gold rat heart jewel

Skinner, automatons, free will

There is Pavlov's classical conditioning, thenthere is Skinner's operant condition.

In this course, as a rat, you will learn to press levers and follow signals and identify symbols on small cardboard squares. You will be rewarded with food and punished with hunger and electric shocks as may be deemed necessary.
As a result of this course you will become a master-lever-operator-light-reader

Operant conditioning
levers and buttons you'll operate
with rewards and punishments
your actions we'll moderate
soon you'll learn to do
what we want you to do
and you'll never want anything else again

Skinner claimed that we humans do things only because we have been conditioned to behave as we do in previous situations. Conditioning is at the level of dopamine secretion, and not at the level of consciousness. Skinner's conclusion was that humans do not have free will, but only have conditioned responses.


I think, what the "Buddha's Brain" people say is that :
behaviours & thinking learned through punishments in operant conditioning are difficult to lose and man suffers much by carrying them around.

new stuff come to light :
kahneman talk on experience vs memory
There is an 'experiencing self' and a 'remembering self'....
hmmm... WAAAOOW !!!