Be sure you understand

NIETZSCHE Human being as both

creature and creator Eternal Recurrence Herd Mentality The Superhuman Existentialism

SKINNER Pavlov’s Dog Classical Conditioning Correct understanding

of the FOUR types of Operant Conditioning

Practical and moral challenges to using Operant Conditioning on humans

American psychologist, social and political theorist, novelist, and inventor(1904-1990)

B. F. SkinnerThe Conditioned Self

... would probably have seemed like a waste of time to Skinner.

It deals in part with the mind, which he considered an unprovable entity.

It assumes humans are free and that they can and should make conscious choices based on thought and reflection

A class like this one

[paraphrase of Skinner:]What is felt or “introspectively observed” is not some nonphysical world of “mind” but the observer's own nervous system.

For 2500 years people have been preoccupied with “feelings” and “mental life” - only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role has led to the invention of mental fictions – the “soul,” the “mind,” the “self”. The only thing we know of the “self” is what it does, and the only thing we can study is the correlation between environmental stimuli and that behaviour.

So what can we know?

Descartes thought the mind was the only thing we could know for sure, and the part of us that we know best.

Freud thought that there is more to us than mind, but the mind (ego) is still the only part we have full access to, and the part that will allow us to change.

Skinner thinks that the mind is an unknowable fantasy – “the ghost in the machine” – and that the only thing we can know, measure, and study is the external self: behaviour.

Skinner turns Descartes on his head

Pavlov’s Dog

Classical conditioning. A neutral stimulus (bell) is associated with a stimulus that causes a response (meat); eventually the subject will respond to the neutral stimulus alone with the same response as given to the stimulus associated with it.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. John B. Watson, Behaviorism (1930)

John B. Watson

Little Albert

Classsical Conditioning and Madison Avenue

Operant Conditioning

The Skinner Box

Successive Shaping of Behaviour

Initially reward any behaviour that resembles the target behaviour.

As the subject gets closer to performing the desired behaviour, make the rewards dependent on more and more accurate presentations of that action.

Possibly introduce punishments for behaviour that goes in the wrong direction.

Successive Shaping of Behaviour

Successive Shaping of Behaviour

Operant Conditioning

Positive reinforcement – give you something to encourage behaviour

Negative reinforcement – remove something to encourage behaviour

Positive punishment – give you something to discourage behaviour

Negative punishment – remove something to discourage behaviour

TRY NOT TO BE CONFUSED ...positive = additive, adding a “stimulus”negative = subtractive, removing a stimulusreinforcement = making you feel like repeating the behaviourpunishment = making you feel like avoiding the behaviour

Operant Conditioning

Positive reinforcement (Reinforcement): occurs when a behaviour is followed by a stimulus that is rewarding, increasing the frequency of that behaviour. For instance, you get an A on an exam, and your father takes you to a hockey game as a reward.

Negative reinforcement (Escape): occurs when a behaviour is followed by the removal of an unpleasant stimulus, thereby increasing that behaviour's frequency. For instance, your mother nags you every hour about cleaning your room; after you clean it, the nagging stops.

Operant Conditioning

Positive punishment (Punishment): occurs when a behaviour is followed by an unpleasant stimulus, such as your father giving you a spanking when he finds out you’ve lied to him.

Negative punishment (Penalty): occurs when a behaviour (is followed by the removal of a positive stimulus, such as your father withholding your allowance after you fail an exam.

Operant Conditioning

Skinner & Social Engineering

Skinner considered crime to be the result of bad previous conditioning, but curable through further conditioning.

Criminals are not “evil” – just poorly programmed.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGazyH6fQQ4

1. It’s easy to predict animal preferences; it is harder to know with humans what things are rewards or punishments. Why do people who grow up in very similar environments often display very different behaviours?

2. The efficacy of reinforcers may diminish over time, so that more and more or stronger and stronger reinforcers are required to get the same behaviour.

3. People often rebel against shaping when they notice it. If they know they’re being conditioned, they may be able to fight the effects of the reinforcement and punishment strategies.

Practical challenges to conditioning human beings

1. If you follow this doctrine strictly, no one can really be held responsible for their actions – there is no longer room for moral judgment of people, for any belief that anyone is better than anyone else, for punitive action on the part of the community or the state, or for revenge for wrongs done. Choice and responsibility are illusions, and people can’t be held accountable.

2. If you decide to use conditioning to make better people, who exactly will decide what “better” is?

Moral, philosophical, and legal challenges

Skinner’s question to those who believe in the mind, free will, personal responsibility and so on:

If you’re wrong and we aren’t free, we can never solve our problems as a race without first acknowledging this. Would you rather pretend you’re free and have war and crime and inequality and overpopulation and pollution and quite possibly eventually destroy the human race and the planet along with it, or would you rather accept that we are determined by our environment and do what we can do to determine ourselves into less dangerous and unpredictable creatures?

Beyond Freedom and Dignity

German philosopher(1844 - 1900)

Friedrich Nietzsche

What does your conscience say? — “You should become the person you are.”

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

A thought experiment.

Suppose you were found out that this life you are living now, in every detail ... you would live it over and over again for all eternity?

Would you rejoice? Or would you put your head in your hands and weep?

The Eternal Recurrence

If you would not rejoice, then why are you living the life you are living?

Why don’t you take it in some other direction?

The Eternal Recurrence

Why do most of us end up with the job, the spouse, the kids, the mortgage, the tract house in the suburbs?

Is it because this really is the ultimate for a human being, as good and fulfilling as life gets?

Is this living out the potential of the human race to its fullest?

The Eternal Recurrence

Herd Mentality

It’s because we’re afraid.

Afraid to be ourselves, afraid to be different, afraid to be alone, afraid to be wrong, afraid to be true to what deep down we know to be our truth.

Afraid to live, in this world, this life.

Afraid of the unknown ...

Herd MentalityWhy do we live like this?

As Nietzsche sees it, we’ve been conditioned to be afraid of our true individuality and uniqueness by “society.”

Herd Mentality

By our parents By the church By our educators By our friends and peers By the media and culture (news, films, books, etc) By the government

We are afraid to accept, love and affirm who we are, warts and all.

We try to hide who we are, even from ourselves, convince ourselves and others that we are like everyone else.

We join the herd because we are afraid to affirm ourselves.

In veiling our quirks we deny reality, and we deny the very things that distinguish us as humans from the beasts. Our individual uniqueness – even the things we are most ashamed of – this is how we enrich the world. And this is who we are.

But we want to be different, and we want things to be different.

Herd Mentality

Creature and creator

In human beings, creature and creator are brought together: in humans there is material, debris, abundance, clay, crap, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day– do you understand this opposition?

(Beyond Good and Evil, 225)

Don’t waste your uniquenessWe owe it not just to ourselves, but to humanity and the future, to “come out,” affirm our truth. We may be scorned, people may not want to hear what we have to say, we may “fail” by the standards of the herd, but the only greatness there is for a human being is to be yourself to the max.

We are all unique experiments. We can either contribute to the further evolution of humanity or hide what we personally have inside us and keep humanity where it is.

I teach you the superhuman. The human being is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome it? … All creatures so far have created something that went beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even revert to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to the superhuman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more ape than any ape.... The superhuman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superhuman shall be the meaning of the earth.... Humanity is a rope, tied between beast and superhuman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in humans is that they are a bridge and not an end.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

The Superhuman

Those who are getting closer, or moving us closer ...

An artist like Shakespeare

A great thinker (like Nietzsche)

Any person who overcomes himself or herself

Jesus or the Buddha

An individual who follows his or her own heart or genius in spite of society’s pressures to remain within the herd

Someone who moves us forward as a species, changes us for the better, transcends what we previously thought were the limits of humanity

The Superman

God is dead.Some of the scientific and humanist thinkers whose work led to the “death of God” felt that with God’s departure human dignity and free will also went away. We are just bundles of genes or we are completely determined by our experience and upbringing (conditioning by our parents, society, etc), as Skinner believed.

God is dead and we are just trained animals or complex machines.

But that’s not what Nietzsche thought.

Nietzsche thought the death of God was good news in many ways....

God is dead.

You are free

... and it terrifies you.

What scares you is your actual uniqueness and the fact that you could actually be anything; the possibility that you might actually do anything (turn gay, become a Born Again Christian, quit your job and become a street person, throw yourself off a bridge, kill somebody, get married, leave your marriage, discover something that would change you or the world forever – and then reveal it!); the danger of being who you are, that part of you that is different from everything that came before and everything that will ever come again ... who knows what will happen if you be yourself?

The risk of being you and being free is what scares you, and that’s why you get the house in the suburbs, the big dumb car, the spouse, the family, the job, the mortgage, the funeral plan.

A 20th century movement in philosophy that focuses on the meaning and value of existence now, in this world.

God is dead. We no longer have God to give our lives meaning and guidance. Authority and tradition are dubious at best. The life you are living now is the only one you can be sure of, the only one you should be concerned about. You make the meaning and value your life has.

Think for yourself.

You make the world – nobody else; if you’re passive, other people are going to make the world they want. God isn’t there to help you and make it all right in the end. You’ve no god to blame but yourself.

Make the world you want.

Existentialism

You’re an experimental work of art – each of us is, nothing more or less. You can’t know or foresee how you should or will come out. “Courage – and throw the dice!”

There is no God with any plan for you – if you’ve been trying to follow some plan, it’s just some other person’s plan, not God’s.

Be yourself – you’re the only you there will ever be. Don’t waste that.

Living your life honestly and to the full is the full expression of life and humanity, and it is the means by which we will overcome this humanity for a better future one. Don’t drag us back; help us evolve.

Nietzschean Existentialism

There’s nothing you have to be, except what you are. Greatness comes from accepting who you are and turning up the volume. Be the self you want to be; be the self you already are but are hiding; be the self you were born to be, and were shaped to be. Be the MOST YOU that you can be – that is what it is to be a great human being.

You are creature and creator – create something interesting, create something unique, create and express yourself in your full beauty and ugliness and complexity and difficulty and shamefulness and greatness.

Life is a work of art. You are an experiment and a work of art. Dare to be it fully.

Nietzschean Existentialism

“Live in the world on your own terms.”

“Become who you are.”

The self as a work of art