Saturday, May 26, 2018

WORK, REWARD AND LEARNING

It is well known that in the process of learning, concepts of reward or reinforcement, and withdrawal of reward, or punishment play a crucial part.

The details of the process can be summarised.

Certain actions involving a certain pattern of neural connections produces for the subject a reward which satisfies him, and which induces a readiness to repeat the performance. Here one must carefully observe that the most important element in the process, the man who is conducting the learning experiment, is not in the foreground. But, for a full appreciation of the totality of the process of learning, he has to be pushed into the foreground.

Now, this man called the scientist offers the monkey a banana or stops an electric current, if the monkey succeeds in doing something - work a typewriter, or play the piano, or add two and two. (Obviously, if the whole object of the man, if we may call him thus, was merely to give a banana to the monkey or relieve it from pain of electric shock, simply because he loves the monkey, the whole exercise is useless. What new knowledge arises in such a mutual interaction between the man and the monkey is of another domain.)

What the monkey does in this business is useless for its existence - typing banging the piano and adding two plus two - left to itself without the kind tutorial of this very objective scientist. Therefore, the whole business in the objective science of learning-theories consists of a man who makes the monkey do some things that interest the man, things it would not normally do, using its love of bananas and fear of pain as the palpable intermediary goals for the monkey. The experimenter being an objective phantom does not need any rewards excepting the salary he gets for this business or the thunderous cheers he gets for his thesis from fellow phantoms. Such rewards are not at all stressed out of sheer modesty and scientific humility.

The least obvious aspect is that which happens to the nervous system of the monkey and its teacher. Since the monkey has not yet been taught how to do brain surgery and examine slides, the benevolent objective scientist cuts open the monkey’s brain to go to the roots of the learning process. The teacher, no doubt, is successful in learning the steps of man’s evolutionary descent into ape - its idle and destructive curiosity and its tendency to pull things out to expose the roots.

These, then, are the four cornerstones for the edifice of learning theory: Reward for the subject, reward for the objective scientist, and that which happens to the nervous system of the subject and that which happens to the nervous system of the scientist.

Let me examine the case further:

Just as basically a monkey wants a banana or avoid pain, so does a man, presumably, wants food and wants to avoid starvation. The social experimental situation is thus arranged. A rich man wants a chair. That is his reward. He cannot make a chair. So, he catches hold of a subject who can make a chair. This man and his friends so arrange affairs that the chair maker cannot get food which is his primary aim or reward and unless he produces a chair which is perfectly useless for himself. So far so good. Society organises itself so that everyone is made to produce rewards which he himself does not need in order to get the rewards he needs from the first lot.

Now, let us see what happens if the monkey can hoodwink his teacher, the reward-bestowing God and manages to snatch away a banana which is what it really needs. When the human being is the subject of the experiment the possibilities are quite interesting. Many human beings manage to directly snatch the banana without having to go through the beastly bother of making chairs and the learning process. The whole human society is completely arranged around the laws of learning so ably revealed by the objective scientists who need no reward. The man who is in the position to offer rewards is first of all in a position to withhold rewards, and is certainly not in need of any vulgar rewards. Only, he wants a chair for the sake of the chair, art for art's sake, food for food’s sake, sex for its own sake and objective science for its own sake.

Now, if you offer ten bananas for making a chair, and if the subject of learning experiment is able to get at the bananas more easily by making a hollow chair made of cardboard, or if he is more enterprising and can waylay his reward giver, mug him and take away forty bananas instead of the miserable ten, the name given to this very unscientific but extremely sensible biological activity is lawlessness, corruption etc., because it flouts the laws of learning laid down by the professors.

A few in this jungle come out of the trap of reward and are concerned with the drive of their inner urge to find out if they can train their nervous system to do without bananas, if they can get out of the terrible limitation which binds them perpetually to bananas and the laws of learning.

The Sufi speaks of two harvests which are the result of any work done by man: the external harvest, the yield, the grain produced which gives food, which also gives frustration and pleasure according to the yield, putting the whole of the man's compex being at the disposal of the vagaries of the wayward yield.



Statue of Nasreddīn Hodja in Bukhara. Faqscl, Wikimedia Commons
The other harvest is what happens to himself during the work - the patience he developed, the joy in putting his muscles to work, the joy he gave and got in looking after the trees and cattle and workers, and his own ascent into higher and higher and more and more harmonious expressions of behaviour he and his body are capable of. The second learning is the ascent of man to something higher than himself as he is, and his miserable dependence on numerous things for his comfort, where comfort is seen not as a state of being, but is seen as a sum of articles and objects.

One of the most important objectives of science and technology is to provide comforts to man. The immediate and ultimate object of these comforts is to prove that man's body is totally unnecessary. The degree of comfort is measured by the degree to which a man need not use his organs. A man has two legs. The first sign of civilisation is when he has found it unnecessary to have legs when he found it easier to apply the laws of learning and climbed on a horse or on other men's backs.

The logical end object of a comfort-offering science and technology is to abolish man, all men, excepting the objective scientists who will find a hole in Mars. This abolition of organic man can be achieved by subtle or gross means. The subtle means are to provide cars so that the legs may be found unnecessary, learning theories to show how you can make another man work for you; theories of human personality founded on scientific investigations to show that man is really an ape and it is better to stop there; the gross methods are by mass murder with bangs or hisses or completely noiseless lasers.

What the work does to you is the reward. The rest is biological theory propounded by objective science and made by self-declared robots who have left their humanity in the cupboard or bank vaults.

Real human inquiry begins with the subject himself, not as subject of this or that inquiry or operation.


***

Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape