[From Bill Powers (941205.0615 MST)]
Morning thoughts:
What real-life situations correspond to life in a Skinner Box? That is:
Where behavior consists of repeating a single movement over and over?
Where behavior creates an effect only every nth movement, plus or minus
a large random component?
I can think of only a few examples:
A gambler at a slot machine (but not a gambler playing poker)
A bird pecking for grain (but not a bird flying to its nest)
A fisherman casting flies (but not a fisherman cleaning a fish)
There are probably some more examples, but I wager that each one will
call to mind other behaviors that are not instances of repetitive
movements creating sporadic results.
Sixty years ago Skinner invented an experimental apparatus in which
repetitive movements were artificially translated into environmental
effects. It seems to me that the "experimental analysis of behavior" has
involved performing this experiment over and over ever since then, with
hundreds of scientists investigating repetitive movements and assuming
that this sort of behavior is representative of behavior in general.
I hope that control theory doesn't lead us to a similar Procrustean way
of defining behavior to fit a single experimental situation.
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Best,
Bill P.
[Avery Andrews 941206]
Bill Powers (941205MST)]
>I hope that control theory doesn't lead us to a similar Procrustean way
>of defining behavior to fit a single experimental situation.
This does seem to be a recurrent problem with the `human sciences',
and I think it's driven by the quest for `rigor' as opposed to
significance (Jerry Katz's 1972 book `Semantic Theory' has an interesting
discussion of this, as it applies to linguistics). Then again, at
higher levels, it seems to me that many activities are repetitions,
with only occasional results (trying to get that program to run:
test it, change something, test it, ....), and it's amazing how
time flies when you're doing this sort of thing. I think Skinner did
identify a significant aspect of the structure of activity.
On the subject of experimental settings, it does seem to me that VR
games might provide a useful one: one problem with `stick wiggling'
experiments, including the phonetic one that I suggested, is that you're
only looking at the control of conscious perceptions that a subject has
agreed to control, not at the `natural' organization of control systems
that have been produced by reorganization and/or heredity. But even a
very low-grade VR like that produced by the DooM engine is good enough
to engage real, natural control systems so as to produce silly-looking
output, such as leaning to try to see around corners. The developing
ability of computers to manufactor pretty good perceptions that don't quite
obey the same laws as real ones might provide a pretty powerful methodology
for identifying natural control systems, since reorganization will only
make these good enough to work in the actual world, not in the slight
warped worlds that a VR-designer can create.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au