B.F. Skinner and Thinking Meat (Reposted)

[First posted March 31, 2005. Unfortunately the principal link is no longer active, but I grabbed enough of the content to make the post interesting.]

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a couple of young people and made reference to a Skinner box. Since these were college graduates with undergraduate degrees in a liberal arts area, I mistakenly assumed that they had been exposed to Skinner's work. Not everyone has a Psych 201 lab class to study the behavior of laboroatory rats using a Skinner box, but surely the name has not disappeared altogether. Maybe so. These kids had never heard of either Skinner or a Skinner box. I never bothered to tell them about the man's utopian novel, Walden Two. I figured they would consider me quaint.

Abbas Raza directs us to a short piece by David Barash in The Chronicle with a few comments remembering Skinner. I hope not to insult anyone, but if the reader is not familiar with B.F. Skinner, there is a serious gap in your education and you owe it to yourself to do a bit of homework. This little snip will not do the trick, because there is more than you think to the greater issue of human behavior.

It was Skinner who identified, more clearly than anyone before -- or after -- the key stumbling block for those of us trying to see ourselves accurately; namely, a reluctance to countenance that human actions are caused, because the more causation, the less credit. "We recognize a person's dignity or worth," writes Skinner, "when we give him credit for what he has done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior. If we do not know why a person acts as he does, we attribute his behavior to him. We try to gain additional credit for ourselves by concealing the reasons why we behave in given ways or by claiming to have acted for less powerful reasons." Ironically, there is something flattering and legitimizing in actions or thoughts that spring unbidden from our "self" -- whatever that may be -- and that aren't otherwise explicable. By the same token, the more our actions are caused, the less are we credited for them.

The article ends with this wonderful quote...

In a 1991 science-fiction story by Terry Bisson, we listen in on a conversation between the robotic commander of an interplanetary expedition and his equally electronic leader, reporting with astonishment that the human inhabitants of Earth are "made out of meat":

"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. ... "
"That's impossible. ... How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector, and they're made out of meat." ...
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. ... "
"Nope, we thought of that, since they do have meat heads. ... But ... they're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat?"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Dreaming meat! The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"