Dear Professor Skinner,
I am writing in response to your assumption that the idea of free
will and motivation are illusions. To be fair, it must be the human nature in me to be defensive on
this matter, but at the core of my logic, I simply know that your assumption is
mistaken. Why? Free will is not equivalent with predictability or ‘not in
control’, as you have chosen to define it with. I think you must always reflect on the circumstance that pigeons
are different from humans. Pigeons can either choose left or right depending on
how they are conditioned or reinforced into, but humans have decision-making,
we can choose left or right, or simply choose not to choose.
Humans are not always tempted or ruled by reinforcements. Biologically,
when a person is being deprived of sugar, he will weaken. Once a food is
presented in front of him, it is reasonable to predict that he will eat it, but
there are instances when a person suppresses because of personal values, such as when
Muslims and Monks fast. Values and logic, it exists among humans, but not in
pigeons. Our intellect is a lot more sophisticated. Of course, a good Skinnerian
behaviorist will argue that it is because they were conditioned to expect a
positive reward or avoid a negative punishment at the end of it all. I don’t think so. How about the
ones who chose to eat despite being conditioned of 'eternal rewards' the same way? Besides, such
rewards are ‘illusions’, self-regulated and self-conditioned, they are
intrinsic reinforcement. It is, at the end of it, free will.
From your school
of thought, Sir Tolman believes in the intentionality and purposive behaviors, and I share his lens of behaviorism on this area,
but not yours that is perfect determinism. With humans, your formula of
conditioning does not always work. Again, you are ignoring human’s sophisticated intellect. We are
indeed answering to myriad causal influences, but the sum total of these
influences does not determine our decisions, but only, to make the options at
hand more or less likely to be chosen. This is an evidence of free will, the
ability to reconsider and be firm.
Your perfect
deterministic behaviorism suggests that when we are not punished nor rewarded,
no behavior is supposed to occur, but then infants speak gibberish words for
the sake of it, neither punished nor rewarded, just like Sir Noamsky’s
argument. Kids say curse words even if they know they will be punished for it.
Why are there instances of teenagers rebelling despite being spoiled rotten
with love and riches? Good sir, your explanation of behavior is like explaining
our reflexive reactions to pain, it can only be true for certain situations
when our brain is not consulted, like knee-jerks. It does not explain the rest
of our body’s reaction to pain just as your theory does not explain all our
behaviors.
Further, you must have heard of the concept of Natural Autonomy. It means that under very similar
circumstances we can choose the other option. When I said sophisticated intellect
before, I meant intelligence, plus natural autonomy and agency (the feeling of
selfhood). When we encode information, we relate it to our existing schema to
make sense, but aside from that, we do reflections, we process information with
our emotional and cognitive system. When a running vehicle is running towards
you, your output may be physically determined, you naturally run, but it is not
predictable due to the complexity of our information processing, we are
consulting our limbic system feedback, our emotions and memory. As long as we
are aware of this as well as our authorship, we can always choose otherwise, to
stop and get hit by the car. This is a sad example of free will, but
nevertheless true. Why do people choose suicide, when death is the home of fear
and all forms of punishment? Why would people punish themselves? You can always
decide between rewards, but not choose what is rewarding. Your theory cannot
explain this paradox, and perhaps no one can.
Accepting your point means the abandonment of any rational
activity, which is not only fallacious, but also dangerous. You are removing
our accountability on our actions. You are talking about a world where order is
a fantasy, and if a crime has been committed, it has simply been committed by
nature. I cannot agree on this. Beside Nature and Nurture, there is a narrator,
you. And while this may sound philosophical, which you advocate as pointless,
our brain really has a ‘narrator’, as proven by fMRI’s. Before we think of an
action, there is a flare of activity in our frontal lobe deciding for the
course, mirroring the action as if we are actually doing it. Technically, our
brains have already done the deed, but that does not determine that our bodies
will follow. Mirror neurons are brain cells that will light up similarly when
we do an action or just watch someone else performing the action. If there is
no such thing as free will, our bodies would have performed the action,
following the program, but that is not always the case. We imagine things we
are not really willing to act upon. To
not do something when you are supposed to, is a narrator’s choice. Besides,
free will is subjective. You cannot judge this by just looking at a behavior.
If the behavior performed was predicted, it does not mean I was not willing to
do it. The predicted result of condition merely received my consent that it can
be performed. Perhaps, your version of behaviorism is exactly just like reflex,
it is for creatures who do not have time to comprehend more.
Yours respectfully,
Apple
Ehe~
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