career.
—Oliver Wood
