Ghost In The Machine Arthur Koestler Pdf Download

One of the book's central concepts is that as the human triune brain has evolved, it has retained and built upon earlier, more primitive brain structures. The head portion of the "ghost in the machine" has, as a consequence of poor, inadequate connections, a rich potential for conflict. The primitive layers can, and may, together, overpower rational logic's hold. This explains a person's hate, anger, and other such emotional distress.

One of the book's central concepts is that as the human brain has grown, it has built upon earlier, more primitive brain structures, and that these are the "ghost in the machine" of the title. Koestler's theory is that at times these structures can overpower cognitive logic, and are responsible for hate, anger and other such impulses.

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"Apart from 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic', all of the songs on this album were written in the west of Ireland in 1981. I borrowed the title from Arthur Koestler's 1967 book about the human mind and our seeming appetite for self destruction. The book talks about how the modern brain of Homo sapiens is grafted onto older and more-primitive prototypes and how in certain situations these reptilian modes of thinking can rise up and overcome our higher modes of logic and reason. I tried, as far as it was possible in a collection of pop songs, to deal with some of these issues. Violence in Northern Ireland in 'Invisible Sun', skinheads and Nazis in 'Rehumanise Yourself', destructive pathology in 'Demolition Man', lust in 'Hungry For You'. The album was densely layered with multitracked vocals, synthesised keyboards, and horn riffs played by yours truly. I wanted to create the impression of something struggling to the surface, something hidden in the recesses of the mind, something from our dark subconscious wanting to be seen. The album cover showed our three faces transposed into digital images, red LED lights on a black background. We were the ghosts in the machine, and while some of the songs are a plea for sanity, others are an expression of that malevolent darkness that haunts us all."

'Lyrics', 10/07

"In the record I have ideas put very simply which are parallel to the ideas put very coherently over hundreds of pages. 'Spirits In The Material World' says there's no political solution to what's happening to us, it involves transcending our condition. 'Demolition Man' is the beast, he can't help himself, he has to destroy. That's part of me, I'm actually very destructive, I can also be creative, but that is half of me. 'Re-humanise Yourself' is a parallel idea to Koestler's that we're becoming dehumanised through work systems, through political systems, through convention. 'Hungry For You is in French', because it's filthy, and French is the language of love."

NME, 9/81

"The reason we have to attack Behaviourism is because it's been used by totalitarian regimes as an easy way of making people conform. A robot fits into big ideas much better. Whereas a thinking human being, a complex spiritual being, which is what we are, is out of place. You only have to look at the kids on the streets, they're becoming de-humanised. A gang of skinheads can be machines, hateful. And it's not their fault, they're being used. According to Koestler there are two brains. Well, there are three, but for our purposes there are two. There's the old brain that the lizards have which involves fear, hunger, aggression, sex, the beast in us. The other brain is quite a recent addition and involves abstractions, things that transcend the body. Unfortunately the two brains are entirely separate and there's no communication between them. Therefore there's a kind of schizophrenia. One side is looking at the stars and wanting to transcend the human condition, and the other side is grovelling round looking for the next person to rape or beat up. I think he's right, that is what's wrong with us. He does offer a solution which is a bit extreme, but I think he does have a point. I won't tell you what it is or I'll spoil the book."

NME, 9/81

"'Ghost In The Machine' is a very punchy album. It's getting harder, year by year, to make the grade. As the years go by the spotlight gets bigger and makes you sweat more. I would say that we've broadened stylistically and it's true to say that Sting's voice has a greater range. In the old days I think he used to sound something like Yes's Jon Anderson but now he's got a lot more bottom to his voice. All of us are worried about the quality of our records and performing. All of us are constantly critical about the things we do. You see it's not the similarities that makes this band - it's the differences. By that I mean that if we all got on well all the time and agreed about everything there would be no creative tension. We'd amble off into a recording studio from time to time and produce garbage. I'm sure that for any band to achieve longevity they must have creative tension.

Andy Summers: A Visual Documentary, '81

"Before we come together for an album, each of us goes into a studio of our own. I wrote ten songs for this album, and with a drum box, piano, bass and guitar put down the arrangements as I saw them, as best I could. If they were satisfactory to the group, that's what we played. If they could be bettered... I'm proud to say that in a lot of cases, the arrangements I came up with at the demo stage arrived on record. 'Don't Stand So Close to Me' is virtually the same as the demo, and 'De Do Do Do', on the new album, 'Invisible Sun' and 'Spirits in the Material World'."

Musician, 12/81

"Whoever wrote the song will show the others the chords. In my case, I dont know the names of em so I just play em. Andy looks at my fingers and says, You moron, that cant be done, or why have you done that and everybody figures out whatever they can. In Montserrat, Andy was in the studio, Sting in the mixing room playing through the board and I was in the dining room in the next building. We all have our cans [headphones] on; while they get the chords I fiddle with the rhythms. Then we run through it once. Usually, somebody plays too many times around the chorus or something thats not right, and we do it once more. If we havent got it then, it starts to get lost. Usually we have, though; 'One World (Not Three)' was right the very first time, for instance."

Stewart Copeland: Trouser Press, 4/82

On the use of horns...

"They happened by accident. I brought a saxophone in and during the vocal tracks I first started to play sax lines and I thought they were fun so it ended up that I took a tenor and an alto and ended up overdubbing them four times like a brass section. It shouldn't have been done because I'd only been playing saxophone six months, but it did. And that additional colour - affected the whole atmosphere of the album, the whole thing, it just changed it into what it became."

Guitar World, 7/82

"'Ghost' was, for us, a please-yourself album. In it we pleased ourselves. Our last records were experiments in commercialism. I'd been obsessed with the idea of coming up with a commercial record. 'Ghost' doesn't have that concern. It's just... us. I wouldn't say we were totally non-thinking before it came along. It's just that in the past a function of our music has been to be a catalyst for certain feelings. After our first three albums, we wanted to go as far away from the sound we'd already created. I was determined to play some saxophone. Generally we wanted to go off the beaten path, to take a fresh new approach and see what happened. I think the material that came out on the next albums was stronger. It was something we all believed in. By our third album we realised it came too close in sound to the albums before it. The balance had been tipped too much toward commercialism. We'd become almost obsessed by it largely because the only group who was selling any records in Europe for a year or so was The Police."

The Police Chronicles, '83

"Things were getting very horrible. Very dark. Miserable. Our marriages were breaking up, our marriage was breaking up and yet we had to make another record. Nightmare. Then it hit us that this is how we're going to have to make our living for the rest of our careers. I started looking for a way out. It was too much of a shock because I said from the beginning the Police will last three albums and well, we did really."

Q, 11/93

"I have to say I was getting disappointed with the musical direction around the time of 'Ghost In The Machine'. With the horns and synth coming in, the fantastic raw-trio feel - all the really creative and dynamic stuff - was being lost. We were ending up backing a singer doing his pop songs. But there were still great moments when Sting was able to loosen up enough, where we could really go for it in concert."

Andy Summers: Guitar Player, 1/94

On being asked what we thought of the keyboards and horns on the album.

"I hated them."

Andy Summers: Guitar Player, 1/94

"The title is taken from a book by Arthur Koestler about comparative psychology in which he states that man is becoming more machine-like, and what I'm saying is that we shouldn't be like machines. We're much more complex, more creative, more destructive."

A Visual Documentary, '81

"If one person reads "The Ghost In The Machine" because our album has the same title, then I think it's a good excuse to have called it that. They're ideas that gestate, and now I'm at the stage where technically I can write songs that I would have found really difficult two years ago. I now feel capable of writing objective songs and I think that's an improvement. That's not to say that I can't go back and write very personal songs, but my concerns at this moment aren't whether I have a number one record this week, or whether we sell ten or seven million, or whether we're the biggest group in the world. My concern really is whether there's going to be a world left for us to be successful in. Michael Foot was right, everything else is trivial and childish. The real issue is whether we're going to survive as a race."

NME, 9/81

"It would be pretty pompous if I turned round and said this album is going to change the way people think. However, you have to chip away, you have to give something. I have a medium at my disposal a forum, if you like, in which to discuss ideas. I'd be untrue to myself if I didn't try to say what I believe in, in that medium. I don't know how far you can go, to a certain extent it's all rhetoric. There's a line in one of the songs that says "the words of politicians are merely the rhetoric of failure" and I don't claim that much more for my own rhetoric, except that I have no other choice but to say what I believe in now. I'm free of shackles; so I think I can do it. It won't change society, of course it won't. But what I would like is for people to read the book, because I think it has some great ideas, very simply and coherently put, which the songs give a glimmer of."

NME, 9/81

"This is the fourth album. By the time you get to this point, most people usually start softening up. For us, it was very important to bring out a very strong, punchy album."

Andy Summers: Musician, 12/81

"I used to play saxophone as a teenager although not very seriously. The fingering has always stayed with me, and I can read music, so getting back into it was fairly simple. I bought a Yamaha alto and tenor in January and spend about two hours a day, the fruits of which you can hear on the album. It's section work, really. I'm no Charlie Parker, but it's very satisfying getting a simple riff together, then dubbing it and putting harmony on it. The skills involved are fairly similar to the ones you use in singing; you know, breathing, pitch, a sense of harmony."

Musician, 12/81

"It's a fair comment to say that there's a little more of a rhythm and blues feel on the new album. We never said, 'Okay, let's make this a more soul-oriented album,' but on some of the tracks there's definitely that sort of James Brown edge to it."

Andy Summers: The Washington Post, 1/82

"I'd written four or five of the songs on the new album on keyboards so in a sense that was an extra colour as well. Having written them on keyboards, I recorded them with keyboards. I'm talking about 'Invisible Sun', among others. So in a sense we've broken away from the thing which first made us. Well, 'power trio' was a misnomer in the sense that it made us sound like Cream or Jimi Hendrix. I think we're much lighter than that, so I don't usually take that blanket title with much seriousness. We're just getting away from the sparse sound of three instruments and a voice - we're more interested now in just selling our songs in a bigger way. Maybe we've gone through the cycle now. Perhaps we'll go back to a sparser sound."

Guitar World, 7/82

"I didn't think the book had any particular relevance to my understanding of the album's lyrics. At the same time we had a million titles written up on the studio wall including 'Blanco De Bunker,' and a lot of similar ones we didn't use."

Stewart Copeland: Creem, 4/82

On being asked if people had picked up on the political overtones of the albums lyrics...

"Not so much the political things, but I'm plagued by mystics. Ever since 'Spirits In The Material World'...it's become the theme song of all kinds of weird religious groups. They keep writing to me, they keep turning up with bald heads and ponytails and pink dresses. It's like I've become this kind of focus point for gurus. I mean it's something that I'm interested in but it's very odd that all these people are suddenly turning up."

USA Press Conference, '82

"I enjoyed making 'Ghost In The Machine' and playing with the tools of the studio, just building things up and sticking more vocals on. Great fun. But listening to it, I thought. "Hey, my voice on its own sounds as good as fifteen overdubs, so I'll try it on its own." And I've done the saxophone section bit now, I'm bored with it; and Andy was into just plunking down one guitar part. I'm glad we did 'Ghost'. I don't regret it. But it was time to change the regime again. A lot of the criticism levelled at us and that album was that we're incredibly formula-ised and efficient. Almost Nazi-like..."

Musician, 6/83

"I think it's very strong. It has a supple quality I really like, and a very positive vibe I think was lacking on the last album. It's a true reflection of the psychological state the band was in."