'Kay, behaviorism really was the dominant force in psychology, especially in North American psychology for many decades. And in fact, although we've kind of moved on, and we'll be talking about that through the remainder of this course. there's still a very strong legacy from that behaviorist era. we learned a lot of lessons then, and we've kind of taken those lessons forward. but we still kind of always have an eye towards behaviorism, and it always to some extent provides a bit of a test, especially with respect to claims concerning consciousness. That's what we're going to talk about today. Um,so let's get at that. Alright, so Week 4: Lecture 7, getting to the end of week 4. I call this Passing the "Not Conditioning" test. and I'm really linking that now to these comments that a lot of behaviorists made, or at least the perspective they had. That to truly be scientific you shouldn't be talking about abstract concepts that you cannot directly see, measure or manipulate. And so, let's kind of see how, how this was stated by John B Watson. John B Watson is probably an exp, especially strong in this regard. But he says, Psychology as the behaviorists use it, is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. So something is ob, objective when you can measure it directly. it's theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. That sounds a little ominous, doesn't it? But here we go. Introspection forms no essential part of its method. So remember introspection, that idea you know, right from Wilhelm Wundt? The idea of sort of looking into the mind and, and having a sense of mental processing through experience. He's saying, we don't want that. None of that. So, and, and, we do not want the scientific value of behaviorism dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretations in terms of consciousness. So, he really wants to take consciousness out of the picture. the behaviorist in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. I mean, even this last thing is a little odd. As, as I'll, I'll even challenge that a little bit. But the, the implication he, he has there is to the extent, anybody as a consciousness, it's probably humans. But again, he's echoing that epiphenomenon notion that yeah, maybe that consciousness is there, but it's not determining the behavior. and so, in terms of our behavioral outputs to stimuli, there's no difference between humans and animals. Perhaps humans have a conscious experience, but that conscious experience is irrelevant with respect to the prediction and control of behavior. So very strong perspective, very strong stance, in kind of saying, you know, consciousness has no role in psychology. Now, a lot of people disagree with that. But the challenge they now face, the test as I'm calling it now, is to the extent they want to say hey there's some behavior that shows a very important role of consciousness here. They have to kind of show how that behavior could not just be explained by behavioral principles. Why does it actually require one to posit some role of consciousness. And, as an example of this, to make it a little concrete, I'm going to start with language, okay? Because language, we really think of as a, as a uniquely human ability, at least in terms of its complexes. We all agree that, that animals communicate, and that they use their bodies to communicate. You know, when a dog is growling at you, he's telling you something. and we all recognize that. We can all interpret that. but the claim is that animals interp, communicate very much in the now. They're just giving you a signal of how they feel right now. But human language is really impressive in the sense that it can cross space and time barrier. So this is my little tribute to Einstein's space-time, I guess. But I'm going to use it in a couple of things. So, you know, Einstein had this notion of potential wormholes, where you could enter a wormhole from one spot on the space time continuum and perhaps emerge at another spot so that you could actually through a wormhole go to a different time. The notion of time travel. you know, really fascinating. Well, to some extent language already does that. In fact, if you wanted to know a lot more about Einstein's thoughts, you could go to one of his books. And in his books, he uses language to communicate his ideas, his thoughts, dare I say his consciousness. and now decades later, we can receive that information. You know, the information that he sat somewhere and wrote down has spanned time and space, albeit, only in a forward direction. but in this forward direction has, has spanned time and space. And so, language is very powerful. in fact, even if we think about learning, language allows learning to be passed down without the receiver having to actually have gone through the learning experience. Someone can tell them, hey, if you do that, this will happen. So, they don't actually have to do it in order to have a learning experience. Language allows the transmission of knowledge and information. You know, really, just as we're doing in this course, as a great example. So, it's a very powerful thing. And a, and most people would say, and it requires consciousness. You know, a lot of people would say, I know what the behaviorists are arguing. but for somebody like Einstein to sit down and describe his thoughts, surely, that's mediated by conscious experience. And most people would say, yeah, I think so. at least for humans. What about for animals? Now, I said that animals cannot produce human like language. But a lot of people have kind of challenged that. and, and there's some famous examples. So, what I'm suggesting here is, this is, this is a chimpanzee named Nim Chimsky. I, I, you're going to see there is a real interplay between Skinner. BF Skinner and Noam Chomsky on the other side. and Noam Chomsky is, is very well known for his arguments of language and the sort of innateness of language. And so, Nim Chimpsky here was a chimpanzee that they were trying to, they were trying to assess what is the potential of a chimpanzee. Now, by the way, all of great apes do not have the vocal apparatus required to speak as we do. They simply do not have the voice box. They could never produce words, planet of the apes aside. They could never produce words the way we do. but that doesn't mean they couldn't produce language in some other way. And in fact, American Sign Language, which is what you see going on here between Nim and Laura and Petito; a very famous psychologist that worked with Nim and, and once a colleague of mine. they are communicating with each other using sign language. And what they actually did with Nim is really fascinating. They said well, you know, maybe monkeys have, maybe monkeys. Ooo ,sorry. Ape researchers would not be impressed if you called a Chimpanzee a monkey. maybe great apes don't communicate in complex ways because they don't have to in their natural world. They live in a relatively simple world. But what if you raised a chimpanzee like a human child. And that's what Nim experienced. He was raised. It's a kind of crazy story, I'm going to point you to a link if you want it. There's a movie about this now called, Project Nim, that kind of lays it all out. But he was essentially raised like a spoiled human child, kind of allowed to do whatever he wanted to do. but he was also taught sign language, especially when Loreann came into the picture and really kind of started adding a little more structure to the, to the experiment, as it were. and so, he was very capable of sign language. In fact, a lot of great apes have shown, th, this is something called a pictogram. Where a great ape can communicate by touching the pictures of things it's trying to express. so they've used things like pictograms, they've used sign language, and they've shown an ape can do something like apple, I want an apple. and when you give it an apple, it clearly wanted an apple. Now, so does that suggest language. And does that suggest consciousness? Well, here's where that behavior-, behavioral test comes in. A lot of behaviorists, when they saw these experiments, said, yeah, I don't know. What this, what these chimps seem to have been learning, or these great apes, is to associate symbols with objects. And so, yeah, they want apple and they can say apple. But they can't say, man I remember that fantastic apple pie we had three days ago, and that was so much fun. They can't use language in complex ways, with complex sort of grammar and syntax and structure. and of course importantly, complex semantics. They can do semantics as the meaning of things. So, the idea is they can do simple meanings, kind of like a two year old child. I want x, I want y. but they can't do anything deep and complex. And in fact, everything they can do, you could imagine by the principles of conditioning. Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, they've just learned that if they give this signal, then they get that reward. and so they've associated the two, and there's perhaps nothing deeper going on than that. They're hungry, they ask for food. They get food. So, they know by doing this, they learn by doing this, just like pressing a lever, that, that will ultimately deliver a reward to them. that's the claim. Now, a lot of people who work with them say, no, no, it's much more complex than that, it's not that simple. But how do you demonstrate that? What do you show, what behavior do you show from an organism like this that convinces people, they do have some sort of conscious experience and they do have an ability to express that through language. And even these mirror tests, remember I told you the mirror test, where they're wiping the red dot off their eye. Well, one behaviorist explanation of that or, or behavioral style explanation of that, put forward by someone named Daniel [UNKNOWN], is that, you know, they're not really recognizing that object as themselves. What they're very good at is sort of classical conditioning, operating conditioning. So, they learn very early on that if I move my body in certain ways, that organism in the mirror moves it's body in reflective ways. Kind of like if you're playing a video game, you learn pretty quickly, hey if I make certain movements, then my character will mirror my movements in certain ways. and so if I want to control that character, I learn how to make the movements that control that character, and maybe that's what the chimps have learned. How to control that character in the mirror. And so if that character has red spots here, I've learned that in order for that character to check out its red spots, I have to touch certain areas and he will now touch those areas. And if I look at my hands, he will now look at his hands. And so, what I'm doing is not recognizing that character as me, but I'm just recognizing my ability to control that character. So, notice that this explanation, although just suddenly different, has taken self awareness out of the picture. And if you can do that, if you can provide an explanation like that. And you, and, and the thing from behaviorism is it seems like you almost always can, it's very hard to find things that you cannot provide that explanation, then it's always open to alternative theories. It's always open to somebody saying they weren't self aware, they have no consciousness. you know, in fact, or taking the extreme view that even we don't have a consciousness that does anything. Okay, that's the real challenge. So, when, when we're trying to study consciousness and what it does, we're always kind of trying to show how this behavior is more than you would expect through simple conditioning. And it can be a real challenge, it really can. Okay. So check out a little more on this. There, there's a bunch of fascinating things. Again, Project Nim was a movie. you, you can rent it if you want. Fa-, fascinating movie. kind of shows you how loose science can be sometimes, but also how interesting. this is just a little interview of, of Koko. a gorilla who'slearned American sign language. And Koko's interaction with Robin Williams, somebody that Koko had watched on videos before, so they get to meet and interact, tickled each other and laugh together, which is kind of interesting. This is, if, if you're a, if you're a science geek at all, this is almost must see TV. Noam Chomsky and Skinner kind of debating each other. Noam Chomsky being a much more sort of genetically inclined, innate inclined kind of guy and Skinner of course, being much more about the environment and the environmental influences. So a little bit of a back and forth between them, which is fascinating. at least if you're a geek. here on the reading side, I've given you a nice discussion of this animal language controversy, so that you can actually see the back and forth a little bit that, that was going on concerning how to interpret an animal language. And then this is this actually a Bachelor's thesis. but I thought it was really kind of well done. a nice laid out discussion on animal communication that's, that's written in a nice comfortable way, and lays out many of the, the critical issues. So check those out if you're interested in more. and we'll come back for one more lecture in this week about something called observational learning. I hope you have a fantastic day. Bye-bye [BLANK_AUDIO]
