Re: Representationalism rescues reinforcement learning


"J.A. Legris" <jalegris@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1179971232.741884.221330@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
So here's the thing: in the real world, an organism that learns by
trial, error and (yawn) reinforcement, is likely to get eaten before
it is lucky enough to stumble on the appropriate response.



No, if a feature of the world is stable enough, the animal has behavior that
is elicited. Just because some responses are acquired through conditioning
(you imply operant conditioning, but the issue is largely the same for
Pavlovian conditioning) does not mean, say, escaping predators is. Further,
as I have repeatedly pointed out to you, operant conditioning can be
virtually instantaneous, as Skinner demonstrated in 1938. We see this in
operation (as I have explained to you before) in so-called imprinting.
Little could be as important (life and death) for a duckling or gosling than
following mom, yet it has been DEMONSTRATED that the behavior is due to
operant conditioning. What the birds inherit is the capacity for
reducing-the-distance-between-itself-and-the-first-moving-object-seen-of-appropriate-size
to be a reinforcer. If a device is constructed such that the object moves
away more rapidly when approached, but moves closer when the bird moves the
other way, it learns to move the other way instead of approaching. If
pecking a key causes the object to move towards the bird, it learns to peck
the key. In the natural world, the usual consequence of moving towards an
object is that the distance between you and it is reduced and the behavior
of approaching is learned extremely rapidly. It is operant conditioning and
the birds don't die before they learn it.



But, it if
has a virtual environment in its head where it can test various
responses before committing to any, it has a leg up on the challenges
of existence, which appears to be just what we mammals have managed to
evolve - internal representations of the real world with little
homunculi going at it, and just possibly, another level or two of
homunculi contained therein (not so much for the good of the theory,
but just to irritate antirepresentationalists a little bit more). And
get this - it's TESTABLE!



Modern humans do, in fact, engage in behavior that could be called "testing
out the behavior" and it is part of the complicated behavior we call
"thinking." There is little reason to believe, it seems to me, that this is
a basic process in itself. We have to learn to observe our own behavior and
its effects on ourselves. I think, also, that there are serious limitations
to the circumstances in which this applies. Verbal behavior is probably one
area where it applies. We learn to say silently many things before we say
them publicly and we are well set up for this to be effective since our
"listener's repertoire" is the product of histories somewhat similar to
those we are talking to. What else it applies to is not clear to me. Say,
for example, that you must jump a chasm. You either jump or not, but upon
what does that depend? Even if one does imagine a leap and imagine a
distance covered and compare the imagined distance to the actual distance
etc., what is imagined cannot be independent from our observations of our
own leaps and the leaps of others'. But is that what actually goes on? And
even if it is, this does not mean that what happens in imagination is taking
place in a virtual world. In the case of testing out verbal responses before
they are emitted publicly, there is absolutely no reason to think that the
silent response is anything more than a less intense version of the public
response. It takes place in the world (and the organism/environment
interaction is part of the world - I say this for the benefit of Smart Joe),
and the effect of that verbal behavior on ourselves is the same as public
behavior (or very similar - since the response is a less-intense its effects
may be slightly different). I think that most of what we call "imagination"
is simply automatically reinforcing. We imagine others showing us
admiration, or we imagine the face of a lover, or the face of a dead friend.
I can sometimes figure out songs simply by "listening to them in my head" as
I sit at the piano - at least it plays a role. If the song is too difficult,
I engage in other behavior. I go fetch a CD player with a "rewind" function.
But either way, there is no reason to think that any of this takes place in
a virtual world; listening to a song is behavior, and that behavior can
occur even when there is no media. It can't occur, however, if our
music-listening behavior is currently being strongly controlled. Try
listening privately to a song while some other song is playing publicly.


--
Joe


Now that Smart Joe is here, you should probably either go by "Legris" or
"Dumb Joe."



.

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