Voluntary Behavior, Conscious Thoughts

Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky made the connection more explicit; he found that children begin by speaking their stream of consciousness aloud to inform other people, and eventually learn to suppress that stream into nonvocal (subvocal?) thought.

That doesn't sound right. I've heard mentions of children who only start speaking at a late age, but when they do, they skip right to speaking in fully-formed sentences. I'm not sure whether I understand correctly what you're saying here.

voluntary behavior is behavior subject to operant conditioning, and involuntary behavior is everything else.

Hm, I thought operant conditioning, by definition, worked on voluntary behavior, and classical conditioning worked on involuntary behavior. (This would make Skinner's definition of voluntary behavior circular.) I need a new definition of operant conditioning.

Perhaps operant conditioning should be defined as conditioning that presents reward or punishment stimuli in response to behavior, and classical conditioning should be defined as conditioning that presents stimuli independent of behavior.

I have several issues with the ideas you present here. Of course, it's likely that it's just another communication error given our last conversation..

Here "involuntary" needs to be distinguished from "hard-to-resist". Most people do not define smoking as an involuntary behavior, because, although people may smoke even when they wish they wouldn't, they have the feeling that they could have chosen not to smoke, they just didn't.

For smoking, sure. I have a habit of twirling my hair which can be damn annoying and sometimes hard to resist. I can choose to keep myself from doing it by paying attention to what my hands are doing and forcing it to stop. If I'm concentrating on other things, it happens without me realizing it. It seems out of touch with the normal meaning of the word "voluntary" to include this.

But when our masked gunman tells me to increase my body temperature by two degrees or he'll shoot, he is out of luck.

Well, I just tried it. I got 0.6 degrees increase. If I were to put blankets on like feverish people normally do, I'm sure I could do better. If there was a real gunman, I'd start doing squat jumps. Marathon runners can get their core up to 105.

Does that mean that the process of regulating core temp both is and is not "voluntary", depending on the size of the temperature change?

If you're not willing to do the work of trying to model the hierarchical structure of the brain and the interconnections, what can this theory say about why my locus of voluntary control is bigger than it used to be? Can your black box theory advise people on how to increase their locus of control? What can you even use it for?

But an explanation in the spirit of reinforcement learning would have to start by insisting on treating thoughts and emotions as effects rather than causes. Instead of explaining my choice of restaurant by saying I thought about it and decided McDonalds was best, it would be more accurate to say that previous experiences with McDonalds caused both the thought "I should go to McDonalds" and the behavior of going to McDonalds.

What's the evolutionary purpose of thoughts if they don't do anything? Where do thoughts like "I just thought about going to McDonalds" come from? What distinguishes this from philosophical zombies?

actions may not end up so harmonious, because they suffer from differential reinforcement.

What does "differential reinforcement" mean? If you covered it in the previous post, a link or summary would be good.

From Wikipedia:

Other simple (reinforcement) schedules include:

Differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior – Used to reduce a frequent behavior without punishing it by reinforcing an incompatible response. An example would be reinforcing clapping to reduce nose picking.

Differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) – Also known as omission training procedures, an instrumental conditioning procedure in which a positive reinforcer is periodically delivered only if the participant does something other than the target response. An example would be reinforcing any hand action other than nose picking.

Differential reinforcement of low response rate (DRL) – Used to encourage low rates of responding. It is like an interval schedule, except that premature responses reset the time required between behavior.

Lab example: DRL10" = a rat is reinforced for the first response after 10 seconds, but if the rat responds earlier than 10 seconds there is no reinforcement and the rat has to wait 10 seconds from that premature response without another response before bar pressing will lead to reinforcement.

Real world example: "If you ask me for a potato chip no more than once every 10 minutes, I will give it to you. If you ask more often, I will give you none."

Differential reinforcement of high rate (DRH) – Used to increase high rates of responding. It is like an interval schedule, except that a minimum number of responses are required in the interval in order to receive reinforcement. Lab example: DRH10"/15 responses = a rat must press a bar 15 times within a 10 second increment to get reinforced Real world example: "If Lance Armstrong is going to win the Tour de France he has to pedal x number of times during the y-hour race."

tied so intimately to ... (the easy problem, not the hard one), that one would hope that a new approach to one...

The diverse use of the word "one" in this sentence makes it amusingly perplexing on the first read or two (at least, for a non-native speaker such as Y.T.) :)

This seems pretty interesting, but it's not very clear to me.

The last post in this sequence discussed different reinforcement of thought and action. Speech and thought make a natural category as opposed to action; both are fast and easy, and so less likely to be affected by time and effort discounting. Both are point actions as opposed to a long project like learning Swahili or quitting smoking. And both bring reinforcement not through normal sensory channels (saying a word doesn't give pleasure in the same way smoking a cigarette might, nor pain in the same way having to study a boring grammar textbook might) but in what they say about you as a person and how they affect other people's real (and perceived) opinion of you.

So even if there is no governor anywhere unifying all thoughts and words, they may come out in harmony because they were selected by the same processes for the same reasons. And actions may not end up so harmonious, because they suffer from differential reinforcement.

They make some intuitive sense, but I'm not sure how to understand the distinction you're trying to make more technically. Can you elaborate? I think pictures of casual graphs might be useful here.

Interesting.

Where does this fit with the idea that voluntary behavior can become involuntary in time. Like driving, where you start by fully thinking (consciously) of each move, and in time it becomes unconscious (not sure if we can call it involuntary). This was discussed a bit by Schrodinger in What is Life.

Will this, now unconsious action, be susceptible to reinforcement? If you find you make lots of accidents, maybe driving will jump back to voluntary?