The Ghost in the Machine

by Arthur Koestler

Book Overview

In The Sleepwalkers and The Act of Creation Arthur Koestler provided pioneering studies of scientific discovery and artistic inspiration, the twin pinnacles of human achievement. The Ghost in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394524721
• ISBN13: 9780394524726
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Stick to It - Great Read

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...

Pride covetousness lust anger gluttony envy & selfishness?

?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 coined??holon??seems 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, it?s 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 Koestler?s 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 pieces?and 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. Bios?s method is clearly superior not just because an interruption will only set him back, at most, nine steps (versus Mekhos?s possible 999), but because Bios?s watches will tend to be much sturdier than Mekhos?s. ?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 operations?then Mekh

Extremely interesting

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.

breathtaking

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!