Living with Ideas #2

September 9, 2003

The idea I live with most intimately is gaming. Some of my favorite activities are playing, discussing, and designing games. It's a very social activity, with a great deal of verbal behavior as I interact with friends and colleagues. I enjoy thought experiments, in games or speculative science fiction. Many games explore settings and themes of Utopia, or (more often) dystopia. So my perspective on this week's reading is again colored by games, because I'm a bit obsessed with this perspective, and also because this week's reading is topical. I'm most interested in multiplayer role-playing games, which are driven by social interaction. And Walden Two is a prototypical thought experiment (with speculative science fiction via "cultural engineering").

I first read Noam Chomskey's critique of Skinner's framework for verbal behavior. This is a bit of Celebrity Deathmatch for me. As I wrote last week, I have embraced some of Skinner's perspective, especially his focus on observable outcomes. I also admire Chomskey, for some of his sociopolitical rhetoric. I've never tried to pierce contemporary language theory. As a former English teacher I've had just enough language theory to avoid it henceforth. Alas, Chomskey writes directly from his mastery of theory, and I find some of his arguments inscrutable. His tone is confidently callous, which I've enjoyed when he was attacking neo-conservative leaders and politics. Now that it's turned on my hero Skinner, I'm vexed! He sometimes extends Skinner's arguments to expose their weakness, but even when an idea is face down on the mat, he elbow-smashes it past absurdity (e.g. aiming machine guns at crowds). I guess the moral is never get in a rhetorical fight with a semiotician.

I try to share Chomskey's cool disdain for Skinner's framework, but it's difficult because I haven't read Skinner's book. Nor, it seems, do I want to. Chomskey fights with honor when he praises some methods and theories of behaviorism, reminding us to not discard the fledgling perspective because of its inability to demystify language. Indeed, Chomskey's works is widely acknowledged as a watershed in semiotics, and he concedes that language (and by extension, thinking) is fabulously mysterious. The mind is complex and Skinner's framework seems pitifully simple. I agree that pigeons to rhetoric is a big jump, and Skinner's framework is evidently mere extrapolation. As such, it has value, but we shouldn't be mislead by Skinner's halo effect and white lab coat.

(With my background in physical science, I'm always amused by the youthful myopia of psychology. I've read millennia of progressive understanding of matter and energy, from Heraclitus' elemental fire to Oppenheimer at Alamogordo, New Mexico. And we still don't understand the really big phenomena, like gravity and light. Yet psychologists presume that a few decades after Freud and Jung we're going to deconstruct human thought. Good freakin' luck!)

A few quibbles for the post-game show. In section 3, Chomskey claims to deconstruct Skinner's framework by asserting that we have countless "nonsynonymous descriptive expressions in our language." This is true, but Skinner would probably reply that different expressions have different degrees of force. This is a nuance that Chomskey seems to ignore, although he could probably manage to counter it by forcing behaviorists to admit that covert behaviors sound a lot like cognition. In section 7, Chomskey extends one of Skinner's argument to the notion that "at any moment a person is in countless states of deprivation." He intends this as a clever absurdity, but I actually believe this. At the fundamental level, I believe humans are driven to reduce their anxiety. So here and elsewhere, Chomskey doesn't disabuse me of a behaviorist perspective.

Despite my vexation at Chomskey's dirty moves, all is forgiven in the final section. I believe research must be driven by good questions, where "good" is a stupendous understatement of Platonic quality. Chomskey provides a really good question in this statement: "We understand a new sentence, in part, because we are somehow capable of determining the process by which this sentence is derived in this grammar." This gets at the foundation of my interest in role-playing games. When players assume fictional characters, they must imagine how these characters think. My greatest research interest is the "somehow" in Chomskey's statement. I'm less curious about the origin or nature of the somehow, and fascinated with how we can cultivate our "somehow." I've grappled with these ideas many times, but I've never found them expressed so eloquently, with so much subtext. (Yeah! Doing the required reading paid off!)

(I have more marginal musings on the behaviorist vs. cognitive battle. First, the more I learn about the perspectives the less I believe there's a battle. Dialectic conflict can be used to seek truth, but we shouldn't be blinded by it or solely dependent on it. Second, whether we have free will or not, we like to believe we have it and are reluctant to give up this belief. The cognitive perspective is also inherently more appealing because we try to distance ourselves from our animal nature. For example, we're very sexualized creatures but we almost never discuss sex. So instead, our entertainment and marketing are saturated with sex. Finally, it's easier to discredit a behaviorist, or any worrisome perspective, than to allow for the possibility that he's correct, to accommodate pluralistic thinking. Chomskey, at least, seems like a pluralistic.)

Reading Chomskey was challenging but intellectually productive, evidently. I have less to say about Walden Two, because I'm still reading it. I greatly enjoy speculative fiction, partly because its nature is similar to role-playing games: "What if?" In this case, "What if the behaviorists walked the talk?" (Post-WWII is a great era for speculative fiction. I've also enjoyed Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.)

I wonder how Burrhus is split between Burris and Frazier. It's like watching a man talk to himself, but instead of a scary homeless addict, it's a socially-conscious genius.

Some initial margin notes.... Rodger and Frazier's rejection of politics is ludicrous (p 10), unless we accept a very limited definition of the term. I believe everything is indisputably political, and that abdicating the franchise is tantamount to civic suicide. The religious subtext is initially enigmatic (the sheep are guarded by "Bishop" the dog, p 16; Frazier calls the children angels, p 31). I smile at the "constantly experimental attitude toward everything" (p 25), since this attitude is what attracted me to behaviorism. The simplification of human behavior is sometimes absurd. For example, "indolence or simple carelessness... are born of weariness." (p 32) On page 35 Frazier asserts they don't practice hero-worship, yet other members of the commune, er, utopia seem to idolize him. Perhaps this just reflects Skinner's inexperience in writing fiction (which shows elsewhere). Down with lectures! Down with crowd! (p 36-37) Heh. Sometimes Skinner seems to trying for a laugh, although I try to track his allegory instead. (We develop aesthetic taste in the dining room?) (p 40) I do enjoy the social justice and gender equality ideals. So far, Walden Two seems like a very nice place. I'm looking forward to reading about the methods behind this alleged paradise (e.g. no jealousy) (p 47).