[lbo-talk] RE: AI

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Fri Nov 21 16:20:59 PST 2003


On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 11:50:06 -0800 (PST) Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> writes:
>
>
> On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, joanna bujes wrote:
>
> > If a computer can do anything without a humanly-programmed set of
> > instructions, we can start talking. However, a computer without a
> > program is like a car without gasoline. It just sits there and
> does
> > nothing. Another way of getting at this is to say that machine
> > "Intelligence" starts at the point where a computer can come up
> with
> > something that lies outside the permutations of its instruction
> set.
> > Problem is, it can't. Some humans, on the other hand, can overcome
> their
> > conditioning.
> >
> > Joanna
> >
>
> Radical behaviorists have a reasonable point on this (where's Jim
> F?):

I haven't gone anywhere.


> how do we know that people "can overcome their conditioning"?

People and other organisms can overcome specific forms of conditioning by virtue of other forms of conditioning that they might experience but they cannot "overcome their conditioning" taken as a totality.


> People's lives are long and complex, and reinforcement contingencies
> may not be apparent to the casual observer at one point in time.

Quite true. Spinoza, long ago, made the argument that to a large extent our illusion of possessing free will stems from the fact that we are generally unaware of most of the causal determinants of our behaviors. And radical behaviorists would concur with this view, pointing out that especially when it comes to the role of positive reinforcement, the contingencies that control much of our behavior, often do so beyond our conscious awareness of them.


> What looks like "overcoming conditioning" could in fact be
> predictable responses to past learning. (--e.g., people insisting
> they have free will: couldn't that just be because people are
> continually reinforced for claiming independence and freedom?

B.F. Skinner pointed out in his *Beyond Freedom & Dignity* that the assertion of our claims to independence and freedom can be seen as a predictable response to the traditional reliance upon punitive contingencies as a means for controlling behavior. The claiming of independence and freedom represented kinds of escape/avoidance responses to such contingencies, a form of counterconditioning that had the effect of weakening punitive controls. And Skinner maintained that this was a progressive step as far as it went but the problem with it was that it relied upon the myth of the "autonomous self" which is inconsistent with the postulates of behavioral science. And this myth of the "autonomous self" was in the long run undesirable because it diverted people from discovering the more covert causal determinants of behavior and was preventing people from making proper use of a science of behavior for creating a more humane society (which for Skinner would have been a more egalitarian society which substituted controls based on positive reinforcement in place of punitive controls).


> So
> even the claims of personal autonomy are--evidence that human
> behavior is "programmed" by past reinforcement?)
>
> Miles
>
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>

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