Extinction Burst
The Misconception: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life.
The Truth: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit.
Source: Corie Howell
You’ve been there.
You get serious about losing weight and start to watch every calorie. You read labels, stock up on fruit and vegetables, hit the gym.
Everything is going fine. You feel great. You feel like a champion. You think, “This is easy.”
One day you give in to temptation and eat some candy, or a doughnut, or a cheeseburger. Maybe, you buy a bag of chips. You order the fettuccine alfredo.
That afternoon, you decide not only will you eat whatever you want, but to celebrate the occasion you will eat a pint of ice cream.
The diet ends in a catastrophic binge.
What the hell? How did your smooth transition from comfort food to human Dumpster happen?
You just experienced an extinction burst.
Once you become accustomed to reward, you get really upset when you can’t have it.
Food, of course, is a powerful reward. It keeps you alive.
Your brain didn’t evolve in an environment where there was an abundance of food, so whenever you find a high-calorie, high fat, high sodium source, your natural inclination is to eat a lot of it and then go back to it over and over again.
If you take away a reward like that, you throw an internal tantrum.
Extinction bursts are a component of extinction, one of the principles of conditioning.
Much of your behavior is the result of conditioning. It is among the most basic factors shaping the way any organism reacts to the world.
If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of events to their eventual outcomes.
If you want some chicken nuggets, you know you can’t just snap your fingers and wait for them to appear. You must engage in a long sequence of actions – acquire language, acquire money, acquire car, acquire clothes, acquire fuel, learn to drive, learn to use money, learn where nuggets are sold, drive to nuggets, use language, exchange money, etc..
This string of behaviors could be sliced up into smaller and smaller components if we wanted to really dig down into the conditioning you have endured in order to be able to get nuggets in your mouth.
Just driving the car from point A to point B is a complex performance which becomes automatic after hundreds of hours of practice.
Millions of tiny behaviors, each one a single step in a process, add up to a single operation you have learned will payoff in reward.
Think of rats in a maze, learning a complicated series of steps – turn left two times, turn right once, turn left, right, left, get cheese.
Even microorganisms can be conditioned to react to stimuli and predict outcomes.
For a while in psychology, conditioning was the cat’s pajamas.
Source: Time Magazine
In the 1960s and ’70s, Burrhus Frederic Skinner became a scientist celebrity by scaring the shit out of America with an invention called the operant conditioning chamber – the Skinner Box.
The box is an enclosure which can have any combination of levers, food dispensers, an electric floor, lights and loudspeakers.
Scientists place animals in the box and either reward them or punish them to either encourage or discourage their behavior.
Rats, for example, can be taught to push a lever when a green light appears to get a food pellet.
Skinner demonstrated how he could teach a pigeon to spin in circles at his command by offering food only when it turned in one direction. Gradually, he withheld the food until the pigeon had turned a little farther and farther until he had it going round and round.
He could even get the pigeon to distinguish between the word “peck” and “turn” and get them to perform the corresponding behavior just by showing them a sign.
Yes, in a sense, he taught a bird to read.
Skinner discovered you could get pigeons and rats to do complicated tasks by slowly building up chains of behaviors through handing out pellets of food. For example, if you want to teach a squirrel to water ski, you just need to start small and work your way up.
Other researchers added punishment to the routines and discovered it too could be used like the pellets to encourage and discourage behavior.
Skinner became convinced conditioning was the root of all behavior and didn’t believe rational thinking had anything to do with your personal life. He considered introspection to be a “collateral product” of conditioning.
Like Freud and Einstein, Skinner was a celebrity in his day, and his belief we were all robots was unsettling. He made the cover of Time magazine in 1971.
“My book,” says Skinner, ”is an effort to demonstrate how things go bad when you make a fetish out of individual freedom and dignity. If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.”
- Time Magazine, 1971
Some psychologists and philosophers still hold to the idea you are nothing but a sophisticated automaton, like a spider or a fish. You have no freedom, no free will.
Your brain is made of atoms and molecules which must obey the laws of physics and chemistry, so some say your mind is locked into service of the rules of the universe like a clock. Everything you have thought, felt and done in your life was the natural mathematical aftermath of the Big Bang.
To this wing of psychology, you are the same as an insect, just with a more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines which only appear to give rise to consciousness.
You may take comfort knowing this is a hotly contested idea, one which is as old as the Greek philosophers who imagined the unconscious as wild horses pulling a chariot helmed by your upper-level reasoning.
Whether or not you have free will, conditioning is real, and the impact of conditioning can’t be ignored.
The Supernanny
There are two kinds of conditioning – classical and operant.
In classical conditioning, something which normally doesn’t have any influence becomes a trigger for a response.
If you are taking a shower and someone flushes the toilet which then causes the water to become a scalding torrent, you become conditioned to recoil in terror the next time you hear the toilet flush while lathering up.
That’s classical conditioning. Something neutral – the toilet flushing – becomes charged with meaning and expectation. You have no control over it. You recoil from the water without ever thinking, “I should recoil from this water else I get scalded.”
If you have ever been sick after eating or drinking something you love, you will avoid it in the future. The smell of it, or even the thought of it, can make you ill.
For me, it’s tequila. Ugh, gross.
Classical conditioning keeps you alive. You learn quickly to avoid that which may harm you and seek out that which makes you happy, like an amoeba.
The sort of complex behavior Skinner produced in animals was the result of operant conditioning.
Operant conditioning changes your desires. Your inclinations becomes greater through reinforcement, or diminish through punishment.
You go to work, you get paid. You turn on the air conditioning and stop sweating. You don’t run the red light, you don’t get a ticket. You pay the rent, you don’t get evicted.
It’s all operant conditioning, punishment and reward.
Which finally brings us back to the third factor – extinction.
When you expect a reward or a punishment and nothing happens, your conditioned response starts to fade away.
If you stop feeding your cat, he will stop hanging around the food bowl and meowing. His behavior will go extinct.
If you were to keep going to work and not get paid, eventually you would stop.
This is when the extinction burst happens, right as the behavior is breathing its final breath.
You wouldn’t just not go to work anymore. You would probably storm into the boss’s office and demand an explanation. If you got nowhere after gesticulating wildly and inventing new curse words out of your boss’s last name, you might scoop your arm across his desk and leave in handcuffs.
Just before you give up on a long-practiced routine, you freak out. It’s a final desperate attempt by the oldest parts of your brain to keep getting rewarded.
If you use the same elevator every day, and one day you press the button and nothing happens, you start jamming the button over and over again instead of just giving up.
You lock your keys in your apartment, but your roommate is asleep. You ring the doorbell and knock, but they don’t come. You ring the doorbell over and over and over. You start pounding on the door.
If your computer freezes up you don’t just walk away, you start clicking all over the place and maybe go so far as to bang your fists on the keyboard.
If a child doesn’t get any candy at the checkout line, he or she may throw a giant spit-slinging tantrum.
These are all extinction bursts. A temporary increase in an old behavior, a plea from the recesses of your psyche.
The worst thing you could ever do is give in to a temper tantrum. This goes for adults too, because if you spend enough time observing other people you will notice that people who are used to getting their way will start a temper tantrum immediately after you have refused their request. If you patiently restate your position and stay calm you will see the person eventually give up. Depending upon how long he carries on will tell you how other people have responded to the person in the past. If he has been rewarded for having a fit often enough the extinction burst will be spectacular, enjoy! If it’s short lived, it will be over as quick as it started and you can feel good that you haven’t encouraged it. The best way to eliminate a tantrum is to not give in, wait out the extinction burst (walking away works wonders) and reinforce the absence of the tantrum with your attention as soon as the person stops.
- From the Canine University’s training statement
So, back to that diet.
You eliminate a reward from your life: awesome and delicious high-calorie foods. Right as you are ready to give it up forever, an extinction burst threatens to demolish your willpower.
You become like a two-year-old in a conniption fit, and like the child, if you give in to the demands, the behavior will be strengthened.
Compulsive overeating is a frenzied state of mind, food addiction under pressure until it bursts.
Diets fail for many reasons, much of them associated with your body trying to survive in a situation where surviving starvation is much less of an issue.
To give up overeating, or smoking, or gambling, or “World of Warcraft,” or any bad habit which was formed through conditioning, you must be prepared to weather the secret weapon of your unconscious – the extinction burst.
Become your own Supernanny, your own Dog Whisperer. Look for alternative rewards and positive reinforcement. Set goals, and when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your choosing.
Don’t freak out when it turns out to be difficult. Habits form because you are not so smart, and they cease under the same conditions.
If you buy one book this year…well, I suppose you should get something you’ve had your eye on for a while. But, if you buy two or more books this year, might I recommend one of them be a celebration of self delusion? Give the gift of humility (to yourself or someone else you love). Watch the trailer.
Order now: Amazon - Barnes and Noble - iTunes - Books A Million
Links:
The 1971 Time Magazine Article on Skinner
Operant or Classical Conditioning?
Classical Conditioning at Changingminds.org
Operant Conditioning at Changingminds.org
Extinction at Changingminds.org
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“Some psychologists and philosophers still hold to the idea you are nothing but a sophisticated automaton, like a spider or a fish. You have no freedom, no free will.
They say your brain is made of atoms and molecules which obey the laws of physics and chemistry, thus your mind is locked into service of the same rules of the universe.”
These two statements are unrelated.
Are you saying our brains don’t follow the laws of physics? Could you please point to the violation of physics that occurs within neurons?
I think your misunderstanding here comes from a poor concept of free will. So what’s your definition of free will?
“Take comfort knowing this is a hotly contested idea”
I’m surprised to see this blog recommending that you believe something because it’s comfortable, rather than believing what’s true regardless of comfort.
@Eric – I’m implying some people believe since our brain is governed by rules we cannot escape and have no control over, then true free will does not exist because we are only a complicated piece of clockwork. I don’t believe this, but I must also admit it is only a belief.
I have reworded that section to clarify the point.
You’re wrong. Quantum events act with true randomness.
Schrodinger’s Cat and the EPR paradox (or many other theories and [thought] experiments about quantum mechanics) are very abstract and hard to understand without a foundation of higher-level mathematics and physics. However, whether the average person understands them is irrelevant. The result still stands.
And that result is that even though events on a macro-scale can be precisely predicted with enough information (although ‘enough information’ can be a HUGE amount by reasonable standards), on a micro-scale, dealing with the fundamental pieces of what makes up everything, states exhibit true randomness. It feels paradoxical like wave/particle physics of light, or relativity, but it’s not one of those things you can reason to simply without the proper background (and frankly, something I can only barely understand. I guess that’s why I’m not Einstein).
Anyway, long story short, the idea that our brains (or everything, for that matter) HAVE to behave a certain way because of the unflinching laws of physics IS CONTESTED, and rightly so! Really, it just means that our basic “laws” of physics are incomplete, or overgeneralized, etc. If on the micro-scale true randomness occurs in a way “outside” of the “laws” of physics, then that leaves enough wiggle-room for philosophers to scientifically attempt to justify the existence of free will.
Gabriel, how do you know that quantum events act with true randomness? We use science to understand how things work. Right now, our understanding of quantum physics is such that in some circumstances, we can only predict a certain chance of seeing an expected state. That does not mean that our understanding of quantum physics will never improve, that one day we won’t have a better understanding that leads us to accurately predict behavior on a quantum scale. Of course, by that point, we will have discovered something else, maybe something even smaller, that can’t be described by the state of the art in that time period.
It’s unnecessary to look to quantum physics to address the question of free will. We don’t look to the quantum scale when addressing the workings of the brain. It doesn’t operate at a quantum scale.
You are right that the idea that our brains have to behave a certain way due to the laws of physics is contested. It is not contested because our understanding of the laws of physics is incomplete, though. It is contested because the notion of contra-causal free will is something ingrained in our culture, it is something we are conditioned to believe in.
In fact, I think that trying to justify a belief in contra-causal free will by pointing out that our understanding of quantum physics is limited is a great example of an extinction burst.
No. Current understanding of quantum mechanics *is* that quantum events act with true randomness. Not because our science is so unadvanced that “we can only predict a certain chance of seeing an expected state.” No, quantum mechanics says nature is inherently random, and more accurate measurements will only confirm this randomness.
This is one of the most basic, fundamental assumptions of quantum mechanics. It is supported by all experiments done to date, and taught in introductory quantum courses.
This is coming from a senior physics major, btw.
And scientific standards are consistently being challenged.
I am only a engineering major, so we don’t go into depth with physics as much as you, but I can say that scientific standards are only a rationalization.
When you do calculations, you set your 0, or origin. Nature doesn’t care about it. Similarly, when we set our rules, nature doesn’t care about it. It is our best understanding that nature matches our rules of quantum mechanics, and who knows, maybe in 50 years a new theory will come out that will supercede quantum mechanics.
Here’s a crappy example.
The current random used by most computers is merely pseudorandom. There is a way to predict the numbers namely by using the seed.
Ask an average American, and they will tell you that numbers generated by a computer are random. Boom.. guess what? Any of us who know anything about computer science knows that it simulates randomness but is not truly random.
Right now, we are knowledgeless. We know jacksquat about nature, and your absolute claims are absolutely insulting to the scientist inside me.
The average American doesn’t know about pseudorandom numbers because he hasn’t studied computer science that much. Those in the field know what is really happening. And those in physics research know what is really happening. Perhaps a new theory will eventually come forth displacing quantum theory, but the reality is, according to all experiments done so far that differentiate between true randomness and hidden variables, true randomness has won out every single time.
Right now, you as an engineer are knowledgeless about much of quantum theory. You know jacksquat about the theory and the experiments performed to realize the theory, and apparently all the professors I know are absolutely insulting to the “scientist” inside you, because what I have said is exactly what they told me: nature is actually, intrinsically random.
This is one of the best articles I’ve read here.
@Eric
I don’t quite get what you’re saying with your post. It’s explicitly said that the brain does follow the laws of physics.
Anyways, love the article. Reminds me of this choose your own adventure comic.
http://www.boingboing.net/201003111257.jpg
Nice one!
The cake is a lie!
my late dad would have liked to read this article very much!
i just wish we would not succumb to extinction bursts at all..
Another excellent post. I’m glad I read this BEFORE having kids. Now, during tantrums, I just need to remember to tell my wife: “Just wait for the extinction burst.”
@Josh Rhoderick – Awesome. I recommend anyone planning on having children take a child psychology course beforehand or at least buy a child psychology textbook and read it. Parenting doesn’t come with a manual, and so much of the advice out there is based on opinion despite all the hard, empirical and scientific data available.
I thought conditioning was debunked by modern psychologists a couple decades ago, at least for higher organisms. I’m currently reading ‘How the Mind Works’ by Steven Pinker, who is among the foremost authorities on cognitive research. He says it’s accepted consensus that Skinner, although a pioneering ground breaker, was dead wrong. The current theory among researchers is that the mind works according to a series of goals and symbols, called the ‘computational theory of mind.’
The question of free will is still another question, something Pinker terms a mystery.
@Brian – I don’t think conditioning has been debunked, but psychology is still a young science. Everything in psychology is up for grabs right now.
This article makes my little psychology major heart burst!! Skinner was my favorite when I was studying. Now I understand why dieting fails, too (Psychologically anyway!).
Thanks for sharing!!
I don’t quite get the ‘free will’ part. I feel that it is unrelated and unnecessary to the main topic. What has free will to do with conditioning? If a person behaves rationally does it prove he has free will and vice versa if a person is acting based on some previous experiences does it negate the existence of free will?
Whether there is free will or not has nothing to do with whether you believe in conditioning of the mind. The concept of free will is very abstract and goes deeper and I feel ‘not related’ to the present context of discussion.
Personally I believe there’s ain’t such thing as free will and all our actions and reactions including the thought process at the sub-atomic level are just a continuation of the ‘something’ that happened a long long time back. Still I know I am more ‘ rational’ than my friend Mark.
So you see completely ‘unrelated’.
@Skywalker and Bill – First, thank you for great and interesting comments.
I included the portion on free will because it seemed interesting when exploring the contributions of Skinner to psychology. The extinction burst, and conditioning in general, always seems to creep me out once I get going down that path because of the implications they bring with them, the free will heebie jeebies if you will. I’m aware of the quantum loophole, wave form consciousness and all that, but I didn’t want to devote much more time in this article to the idea. Maybe in a later post I will.
It is fair to say my hedging seems to smack of polemics. I feel like the issue isn’t settled, and I figured most readers would benefit from seeing this is an ongoing debate despite the hard facts about what our brains are made of.
I think you would really enjoy Daniel Dennet’s discourse on free will in Freedom Evolves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Evolves), generally when people get the heebie jeebies about free will it’s because they’re putting the “free” in the wrong place.
Excellent article. Just loved it.
Skywalker said it better than I could have. I’ll just add that the people who most passionately defend the concept of ‘free will’ tend to be unable to define it. Just what the hell is free will supposed to be anyways?
We make choices, but we make them based on factors. These factors can be studied and choices can even be predicted. As far as I know, these factors (eg. hunger) reach a certain point, a certain quantity of chemicals builds up, an action potential is reached in a neuron or something, and we make the choice. One factor overpowers the other(s). So where does free will come into it, and how could you define it in a way that makes sense? A choice made without any factors? A random choice?
But on another note just because we can’t really control ourselves doesn’t mean that
a) we can’t reason stuff out, thus providing more information and more ‘good factors’ that will affect our choices later, and
b) we live in a predestined universe. Quantum theory, unless I’m wrong, states that chaos is built into the universe, so it’s not quite like clockwork after all.
and “To this wing of psychology, you are the same as an insect, just with a more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines which only appear to give rise to consciousness.”
Well, let’s see here. “To this wing of psychology,” while technically neutral, smacks a little of polemic – it seems you don’t agree with this “wing,” and you’re communicating this with your tone rather than with logical argument.
Secondly, we ARE the same as insects just with a more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines which only appear to give rise to consciousness. Unless you believe in magic and souls, which you don’t, you can’t actually argue with this statement. So why bother presenting it with such a distrust, so many qualifications? We “just” have a more complex nervous system, and we “only appear to” be self-conscious – are you taking issue with these (irrefutable) statements?
The thing is, the difference between our brains and insect brains is, relatively and subjectively speaking, huge. To say that we “just” have more complex brains suggests you’re not satisfied with the distinction; you’re hoping for something more? That our consciousness is irreducible and indivisible, arising from some mysterious spark rather than incrementally more complicated brains along a geological timescale?
I recall reading about another explanation of diets falling apart spectacularly after breaking them slightly. Those explanations were based on “cognitive dissonance”. If I recall correctly, the upshot was that by breaking your diet even slightly, you are establishing (via actions) that you are not on a diet, or a failure at dieting. Torn between a conscious belief (“I’m on a diet”) and an action you have performed (“Apparently not”), your subconscious will choose the action and basically declare the diet over. I would assume there’s more than a little of both cognitive dissonance and extinction burst in it, and would be interested in hearing our esteemed host’s take on this.
Regarding the specifics of the diet example, there are physiological factors in play; typically “diet” food high in carbohydrates elicit an insulin response, in turn eventually creating more hunger, and the lack of fat in a typical “diet” tends to not truly satisfy. We desire high fat because it is good for us, unfortunately our society has replaced a standard part of the diet we evolved to eat “fat” with a macronutrient that we didn’t evolve to eat (in large, refined quantities) ie carbohydrates.
Studies have shown that a person can be satiated on a diet of 800 calories of fat + protein, but adding an extra 400 calories of carbohydrates to the same diet (so, and extra 50% calories, theoretically more satisfying/filling) will cause hunger.
The reasons typical diets fail is because they require the dieter to basically be in a constant state of hunger, a truly undesirable state, it’s no wonder diets that lower fat do this. A low-carbohydrate diet on the other hand will satisfy the hunger of a dieter, and the resultant lack of insulin will also enable weight loss a lot easier too!
I wonder if the author ‘freely chose’ to write this article? Or was it conditioning that made him do it?
Conditioning, I’m sure. ;)
Hi, David,
Nice blog, nice writing. Am pleased to have you commenting on topics such as food addiction and compulsive eating. I admire your obvious facility both with language and with thought.
However, IMHO, you don’t understand food addiction. It’s OK; this puts you in the mainstream.
Becoming my own Supernanny, or whatever, wasn’t going to work for me. I banged my head against the fix-yourself wall for — ”THIS time I understand what I need and have what it takes — and still got to be 365 pounds. Then I began conceding I could only surrender my way to freedom, and now I’ve been in a normal-sized body for almost 20 years — and that describes only the physical part of the transformation I’ve enjoyed.
I wrote a longer response on my own blog, at michaelprager.com. Please come take a look, if you’re interested.
MP
@Michael Prager – Thanks for the comment. I’m not attempting to explain food addiction with this post, and I hope I’ve made the case that dieting and food addiction, binge eating and all other eating disorders are complex beasts. I am only taking a tiny aspect of those subjects to help explain another phenomenon.
Hey is that Ed Begley Jr. playing the part of Skinner?
Determinism doesn’t imply that free will doesn’t exist. Just that you don’t understand what “free will” is.
So again I’ll ask… what’s your definition of “free will”? What’s the difference between having it and not having it?
Hello, I have been reading this site for a while and find it very interesting. I find this topic relevant as I have been reading a book on explainatory styles and learned optimism. The books title is “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman. He claims that (please forgive me if I do not express his correctly, I am reading the book in casual interest) that conditional theory is not fully correct through his experiments of “learned helplessness”. His theory is that if an action is out of control of the object, then the object will not react after a while, even if there eventually leads to a means to do so. This concludes that it is not only conditions that impose action, but rational thought as well. (Please read his work or the book for a better explaination)
I just wants to know your thoughts of his work and an optimistic explainatory style with respect to this post. Thanks, and always a great read.
@Anish – Concerning learned helplessness and conditioning, I always fall back to evolutionary psychology and the survival advantages of whatever phenomenon we are exploring. I’ll do a future post on positive psychology like Seligman writes about.
@Eric – Seeing as the debate over free will is as old as civilization, I doubt my answer will add much to the discourse. I am not so smart.
There are days when I believe it exists, and days when I do not.
Sitting here typing, I can’t choose to fly, or to evaporate into a gas, or to live forever. I am constrained like a prisoner in a cell to a gigantic, yet finite, number of choices.
If I were to fall from a building, I would enter yet another set of possible actions. I could tuck into a ball, or scream, or spread my arms and legs, or close my eyes. The set of possible actions is still enormous, but far more constrained than if I were back in my chair typing.
A rock, on the other hand, falling from the same building can’t choose anything. It must yield to a mathematically predictable outcome.
The problem is, my body and brain are both a collection of trillions of objects which separately have as much free will as the rock does.
Is there something special about the brain and the consciousness it produces which allows us the freedom to choose our actions within their constraints?
If we could build a computer so sophisticated it could account for every interaction of every atom and molecule in my body with all the other atoms and molecules in my environment going back to the beginning of time, would it be able to flawlessly predict my behavior? Could it predict my future thoughts?
Would the randomness of the quantum world prevent such prediction? If so, does that matter? Do my actions then become one part predictable macro-level physics and one part unpredictable quantum probability?
I don’t know.
I see free will as the ability to choose to do what I wish within the constraints of the system binding me, but if those actions could be flawlessly predicted it feels somehow…less than free.
Your intro smacks of fake humility. There was a debate for a long time about where lightning came from, that doesn’t mean we can’t answer that question now.
Free will is a difficult concept, but primarily because most questions asked about it are wrong questions. Asking “Do we have free will?” starts out by confusing someone into thinking that free will is a characteristic that some things have and some don’t, leading to dichotomies like the rock/brain one you stated.
Here’s one question that you need to answer to start dissolving (not answering) the question of free will: what testable consequences would there be if you “had” free will, vs. if you didn’t and were completely deterministic? What differences in reality would you see?
Why does this even matter? It’s almost a rhetorical question, like the chicken or the egg scenario.
Healthy debate is wonderful, but there isn’t one answer to is there Free-Will. It’s almost a perspective on knowledge we currently hold, and it also depends on how you define the concept of Free Will. I’m not aware if there is a official definition or standard.
Mostly, things only have the power over that you give them or are unaware that you are giving them.
David underscores this from Skinner:
“My book is an effort to demonstrate how things go bad when you make a fetish out of individual freedom and dignity. If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.”
***************************************************
After a lecture in Denver an audience member once asked William F. Buckley to name the person whose philosophy was most at odds with his own.
Most would have expected to hear Stalin or Castro or Chomsky.
“B.F. Skinner,” Buckley answered instantly — the psychologist who argued that notions of freedom and human dignity were anachronisms in a scientific age.
It would seem, and indeed, can be endlessly argued, how one comes down on these two opposing views of human behavior will predict how successful he or she will be in negotiating life’s never-ending obstacles.
Personal responsibility or victim of human nature?
Skinner’s scientific realism or Buckley’s theological superstition? YOU DECIDE!!!
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
Love reading your articles David!
Found a typo in the line where it says “scolding torrent”, which should be scalding i think?
@Leo Peter – Thanks, I’ll repair it.
Although “scolding torrent” possesses a kind of poetic beauty, don’t you think?
The question of free will is indeed quite intriguing. Like Eric said, we might be asking the wrong questions. So should we be content with this statement? Or should we try to find out the right questions, and subsequently their answers, even at the risk of being wrong (at least initially)! … Supporters of the first viewpoint please pardon me, because I’ll take the second option here.
There are some arguments that I have devised to go with the above statement. If everything is predestined (i.e., it’s a deterministic world), then that means that “whatever” anybody does, what has to happen is not going to change even in the slightest details.
Before we proceed further, let’s clear up a few things. The approach we are going to take here is that there are only two choices that we have here:
1. Either the world is completely deterministic or
2. It’s non-deterministic.
This is so because there’s no such thing as partial determinism. Even a trace amount of non-determinism will make the whole system non-deterministic. So if we can prove the existence of even one such instance that is non-deterministic, we can conclude that the whole system is non-deterministic.
Another approach that many people (especially religious people) prefer, is that certain things (e.g., small details) may be non-deterministic but the other things (e.g., the events on the whole) are deterministic. It means that we may have freedom to choose within a boundary. It may change a few things, but the overall picture is not going to change.
More compelling reasons for the above classification can be understood by closely looking at the way we are going to define determinism. Related to Chaos Theory there is a famous concept called “the butterfly effect”. It propounds that even a small change can cause a major upheaval in the overall scheme of things. We see in our course of life that seemingly small decisions and events can cause a sea change in our lives. So if non-determinism is involved in a system even in very small ways, it has the capability to influence big events (the final state of the world). Hence as per our earlier arguments if we can show the existence of even one case of pure non-determinism, then we have to consider the entire world as non-deterministic.
But if something is deterministic, then there may exist a way of knowing it! So if we know it (or somehow find out), which is theoretically possible in a deterministic world (the reason it’s called deterministic!), we may also be in a position to change it. Because if we have prior knowledge about something is going to happen (e.g., what we are going to eat at a give point of time) we may intentionally decide to change details, and may also succeed. And if we really succeed in our endeavour then the world will no longer remain deterministic.
This is a paradox. Hence if the above logic is correct then our world can’t be deterministic!
@Andy – Thanks for the comment. This is always a fun topic to jump into and tumble around with. The limits of our language and logic probably make it such a devious subject, and I think that’s part of why it endures.
@Andy – no paradox, just a little too much Back To The Future.
You’re mistake is in treating your brain as if it’s not part of the deterministic universe for which you’re calculating future states. In order to have all information necessary to perform a calculation which would tell you something about the future, you would have to know future states of your brain. That means the future state of your brain (the one where it has the information about the event in the future) has already been accounted for in the calculation.
I’m not thinking of brain, as separate from everything else. In fact that’s the whole point! When you do not consider your brain as made of something different, things become very interesting. If it’s all deterministic, then your thought processes are so too!
Also, this past and future, before and after, origin and end, are all concepts very much dependent on the existence of the “flow of time”. If there’s no flow of time, these concepts lose their meanings. There have to be some concepts which are more fundamental that that! Also the physics has over the years has revealed that ‘time’ is not such an absolute entity as has been cultivated into out way of thinking! So if we want to understand things in real deep, we have break our logic away from this constrained way of thinking. It’s extremely difficult to accept this statement:
“It is possible that there is something that doesn’t have an origin, or an end”
Also if you try to study the properties of a place where time doesn’t exist, or even space doesn’t exist, our brain recoils from it! It’s programmed for survival, and life as we know, surely can’t exist in such a place. So it refuses to consider such a notion possible, and this instinct is far too strong.
Many people will also give the reason for this inability through the following statement:
“Our brain can’t imagine something that it hasn’t already perceived. Or in other words it just like a hard disk, where you can only perform two operations – fetch and process.”
But whatever it is, there’s some food for thought! … :)
I like this discussion of the extinction burst. Conditioning is real, but you are right to point out that most psychologists do not believe that “conditioning [is] the root of all behavior.” People are a little harder than that.
I wouldn’t necessarily think that habits form “because people are not smart.” Part of the reason (PART of the reason) the smartest computer in the world can’t make simple decisions humans make in a split second has to do with our sophisticated cognitive shortcuts — like habit. We only really notice them when they go wrong — we don’t pay attention when they go right. Imagine if every day you had to run a cost-benefit analysis on brushing your teeth. Some people with frontal lobe damage have that problem. They aren’t very functional.
Bear in mind also that eating is not your best example of a behavior controlled by habit. Habits play in, of course, but the bigger problem is the evolutionary mechanisms that fight your efforts to get back to a healthy weight. Those mechanisms evolved in a condition of food scarcity, and in a condition of food abundance they are maladaptive. They are very powerful. That binge is being promote not just by your conditioning, but by spikes in hunger hormones triggered by weight loss.
@Robert – Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
@Andy
I don’t see how any of that was related to any of the discussion above. Timeless causality is an important concept, but not exactly new material for anyone who’s studied causality or decision making in general.
Do you agree that what you called a paradox actually was not one?
@Eric
Unfortunately I never “studied” any of the concepts that you mentioned. But now that you have brought it to my attention, I’ll try to look it up. I don’t have much knowledge about the various terms and definitions coined by past philosophers. Most of the stuff mentioned here are my own ideas that stem from my study of physics (both relativistic and quantum) and Computer Science (Algorithmic complexities, AI and Neural Networks).
But although you claim to have quite a fair bit of understanding on these topics, you seem reluctant to share it! Most of your comments include observations about how we are making mistakes or repeating the same old stuff or talking irrelevant things!! … Let’s have some of your own opinions for a change.
@Eric
And yes! You are correct about ur last observation. I agree that the paradox may not actually be a paradox. In fact I detected a logical flaw in my reasoning there. … Another thing, I hope u are not offended by my last comment! … I am sincerely willing to learn something from you, if I can!
The reason I haven’t said much of my own opinions is that free will, as far as hard problems go, is one of the easier ones. It’s not easy by any means, but actually trying to figure it out by oneself can be a very useful learning experience. The best description of the free will problem (and solution) I’ve seen comes from here: LessWrong. When I first saw it a few years ago, I took the time to work through it, and while I didn’t get all of the details correct, I got a few things right and learned a lot in the process.
I strongly, strongly, strongly recommend not reading the solution until you’ve read all of the prerequisite posts and made a serious attempt at figuring it out.
If you stop feeding the cat a lot more then his behavior will become extinct.
Is anybody else as amused by Eric’s zealotry as I am, given the subject matter?
Plus, we all know lightning comes from Odin’s furrowed eyebrows rubbing together and producing a discharge, just like we all know which Zen Master is was who ran around painting all the grass in the world green. Such matters need no longer be discussed in polite society.
Wow. Powerful. You may have just added ten years to my life.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!
I thought this was so interesting, I discussed it on my blog here: http://losingweightafter45isabitch.blogspot.com/
Interesting… so the habit of running a mile everyday to get my happy boost was formed by positive reinforcement of feeling good.
Must be why I like running in the morn. Feels good the rest of the day.
What a bunch of bullshit. Skinner, Pavlov, and the rest of the operant conditoning bozoids have done the world a great disservice. McRaney, your article only helps to continue the myth that man has no choice between stimulus and response. Do you really think lasting change will come through some short term self-reward program just to get through an ‘extinction burst’? Do you really think that people who have successfully lost weight and kept if off for good are doing it for some external reward as opposed to some intrinsic need?
The difference between man and animal is that man has the ability to reason; we can choose our response. We are not rats, we’re not cats, we’re not dogs, and we’re not mentally handicapped. Yet, if you look at the bozoids who generated and/or built upon this school of psychology, their theories are all based on studies of just those groupings. Salivating dogs, rats running after their piece cheese, and mentally handicapped children responding to a reinforcement program.
C’mon people! If you believe this tripe, you’ll be putting it back on as soon as your reward program comes to an end.
I’m sure your baseless rants have been much more useful to the scientific community than Skinner’s research and countless experiments disproving pretty much everything you just said.
Louis, that argument didn’t hold a lot of water in Tennessee in 1925, much less in the here and now.
Anton, You’re one of those last-word kinda guys, aren’t you? Go ahead.. have at it and give yourself a piece of cheese.
i think louis has been conditioned to disagree and argue because louis gets rewarded with a power trip.
Aw, heck. We’re all just house apes fighting for dominance over intellectual territory.
Louis,
“Diets fail for many reasons, much of them associated with your body trying to survive in a situation where surviving starvation is much less of an issue.
To give up overeating, or smoking, or gambling, or “World of Warcraft,” or any bad habit which was formed through conditioning, you must be prepared to weather the secret weapon of your unconscious – the extinction burst.”
See, he isn’t even hinting that lasting change will come through some short term self-reward program just to get through an ‘extinction burst’. He claims that such a thing is necessary but he goes out of his way to make the point that it is not sufficient by any means.
Our capacity for reason doesn’t magically vanish what Carl Sagan called our “dangerous evolutionary baggage”. Our wonderful capacity for reason and our tremendous intellect allow us to recognize our evolved responses and use them to our own purpose instead of being controlled by them.
Watch this. Please.
HAHAHA CARL SAGAN
OH WOW
Here’s my attempt at defining Free will:
Free will is the opposite of doing what you are told. Free will is doing the hard things because you know – for whatever reason – that you must do something other than what is comfortable or natural to you.
The dieting person is exercising her free will, and it’s only natural that exercising one’s free will should be difficult.
If you are told by your boss to fire a subordinate for unjust reasons – you can take the easy route and fire him… OR you can refuse to fire him and deal with the consequences of doing the right thing.
Free will is the most obvious when a person fights against his own conditioning, or puts himself in danger for the sake of others – but free will is not mutually exclusive to operant conditioning either.
The blogger here blogs because he receives a reward (be it in cash or popularity). People read his posts and comments on them. I’m commenting because I want my voice heard on a topic that questions the existence of something that I hold dear (personal freedom) – and I like to be right and agreed with.
We are doing something that is natural – and we should not have to think every time “if I post this, I will have many comments” or “if I eat this, I will be full”. It’s like walking – all because we don’t think “lift left foot, set right foot, lift right foot, set left foot” when we walk does not mean we aren’t in control of our destination or fate.
In fact, the ability to automate our simple tasks allows us to focus more on our goals.
Free will is a murky topic for sure, but it can be defined and defended if you sit down and think about it. If we did not have freedom of will, then we would probably not try to defend it at all. After all, what use does a robot have of such a thing?
>Free will is the opposite of doing what you are told.
I’m afraid that’s called psychological reactance my dear.
It’s how reverse psychology works.
Complete bullshit.
Haha funny Eleris.
I will be back for Cata yep. I’m struggling to stay away this long but, I will.
Brilliant article. Helped me much more than any ‘diet advice’ I’ve ever read. And I mean that.
the video and artivle reminds me of a book I read in high school
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Stairs_(William_Sleator_novel)
Basically a machine would give some kids meat when the preformed actions. everytime they had to make more complex actions and were conditioned to dance to a red light.
So THAT’S where the term “red light district” comes from!
Very encouraging to read actually. It doesn’t make the task of breaking old habits any easier, but it helps to know what I’m up against.
At last! Someone who understands! Tahkns for posting!
Being a dumbass and all, this type of material tickles my fancy.
Useful article, particularly this line:
‘Look for alternative rewards and positive reinforcement. Set goals, and when you achieve them, shower yourself with garlands of your choosing.’
Does anyone (author, readers, commenters) have suggestions as to ‘alternative rewards and positive reinforcements’ that aren’t in themselves bad habits (vices)? I’m trying to lose weight, but what do I reward myself with for a healthy day of eating without resorting to a cigarette, dessert or an alcoholic drink (i.e. something just as bad for me)? I’m drawing a blank.
Nope, you just discovered a fatal flaw in his advice.
Actually, the only way to quit an addiction is to understand exactly why you should. Until you do, you will NOT be able to bring the full power of your reasoning ability to bear against the bad habits that you have unwittingly. formed over the years.
Thank you, thank you! Excellent and fascinating article!
“Your brain didn’t evolve in an environment where there was an abundance of food, so whenever you find a high-calorie, high fat, high sodium source, your natural inclination is to eat a lot of it and then go back to it over and over again.”
was this line not taken word for word from Bill Bryson’s” The History of Just About Everything”?
It would not surprise me if it was, because it is such a badly informed mainstream myth.
Really great article and all the more pertinent at the moment just before it’s time for the ‘New Year resolutions’ to be made!
Very interesting. Great article.
On the subject of free will – it doesn’t really matter, does it? People make conscious decisions based on past experiences, their desires, etc. They also make more unconscious decisions based on things like condition and extinction bursts. People are generally predictable. If you knew every aspect of their conscious and subconscious – EVERY aspect down, their neural mapping or whatever – you could maybe predict their actions. With a big computer.
But for practical, everyday reasoning – we have free will.
This is like the question of ‘Why does it all matter?’ That question doesn’t really matter. You choose why and how it matters.
…anyways. Nice blog man!
If it doesn’t matter then why are you talking about it?
I myself have thought about free will in a context of the mind being a clockwork defined by physics and chemistry. I thought for a time: how can free will exist, when adamant laws govern our mind’s behavior?
The answer is simple: The Chaos Theory.
No. Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics, not a philosophical theory.
Unfortunately, one need not acquire clothes to go get some chicken nuggets. Using language also seems to be somewhat optional.
Why “unfortunately”? Surely it is a GOOD thing?
So i find it vary cool (for lack of a better word) that i was turned to this site by the writer R. Scott Baker. If you have read his books in the Prince of Nothing series this subject is almost constantly apparent. So the question is, do we simply continue to live by the way we are conditioned, or is their some better way to exist, some other means to decide our actions, other than the ones that naturally seem to keep us alive .
I guess my point is, where do we go from here. What other way of choosing actions could be progressive to our condition
var·y
verb /ˈve(ə)rē/
varied, past participle; varied, past tense; varies, 3rd person singular present; varying, present participle
Differ in size, amount, degree, or nature from something else of the same general class
- the properties vary in price
- varying degrees of success
cool
verb /ko͞ol/
cooled, past participle; cooled, past tense; cooling, present participle; cools, 3rd person singular present
Become or cause to become less hot
- we dived into the river to cool off
- his feelings for her took a long time to cool
- cool the pastry for five minutes
their
determiner (possessive) /T͟He(ə)r/
their, plural
Belonging to or associated with the people or things previously mentioned or easily identified
- her taunts had lost their power to touch him
Belonging to or associated with a person of unspecified sex
- she heard someone blow their nose loudly
Used in titles
- a double portrait of Their Majesties
pro·gres·sive
noun /prəˈgresiv/
progressives, plural
A person advocating or implementing social reform or new, liberal ideas
A progressive tense or aspect
- the present progressive
Each of a set of proofs of color work, showing all the colors separately and the cumulative effect of overprinting them
Pseudoscientific bullshit.
This is the name of a song on the new Primus Album, fyi.
Hi and sorry for the very late comment.
About that paragraph you cite:
“The worst thing you could ever do is give in to a temper tantrum. This goes for adults too, because if you spend enough time observing other people you will notice that people who are used to getting their way will start a temper tantrum immediately after you have refused their request. If you patiently restate your position and stay calm you will see the person eventually give up. Depending upon how long he carries on will tell you how other people have responded to the person in the past. If he has been rewarded for having a fit often enough the extinction burst will be spectacular, enjoy! If it’s short lived, it will be over as quick as it started and you can feel good that you haven’t encouraged it. The best way to eliminate a tantrum is to not give in, wait out the extinction burst (walking away works wonders) and reinforce the absence of the tantrum with your attention as soon as the person stops.”
I have a question/comment.
This paragraph seems to make sense with the day-to-day experience dealing with children (and adults) having tantrums. However, how should people react when the tantrum thrower is aggressive/abusive and walking away or waiting out becomes either impossible or dangerous?