B. F. Skinner Is a Strange Loop

If I had thought about it then I would have figured that, other than both being books written by American academic types, B. F. Skinner's Walden Two and Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop have little if anything in common. The former is a fiction novel about the application of behavioral science to create and maintain a utopian society; the latter is a non-fiction exploration of self-referentiality and consciousness. Okay, after writing the previous sentence I realize that both books are, in a way, about psychology, but that is not where this blog post is going.

Despite knowing that knowledge and wisdom having a unifying tendency, I was surprised when I read the following passage in I Am a Strange Loop.

Although I received from readers a good deal of positive feedback (if you'll excuse the term), I also received some extremely negative feedback concerning what certain readers considered sheer frivolity in an otherwise respectable journal. One of the most vehement objectors was a professor of education at the University of Delaware, who quoted the famous behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner on the topic of self-referring sentences:

Perhaps there is no harm in playing with sentences in this way or in analyzing the kinds of transformations which do or do not make sentences acceptable to the ordinary reader, but it is still a waste of time, particularly when the sentences thus generated could not have been emitted as verbal behavior. A classical example is a paradox, such as “This sentence is false”, which appears to be true if false and false if true. The important thing to consider is that no one could ever have emitted the sentence as verbal behavior. A sentence must be in existence before a speaker can say, “This sentence is false”, and the response itself will not serve, since it did not exist until it was emitted.

Douglas Hofstadter
I Am a Strange Loop

There it is, one of those strange coincidences we all come across in life, like when you learn a new word and its definition and then hear that word used several times during the next few days; I finish a book written by B. F. Skinner and then read about him in the next one I start.

What the education professor quoted B. F. Skinner on was Hofstadter's monthly column Metamagical Themas in the magazine Scientific American and its playful exposition of self-referential sentences, of which I quote a few examples below (because I find them deliciously funny and can't resist passing them on to others).

If the meanings of “true” and “false” were switched, this sentence wouldn't be false.

This analogy is like lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps.

If wishes were horses, the antecedent clause in this conditional sentence would be true.

If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.

Laura and I read Walden Two together as part of our book-club-for-two. We gave each other short reading assignments and then discussed the reading after a few days, so we ended up having a good conversation about the book as we read it. During those conversations, we argued, among other points, whether Skinner wrote himself as the character Frasier, who espoused the theoretical ideas underlying the utopia and promoted the society's practical properties, or else wrote himself as the character Castle, a philosophy professor visiting the society and who argued that the utopia necessitated grave imperfections that, even if invisible to a visitor such as himself, made the utopia in reality a dystopia. At first I thought Skinner wrote himself as Castle, probably as a way of showing the potential for excess within his behavioral science, and Laura argued that Skinner wrote himself as Frasier.

Probably the reason I thought Skinner wrote himself as Castle was that Castle's point was agreeable to me; it seemed obvious to me that Walden Two was a dystopia that happened to have a great, though misleading, visitor's tour. Though, Castle's argument was not my argument. Sadly, my argument was never brought up in the book, and so I could only imagine how Frasier would have responded to my questions. (And after reading Skinner's quote above, I can imagine Frasier's response only too well, unfortunately, but I'm getting ahead of myself.)

My argument was that Walden Two could not be a utopia, or at least could not remain a utopia indefinitely, because all human societies are necessarily self-governing (unless we're dealing with a science-fiction earth presided over by alien overlords, such as in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End) and a self-governing system, which is to say a self-referential system, is necessarily riddled with limitations in its expressive power. In mathematics this limitation is formalized in Gödel's incompleteness theorems. In computation it's formalized in Turing machines and the halting problem.

More to the point, the problem with a behavioral-science-equipped utopia is this: the society's members are conditioned to behave “correctly” in order to make for a better society, but what conditions the conditioners? What makes the conditioners condition “correctly”? It's a age-old problem in political theory and ethics: who watches the watchers?—who polices the police?—who spies on the spies?

The idea with behavioral conditioning is that individuals are conditioned to behave in ways that promote the best interests of all individuals within the community. In theory this is possible, though the details of its implementation are far beyond our current level of understanding, but consider what guarantees are in place to ensure such perfection. To guarantee perfection (or as close to perfection as possible) then the conditioning process itself must be without flaw, but what keeps the conditioning process flawless? Clearly the conditioners themselves must be subject to a sort of meta-conditioning that keeps the conditioning in line. But what keeps the meta-conditioners in line? There must exist meta-meta-conditioning for the meta-conditioners. And meta-meta-meta-conditioning for the meta-meta-conditioners. And meta-meta-meta-meta-conditioning and so on.

It's an inescapable problem though there might be a solution. It might be that the conditioning process could hit upon a pattern that happens to spit out perfect conditioners, who themselves will spit out other perfect conditioners, and so on indefinitely. But it's not obvious that that would always be the case, and furthermore, I suspect it cannot be true in the general case just as it's formally proved to be impossible to write a computer program that can debug all other computer programs in the general case, due to the same self-referentiality loophole. In reality, utopian behavioral conditioning would have to be highly dynamic in order to adjust for environmental changes that would require on-the-fly behavior changes in society members, such as with resource abundances and resource scarcities, and it seems plausible that it's just a matter of time before the conditioning process happens to become corrupted and begins to spit out non-perfect members who go on to wreck the nice little utopia.

That was my argument when reading Walden Two, and I wanted badly for Frasier to address the question of by what guarantee were the conditioners kept in-line, but alas, Frasier avoided the pointed and reduced his argument to the tired and refutable point that bad things happen because bad people are in charge and that Walden Two is different because there good people are in charge.

After finishing Walden Two I could no longer defend the point that Skinner wrote himself as Castle. It seemed too much like Skinner really did believe that behavioral science could lead to a wholly new kind of better society, and this quote of his in I Am a Strange Loop is further evidence. And so, in light of those old questions—who watches the watchers?—who polices the police?—who spies on the spies?—and empowered with the hope of his new, potent force of behavioral science in the wake of World War II's destruction, is it any wonder that B. F. Skinner would rail against the “waste of time” that is self-referentiality?