--- Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Matt Mahoney wrote:
> I guess we are arguing terminology.  I mean that the part of the brain
which
> generates the reward/punishment signal for operant conditioning is not
> trainable.  It is programmed only through evolution.

There is no such thing.  This is the kind of psychology that died out at
least thirty years ago (with the exception of a few diehards in North
Wales and Cambridge).

Are we arguing terminology again, or are you really saying that animals cannot be trained using reward and punishment? By "operant conditioning", I mean
reinforcement learning.

I realize that monkeys can be trained to work for tokens that can be exchanged for food. When I say that the motivational logic cannot be trained, I mean the connection from food to reward, not from tokens to reward. What you are
training is the association of tokens to food and work to tokens.

Mark Waser wrote:
> He's arguing with the phrase "It is programmed only through evolution."
>
> If I'm wrong and he is not, I certainly am.

I certainly agree with Mark on this point (I dispute Matt's contention that "It is programmed only through evolution") but that was only a subset of my main disagreement.

I am disputing the very idea that monkeys (or rats or pigeons or humans) have a "part of the brain which generates the reward/punishment signal for operant conditioning."

This is behaviorism. I find myself completely at a loss to know where to start, if I have to explain what is wrong with behaviorism.

This is the 21st century, and we have had cognitive psychology for, what?, fifty years now? Cognitive psychology was born when people suddenly realized that the behaviorist conception of the mechanisms of mind was ridiculously stupid.

As a superficial model of how to control the behavior of rats, it works great. (It even works for some aspects of the behavior of children). But as a model of the *mechanisms* that make up a thinking system? I can't think of words expressive enough to convey my contempt for the idea. The people who invented behaviorism managed to shut the science of psychology down for about three or four decades, so I don't look very charitably on what they did.

If someone said to you that "All computers in the world today actually work by having a mechanism inside them that looks at the current inputs (from mice, keyboard, etc) and then produces an output by getting the correct response for that input from an internal lookup table" you would be at a loss to know how to go about fixing that person's broken conception of the machinery of computation. You would probably tell them to go read some *really* basic textbooks about computers, then get a degree in the subject if necessary, then come back when their ideas had gotten straightened out.

[Don't take the above analogy too literally, btw: I know about the differences between look up tables and literal behaviorism.... I was merely conveying the depth of ignorance of mechanism that the two sets of ideas share].

And, no, this is nothing whatsoever to do with "terminology" (nor have I ever simply argued about terminology in the past, as you imply).


Richard Loosemore.

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