The Ghost in the Machine Read online

  Books by Arthur Koestler Novels THE GLADIATORS DARKNESS AT NOON ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE THIEVES IN THE NIGHT THE AGE OF LONGING THE CALL-GIRLS Autobiography DIALOGUE WITH DEATH SCUM OF THE EARTH ARROW IN THE BLUE THE INVISIBLE WRITING THE GOD THAT FAILED (with others) BRICKS TO BABEL Essays THE YOGI AND THE COMMISSAR INSIGHT AND OUTLOOK PROMISE AND FULFILMENT THE TRAIL OF THE DINOSAUR REFLECTIONS ON HANGING THE SLEEPWALKERS THE LOTUS AND THE ROBOT THE ACT OF CREATION THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE DRINKERS OF INFINITY THE CASE OF THE MIDWIFE TOAD THE ROOTS OF COINCIDENCE THE CHALLENGE OF CHANCE (with Sir Alister Hardy and Robert Harvie) THE HEEL OF ACHILLES SUICIDE OF A NATION? (ed.) BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: THE ALPBACH SYMPOSIUM (ed. with J. R. Smythies) THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE LIFE AFTER DEATH (with Arnold Toynbee and others) JANUS -- A SUMMING UP Theatre TWILIGHT BAR Arthur Koestler THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE --- The Danube Edition Random House New York Copyright © 1967, 1976 by Arthur Koestler All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., London. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Koestler, Arthur, 1905- The ghost in the machine. (The Danube edition) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Genetic psychology. 2. Human evolution. I. Title. BF711.K63 1982 150'.19 81-48284 ISBN 0-394-52472-1 AACR2 Manufactured in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First American Edition To the Fellows and Staff 1964-5 at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences CONTENTS Preface xi PART ONE ORDER I THE POVERTY OF PSYCHOLOGY 3 The Four Pillars of Unwisdom - The Rise of Behaviourism - The De-Humanisation of Man - How to Manipulate Tautologies - The Philosophy of Ratomorphism II THE CHAIN OF WORDS AND THE TREE OF LANGUAGE 19 The Chain - The Tree - 'What Did You Say?' - The Postman and the Dog -' What Do You Mean By That?' - Rules, Strategies and Feedbacks III THE HOLON 45 The Parable of the Two Watchmakers - Enter Janus - Social Holons - The Basic Polarity IV INDIVIDUALS AND DIVIDUALS 59 A Note about Diagrams - Inorganic Systems - The Organism and its Spares - The Integrative Powers of Life V TRIGGERS AND FILTERS 71 Triggers - How to Build a Nest - Filters VI A MEMORY FOR FORGETTING 84 Abstractive Memory - A Speculative View - Two Types of Memory - Picture-Strip Memory - Images and Schemata - Learning by Rote VII THE HELMSMAN 95 Sensory-Motor Routines - Feedbacks and Homeostasis - Loops within Loops - A Holarchy of Holons VIII HABIT AND IMPROVISATION 104 The Origins of Originality - The Mechanisation of Habits - One Step at a Time - The Challenge of Environment PART TWO BECOMING IX THE STRATEGY OF EMBRYOS 115 Docility and Determination - The Genetic Keyboard X EVOLUTION: THEME AND VARIATIONS 127 Internal Selection - The Case of the Eyeless Fly - The Puzzle of Homology - Archetypes in Biology - The Law of Balance - The Doppelgängers - The Thirty-Six Plots XI EVOLUTION CTD: PROGRESS BY INITIATIVE 151 Acting Before Reacting - Once More Darwin and Lamarck XII EVOLUTION CTD: UNDOING AND RE-DOING 161 Blind Alleys - Escape flora Specialisation - Draw Back to Leap XIII THE GLORY OF MAN 172 Forms of Self-Repair - Higher Forms of Self-Repair - Self-Repair and Self-Realisation - Science and the Unconscious - Association and Bisociation - The AHA Reaction - The HAHA Reaction - Laughter and Emotion - The AH Reaction - Art and Emotion - The Creative Trinity XIV THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE 197 The 'Second Law' - The Swing of the Pendulum - The Stage and the Actors - Shifts of Control - The Serial View - The Flatworm's Ego - A Road to Freedom - A Sort of Maxim - The Open-Ended Hierarchy PART THREE DISORDER XV THE PREDICAMENT OF MAN 225 The Three Dimensions of Emotion - The Perils of Aggression - The Pathology of Devotion - The Ritual of Sacrifice - The Observer from Mars - The Cheerful Ostrich - Integration and Identification - The Perils of Identification - Hierarchic Awareness - Induction and Hypnosis - Sweet Caesar's Wounds - The Structure of Belief - The Split - The Comforts of Double-Think - The Group Mind as a Holon XVI THE THREE BRAINS 267 Mistakes in Brain-Making - 'A Tumorous Overgrowth' - The Physiology of Emotion - The Three Brains - Emotion and the Ancient Brain - 'Schizophysiology' - A Taste of the Sun - Knowing with One's Viscera - Janus Revisited XVII A UNIQUE SPECIES 297 The Unsolicited Gift - Looking in Utter Darkness - The Peaceful Primate - The Harmless Hunter - The Curse of Language - The Discovery of Death XVIII THE AGE OF CLIMAX 313 The Hinge of History - Two Curves - The New Calendar - 'Tampering with Human Nature' - Prometheus Unhinged - Mutating into the Future - A Plea to the Phantom Reader APPENDIX I GENERAL PROPERTIES OF OPEN HIERARCHICAL SYSTEMS (O.H.S.) 341 APPENDIX II ON NOT FLOGGING DEAD HORSES 349 References 355 Bibliography 359 Acknowledgements 367 Index 369

  PREFACE

  In a previous book, The Act of Creation, I discussed art and discovery, the glory of man. The present volume ends with a discussion of the predicament of man, and thus completes a cycle. The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils and succubi. They reflect the streak of insanity which runs through the history of our species, and which indicates that somewhere along the line of its ascent to prominence something has gone wrong. Evolution has been compared to a labyrinth of blind alleys, and there is nothing very strange or improbable in the assumption that man's native equipment, though superior to that of any other living species, nevertheless contains some built-in error or deficiency which predisposes him towards self-destruction.

  The search for the causes of that deficiency starts with the Book of Genesis and has continued ever since. Every age had its own diagnosis to offer, from the doctrine of the Fall to the hypothesis of the Death Instinct. Though the answers were inconclusive, the questions were still worth asking. They were formulated in the spedtic terminology of each period and culture, and thus it is inevitable that in our time they should be formulated in the language of science. But, paradoxical as it sounds, in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its own successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions -- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientist's concern.

  This generalisation refers, of course, not to individual scientists, but to the dominant, orthodox trend in the contemporary sciences of life, from evolutionary genetics to experimental psychology. One cannot hope to arrive at a diagnosis of the predicament of man so long as one's image of man is that of a conditioned reflex-automaton produced by chance mutations; one cannot use a stethoscope on a slot machine. One eminent biologist, Sir Alister Hardy, wrote recently: 'I have come to believe, and I hope to convince you, that this present-day view of evolution is inadequate.' [1] Another eminent zoologist, W.H. Thorpe, speaks of 'an undercurrent of thought in the minds of scores, perhaps hundreds, of biologists over the past twenty-five years', who are sceptical regarding the current orthodox doctrine. [2] Such heretical tendencies are equally in evidence in the other life-sciences, from the study of genetics to the study of the nervous system, and so to the study of perception, language and thought. However, these diverse non-conformist movements, each with a particular axe to grind in its particular field, do not as yet add up to a new coherent philosophy.

  In the pages that follow I have attempted to pick up these loose ends, the threads of ideas trailing on the fringes of orthodoxy, and to weave them into a comprehensive pattern in a unified frame. This means taking the reader on a long and sometimes devious journey before we arrive at our destination, the problem of man's predicament. The journey leads through Part One, mainly concerned with psychology, and Part Two, which is concerned with evolution; and, though it must of necessity include excursions into domains seemingly remote from the central subject, I hope that these may be of some intere
st in themselves. Perhaps some readers, firmly entrenched on the humanist side in the cold war between the two cultures, will be dismayed by this apparent desertion into the enemy camp. It is embarrassing to have to repeat, over and again, that two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half-cultures do not make a culture. Science cannot provide the ultimate answers, but it can provide pertinent questions. And I do not believe that we can formulate even the simplest questions, much less arrive at a diagnosis, without the help of the sciences of life. But it must be a true science of life, not the antiquated slot-machine model based on the naively mechanistic world-view of the nineteenth century. We shall not be able to ask the right questions until we have replaced that rusty idol by a new, broader conception of the living organism.

  I was much comforted to discover that other writers who try to talk across the frontier between the two cultures find themselves in the same quandary. In the first paragraph of his book On Aggression [3] Konrad Lorenz quotes a letter from a friend whom he had asked to read critically through the manuscript. 'This', his friend writes, 'is the second chapter I have read with keen interest but a mounting feeling of uncertainty. Why? Because I ca'nnot see its exact connection with the book as a whole. You must make this easier for me.' Should the gentle reader of these pages occasionally feel the same reaction, all I can say is that I have tried my best to make it easier for him. I do not think there are many passages in this volume which he will find too technical; but wherever that is the case, he can safely skip them and pick up the thread further down.

  While writing this book, I was greatly encouraged and helped by a Fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences in Stanford, California. This rather unique institution, more familiarly known as the 'Think-Tank', annually assembles fifty Fellows elected from varied academic disciplines, and provides them, on its hill-top campus, with the facilities for a whole year's interdisciplinary discussions and research, free from administrative and teaching duties. This proved a most beneficial opportunity for the clarification and testing of ideas in workshops and seminars, attended by specialists in various fields, ranging from neurology to linguistics. I can only hope that the stimulation -- and friction which they generously provided in the course of our sometimes heated discussions have not been wasted.

  Some of the subjects discussed in this volume are dealt with in greater detail in The Act of Creation, and in my earlier books. I have had to quote from these fairly often; where a quotation appears in the text without mentioning the author by name, it is from these earlier books.

  * * *

  I am very grateful to Prof. Sir Alister Hardy (Oxford), Prof. James Jenkins (Univ. of Minnesota), Prof. Alvin Liberman (Haskins Laboratories, New York) and Dr. Paul MacLean (N.I.M.H., Bethesda) for their critical reading of parts of the manuscript; and to Prof. Ludwig v. Bertalanffy (Univ. of Alberta), Prof. Holger Hydèn (Univ. of Goeteborg), Prof. Karl Pribram (Stanford Univ.), Prof. Paul Weiss (Rockefeller Institute) and L.L. Whyte (C.A.S., Wesleyan Univ.) for many stimulating discussions on the subject of this book.

  A.K.

  Part One

  ORDER

  I

  THE POVERTY OF PSYCHOLOGY

  He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. Swift, Voyage to Laputa

  The Four Pillars of Unwisdom

  Proverbs ix, I, says that the house of wisdom rests on seven pillars, but unfortunately does not name them. The citadel of orthodoxy which the sciences of life have built in the first half of our century rests on a number of impressive pillars, some of which are beginning to show cracks and to reveal themselves as monumental superstitions. The four principal ones, summarised in a simplified form, are the doctrines (a) that biological evolution is the result of random mutations preserved by natural selection; (b) that mental evolution is the result of random tries preserved by 'reinforcements' (rewards); (c) that all organisms, including man, are essentially passive automata controlled by the environment, whose sole purpose in life is the reduction of tensions by adaptive responses: (d) that the only scientific method worth that name is quantitative measurement; and, consequently, that complex phenomena must be reduced to simple elements accessible to such treatment, without undue worry whether the specific characteristics of a complex phenomenon, for instance man, may be lost in the process.

  These four pillars of unwisdom will loom up repeatedly in the chapters that follow. They provide the background, the contemporary landscape, against which any attempt to design a new image of man must be silhouetted. One cannot operate in a vacuum; only by starting from the existing frame of reference can the outline of the new design be set off clearly, by way of comparison and contrast. This is a point of some importance, and I must insert here a personal remark to forestall a line of criticism which past experience has taught me to expect.

  If one attacks the dominant school in psychology -- as I did in my last book and as I shall do again in the present chapter -- one is up against two opposite types of criticism. The first is the natural reaction of the defenders of orthodoxy, who believe that they are in the right and that you are in the wrong -- which is only fair and to be expected. The second category of critics belongs to the opposite camp. They argue that, since the pillars of the citadel are already cracked and revealing themselves as hollow, one ought to ignore them and dispense with polemics. Or, to put it more bluntly, why flog a dead horse? *

  * See Appendix Two: 'On Not Flogging Dead Horses.'

  This type of criticism is frequently voiced by psychologists who believe that they have outgrown the orthodox doctrines. But this belief is often based on self-deception, because the crude slot-machine model, in its modernised, more sophisticated versions, has had a profounder influence on them -- and on our whole culture -- than they realise. It has permeated our attitudes to philosophy, social science, education, psychiatry. Even orthodoxy recognises today the limitations and shortcomings of Pavlov's experiments; but in the imagination of the masses, the dog on the laboratory table, predictably salivating at the sound of a gong, has become a paradigm of existence, a kind of anti-Promethean myth; and the word 'conditioning', with its rigid deterministic connotations, has become a key-formula for explaining why we are what we are, and for explaining away moral responsibility. There has never been a dead horse with such a vicious kick.

  The Rise of Behaviourism

  Looking back at the last fifty years through the historian's inverted telescope, one would see all branches of science, except one, expanding at an unprecedented rate. The one exception is psychology, which seems to lie plunged into a modern version of the dark ages. By psychology I mean in the present context academic or 'experimental' psychology, as it is taught at the great majority of our contemporary universities, and as distinct from clinical psychiatry, psychotherapy or psychosomatic medicine. Freud, and to a lesser degree Jung, are, of course, immensely influential, but their influence is more strongly felt in the humanities -- in literature, art and philosophy -- than in the citadel of official science. By far the most powerful school in academic psychology, which at the same time determined the climate in all other sciences of life, was, and still is, a pseudoscience called Behaviourism. Its doctrines have invaded psychology like a virus which first causes convulsions, then slowly paralyses the victim. Let us see how this improbable situation came about.

  It started just before the outbreak of the First World War when a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, named John Broadus Watson, published a paper in which he proclaimed: 'the time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness. . . . Its sole task is the prediction and control of behaviour; and introspection can form no part of its method.' [1] By 'behaviour' Watson meant observable activities what the physicist calls 'public events', such as the motions of a dial on a machine. Since all mental events are private events which cannot
be observed by others, and which can only be made public through statements based on introspection, they had to be excluded from the domain of science. On the strength of this doctrine, the Behaviourists proceeded to purge psychology of all 'intangibles and unapproachables'. [2] The terms 'consciousness', 'mind', 'imagination' and 'purpose', together with a score of others, were declared to be unscientific, treated as dirty words, and banned from the vocabulary. In Watson's own words, the Behaviourist must exclude 'from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined'. [3]

  It was the first ideological purge of such a radical kind in the domain of science, predating the ideological purges in totalitarian politics, but inspired by the same single-mindedness of true fanatics. It was summed up in a classic dictum by Sir Cyril Burt: 'Nearly half a century has passed since Watson proclaimed his manifesto. Today, apart from a few minor reservations, the vast majority of psychologists, both in this country and in America, still follow his lead. The result, as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' [4]

  Watsonian Behaviourism became the dominant school, first in American academic psychology and subsequently in Europe. Psychology used to be defined in dictionaries as the science of the mind; Behaviourism did away with the concept of mind and put in its place the conditioned-reflex chain. The consequences were disastrous not only for experimental psychology itself; they also made themselves felt, in clinical psychiatry, social science, philosophy, ethics, and the graduate student's general outlook on life. Although his name was less familiar to the public, Watson in fact became, next to Freud, and Pavlov in Russia, one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. For, unfortunately, Watsonian Behaviourism is not a historical curiosity, but the foundation on which the more sophisticated and immensely influential neo-Behaviourist systems -- such as Clark Hull's and B.F. Skinner's -- were built. The more painful absurdities in Watson's books are forgotten or conveniently slurred over, but the philosophy, programme and strategy of Behaviourism have remained essentially the same. The next few pages are intended to demonstrate this -- regardless of what the members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses say.