BF Skinner’s Positive Reinforcement Community
We have recently noticed a strong fit between our hopeful project on machine-assisted conversation, including its introduction into social media, and the behavioral principles articulated in BF Skinner’s utopian Walden Two (1948). We propose to outline this fit.
Currently there exists no overarching theory of natural language conversation, of the dynamic binding agent that maintains society. Science has never attempted the theory nor has political economy felt any need to demand it. These notable facts about human self-understanding in the 21st century, which suddenly finds itself under pressure to rework its world order in a substantial way, would seem to suggest a live possibility for scientific and, to an extent, if enough seems promising, even social revolution. The Copernican Revolution, if slow to materialize, delivered such a possibility to 16th and 17th century Europe, principally by altering cosmological perception and political authority; the Russian Revolution, which stemmed from humanitarian impulses, appeared to many at the time also to contain another because it likewise altered perception and authority.
Skinner’s Walden Two is premised on a strong distinction between competitive society and cooperative society, with the idea that the latter, if constructed around experimentalism, can be developed unproblematically and in unlimited degree. Unlimited development is also implicit in the political economy of libertarian competition, and many have been impatient to subscribe to it, but unpleasant problems appear in its framework more or less by design. Society without problems, by way of contrast, is a very different idea.
Consciousness, heretofore merely the external province of religion, of literature and art, of occult practice and of drug use and mental illness, has recently been introduced as a scientific target, and its ground-level, mechanical etiology seems now to be in range of Skinnerian methods, particularly of those being used in machine learning. It seems plausible to us that the causes of consciousness are almost entirely behavioral, which is to say conversational. We think such introduction, if its stages can be pre-solved to line up fully with their causal potentials, has substantial institutional implications. The true object of the science of consciousness will inevitably be understood as the general and beneficent control of social interaction.
The development given to the 21st century which Skinner could not anticipate was physics. We seem likely soon to have algorithms, running on computational qubit machines, which will have enough power to solve optimization problems like this one:
QA1.0: In this shopping mall with five thousand visitors over the next hour, identify a human pair (call them Alice and Bob), signal a compatibility to each of them (by way of a smartphone) and give Alice a sentence to perform for Bob. If Alice and Bob have pre-allowed it, record and analyze the ensuing conversation to assess its spontaneity and its agreeableness for application, perhaps by surprise, to some future human conversation. Such use of intermittent reinforcement will be effective in the popularity of the smartphone app.
We think such a conversation engine, developed as a very large mutual assistance game, can be developed into a beneficial and generally superior form of social media, impinging institutional structures, conversational behavior and consciousness in general. We propose organizing a few people willing and able to start thinking about this undertaking, including philosophical principles, analysis of society, scientific feasibility and the use of capital.
A few words on the presumed cosmic dimension of consciousness, the final target of this medium, its thanatological or necromantic aspect in particular. On the principle of parsimony, we should expect to find extensions of consciousness, as a physical quantity of some sort, both prior to terrestrial existence and after its apparent dissolution. Unless consciousness itself is a nothing, it is unthinkable as coming from and ending up as nothing. Thus the most intriguing outcome would be for our behavioral sciences to discover higher worlds available to society to discover, to organize and to populate, much as it has done with the American continent. Already it seems clear there is substance to the theory of higher cosmic worlds. Tibetan lamas appear to visit them regularly and occidental Cabalists likewise have long been familiar with them. Modern thaumaturgy, we suggest, will start with algorithmic conversation. When two or more find themselves with a magnetic Third or Fifth among them, and when physiological measurements confirm the real-time presence of the wonder, when interpersonal interferometry becomes interesting and useful as a way to calibrate the twenty-three pairs of sympathetic ganglia and when magical chains dominate personal spaces we seem likely to find ourselves at the beginning of cosmic exploration of a new, sustainable and very wonderful sort.
