Notes on behaviorism: After reading a few minutes about it, behaviorism seems obviously false. It views the “important part” of reward to be the external behavior which led to the reward. If I put my hand on a stove, and get punished, then I’m less likely to do that again in the future. Or so the theory goes.
But this seems, in fullest generality, wildly false. The above argument black-boxes the inner structure of human cognition which produces the externally observed behavior.
What actually happens, on my model, is that the stove makes your hand hot, which triggers sensory neurons, which lead to a punishment of some kind, which triggers credit assignment in your brain, which examines your current mental state and judges which decisions and thoughts led to this outcome, and makes those less likely to occur in similar situations in the future.
But credit assignment depends on the current internal state of your brain, which screens off the true state of the outside world for its purposes. If you were somehow convinced that you were attempting to ride a bike, and you got a huge punishment, you’d be more averse to moving to ride a bike in the future—not averse to touching stoves.
Reinforcement does not directly modify behaviors, and objects are not intrinisically reinforcers or punishments. Reinforcement is generally triggered by reward circuitry, and reinforcement occurs over thoughts which are judged responsible for the reward.
This line of thought seems closer to “radical behaviorism”, which includes thoughts as “behaviors.” That idea never caught on—is each thought not composed of further subthoughts? If only they had reduced “thought” into parts, or known about reward circuitry, or about mesa optimizers, or about convergently learned abstractions, or about credit assignment...
Notes on behaviorism: After reading a few minutes about it, behaviorism seems obviously false. It views the “important part” of reward to be the external behavior which led to the reward. If I put my hand on a stove, and get punished, then I’m less likely to do that again in the future. Or so the theory goes.
But this seems, in fullest generality, wildly false. The above argument black-boxes the inner structure of human cognition which produces the externally observed behavior.
What actually happens, on my model, is that the stove makes your hand hot, which triggers sensory neurons, which lead to a punishment of some kind, which triggers credit assignment in your brain, which examines your current mental state and judges which decisions and thoughts led to this outcome, and makes those less likely to occur in similar situations in the future.
But credit assignment depends on the current internal state of your brain, which screens off the true state of the outside world for its purposes. If you were somehow convinced that you were attempting to ride a bike, and you got a huge punishment, you’d be more averse to moving to ride a bike in the future—not averse to touching stoves.
Reinforcement does not directly modify behaviors, and objects are not intrinisically reinforcers or punishments. Reinforcement is generally triggered by reward circuitry, and reinforcement occurs over thoughts which are judged responsible for the reward.
This line of thought seems closer to “radical behaviorism”, which includes thoughts as “behaviors.” That idea never caught on—is each thought not composed of further subthoughts? If only they had reduced “thought” into parts, or known about reward circuitry, or about mesa optimizers, or about convergently learned abstractions, or about credit assignment...