Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Entries tagged as ‘Behaviorism’

Does anything like a mind exist?

January 12, 2010 · 11 Comments

I still have a few more posts on Dewey that I want to put up that lead to an exciting model of cultural evolution, but Carl’s comment to my last post inspired me to write something more about the mind. Carl pointed out how metaphorical my description was, presumably he is making the point that the reason such heavily metaphorical language is needed to describe the mind is because there is no such thing.

The concept of mind is a fascinating one. What is it? Where is it? In the commonest terms we often simply equate mind with brain, or at least speak as if the mind is some function of the brain. In fact, no one knows what the mind is. The word itself is really a metaphor for the collection of experiences of thought, memory, feeling, will, choice etc. that we experience as our “inner world.” Carl’s teacher B. F. Skinner didn’t believe there was such a thing as a mind. With his conception of Radical Behaviorism he believed that he could describe human behavior in relationship to the environment without needing to resort to something called a mind.

I won’t go back into Behaviorism now, because we have covered that in some detail in earlier posts, but I did want to say a few words about the relationship between Behaviorism and the psychology of William James James was not a Behaviorist but he did help set the stage for Behaviorism. Philosophically James also questioned the nature of consciousness. In an important paper of his called, Does Consciousness Exist? James wrote the following:

During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness… But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

James’ pragmatic equivalent was to recognize that everything in the end is “pure experience.” I suppose he was thinking that by doing away with the problem of trying to figure out “what consciousness is” we could put our energy to finding out how human beings actually work. This is certainly aligned with Sinner’s view and it inspired one of James’ students, Edward Lee Thorndike, to do behavior studies on chicks in James’ own basement.

In these experiments Thorndike observed the behavior of insects and baby chicks as he put them through different trials. What he observed led him to believe that animal behavior developed through trial and error and the tendency to form habits by repeating behaviors that had been tried and successful in the past. Thorndike concluded that nothing about animal behavior led him to believe that any kind of mental activity or thought processing was going on behind the scenes. This negation of “mentalism” would be developed by later American Behaviorists including B.F. Skinner, who would develop an alternative to the original Russian conception.

So, is there such a thing as a mind? And if there is a mind, what is it?

People who tend toward empiricism, behaviorism and materialism in general will believe that if you can explain human behavior without needing to resort to some assumption about a thinking entity called mind then you should not make that assumption. To that extend I can go along, but I find that many people with inclinations in this direction will go one step further and say that in fact you should assume there is no such thing. I think it is accurate to say we just don’t know and therefore we need to have an open inquiry as to the existence of mind.

We can’t see a mind, or measure a mind, or even conceive of what it is. So maybe there just isn’t one, but then again maybe there is and we just haven’t conceived of it accurately yet. To use another metaphor, think of leaves blowing in the wind. We can’t see the wind, so it might be helpful to study the motion of leaves without assuming the existence of wind, but that doesn’t mean that the wind isn’t there and it might be a good idea to assume of some wind-like entity until we figure out what is really going on.

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Is there any Intelligence in the Universe?

July 20, 2009 · 21 Comments

I have been reading more about Behaviorism, including the article that Carl sent us by Robert Epstein, so that we could get a little clearer here about exactly what we are looking into.  Maybe I will start with a few definitions of some of the basic learning mechanisms of Behaviorism.

Classical Conditioning – Pavlov’s dog:  A dog salivates when it sees food. You ring a bell every time you bring the food out and pretty soon the dog salivates when he hears the bell. You have created a conditioned response. In other words, the dog has been conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell.

Extinction – when you stop bringing out food when you ring the bell, eventually the dog stops salivating when he hears the bell. (This is what allows us to lean what to ignore.)

Operant Conditioning – (the kind Skinner pioneered) You put a pigeon in a box that has a door operated by a lever. The pigeon flaps around until it accidently hits the lever. The bird is rewarded by having the door open. If you keep putting the bird in the box, eventually it starts hitting the lever faster and faster – i.e. it learns to hit the lever to get out of the box.

Shaping – is creating complex behaviors from simple ones. First you learn to pick one foot up, then you learn to put it down on the ground in front of you, then to shift your weight on it, then to do the same with the other foot and soon you have learned to walk.

Robert Epstein’s paper on Generativity explains how a combination of the simple learning mechanisms can become creative. Let’s say that a chimp has separately learned how to step up onto a box, how to climb a ladder, how to climb through a window and how to put objects on boxes. Then we lock the monkey in a room with an open window too high to reach with either the box or the ladder. Given enough time the monkey might try using the ladder, then try the box and eventually he might start putting the ladder on the box until he would be able to climb out the window.

If you think about this in terms of tremendously intricate skills combining over and over again that would give you an enormous amount of creative potential. Think about how many words you can make with the alphabet, and how many sentences you can make with those words and how many novels you can write with those sentences. Still I wonder, are there higher forms of novelty that are not accounted for in this? – I mean no matter how many novels you write, words alone will never build a house. I can see how behaviors can pile up infinitely, but in the end they will only be behaviors…and that I think gets me to my deeper question…

Summary: Classical conditioning showed us how automatic biological and psychological responses (i.e. salivating in the presence of food) could be transferred to new stimuli (i.e. ringing a bell). In this way animals can be conditioned to respond to an infinite number of stimuli. Operant conditioning showed how circumstance itself could act as the conditioning agent and how life is constantly conditioning all of us by the rewards and punishments that it affords in different situations. Generativity is exploring how the complexity of multiple layers of conditioning can produce novel behaviors that appear creative in nature. My question is, are they really creative? And to answer that I think we have to get clearer about what we mean by creative. And to get clearer about the nature of creativity we must examine the “metaphysics” upon which Behaviorism (which I see as representative of a “hard” deterministic view) is built upon. For the sake of clarity, I am sure that not all (and perhaps very few) behaviorists believe in hard determinism, but still the complaints against that school of thought are mainly against that potential implication.

The essence of the difference between a Behaviorists point of view and a more traditional Psychological point of view can be illustrated like this. In the example with the chimp above the Behaviorist would describe the monkey’s actions in terms such as: the behavior of trying to reach the window by using only the ladder was attempted and fell into extinction, the behavior of using the box also fell into extinction, the behavior of putting the ladder on the box was sufficiently shaped through reinforcement to lead the chimp eventually to place it upright and then the chimp climbed the ladder and left the room. In this picture there is no need for the chimp’s interior workings to be employed as part of the process. This is the sense in which I meant that Behaviorism denies interiority, not simply denying the existence of thoughts and ideas, but denying the “willful agency” of the thinker.) In this description there is no “intelligent being” included in the picture. In a more traditional psychological view you might say: The chimp thought to try standing on the ladder and realized that it wouldn’t work, then she tried the box and realized the same. Then it occurred to the monkey that there might be some way of using the ladder on top of the box and so she tried a few different placements until she found the right one. This description relies completely on there being someone to talk about. Someone with ideas and volitional power.

In the traditional psychological description there is an “actor” in this case a chimp with thoughts and motives and insights and ideas and experiments. In the Behaviorists model there is no need for the “actor” there are just behaviors and reinforcers that interact over time to create new behaviors. There doesn’t have to be “anyone” in there scene figuring anything out. Now if you are only working with non-human animals this doesn’t get you into too much trouble, but when Skinner started to generalize this to describe all human behavior he ran into a heap of resistance (some of which I have expressed.)

This is the question I want to get at. Is there a somebody or not? And I don’t mean do behaviorists think so or not, I mean is there one.  And I also don’t mean only the separate self. The question herinise is universal and it is the heart of the friction between behaviorism and other forms of psychology, and between science and religion, and strong Darwinists and Intelligent Design folks. It is the question of whether there is any intelligence behind this universe or not. Is the universe a deterministic unfolding of cause and effect – or is there some form of universal intelligence at work. Is that universal intelligence the same intelligence that we as human beings experience in ourselves?

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The Indignity of B.F. Skinner

July 9, 2009 · 35 Comments

Warning: This post represents my very first thoughts about the Behaviorism of B.F. Skinner and is probably equally likely to offend both fans and foes alike.

Those who follow this blog may realize that my friend and brilliant commentor Carl has got me reading B.F. Skinner. Skinner is the famous (and to some infamous) Harvard psychologist who developed his own brand of Behaviorist psychology that he called “Radical Behaviourism“- Carl got me started reading Skinner because he felt that Skinner represents the fulfillment of Pragmatism’s scientific destiny. I certainly was interested in finding out more about Behaviorism because it is true that it became the dominant force in American psychology during the middle decades of the 20th century and does represent a scientific turn from the Pragmatism of American Philosophy.

I knew of Skinner from my background as a school teacher, but as Carl pointed out, my knowledge – as is generally true – is superficial and mired by misinformation and negative propaganda. With that, I accepted the challenge to learn more about Skinner and his work, but I found it tough going, not because reading Skinner is difficult, his writing is clear, but emotionally I find my sense of autonomy being insulted with almost every page.

Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism views everything as conditioned behavior and ultimately sees all behavior as deterministic. To the part of me that believes in freewill I find this not slightly offensive – so emotionally I have to keep pushing myself onward. “Skinner is an obvious genius, and my friend Carl is pretty bright himself, so there must be something to this.” I would say to myself.

Then yesterday while reading about one of Skinner’s early experiments with rats in mazes I had my first Radical Behavior insight. I was feeling offended by the rat running through the maze every time the bell sounded, because of course I didn’t like the implication of me living my life like that rat. Then it hit me that I was taking it all too personally. I was looking at Skinner’s logic from the inside of all of my assumptions about my freewill.

I had one of those moments where for a second I realized I didn’t really know yet what Skinner was getting at. I was just jumping to all kinds of conclusions that were challenging my sense of dignity. Then I had a moment of recognition where I think I saw for a second what he was seeing.

Every time the rat heard that bell it would act. Every time! Actually that is quite amazing. The organism was learning to respond to the sound of the bell. I don’t think it was learning in the way we think of learning. It wasn’t figuring out that, “Every time that guy rings that bell he also puts food down so I better run and get it.” It wasn’t the rat’s brain that was learning; it was the entire organism. That is when I realized that there was something outrageous in that. The organism was learning to respond – not just the brain, not just the mind.

So I started to wonder how much of what I do is simply me as an organism responding and not me as a “thinker” making choices. Maybe “I” as a thinker don’t need to be around at all for many of the so called choices that I make to happen. Maybe my idea about being the one that is thinking and choosing is all just another response to stimulus – a story that gets made up to explain conditioned responses and make them conform to my need to maintain a sense of dignity.

I realized that Skinner was asking some tough questions about what is really going on in our choices and actions. Still, I am somewhat repulsed by the implications of this, but I am also fascinated. If it is true that many of what I relate to as conscious choices are in fact conditioned responses, isn’t better to know? As I warned at the beginning, this is my very first glimpse into a challenging world, but if you stick with me I will keep going.

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