Read The Act of Creation Online
Authors: Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation (79 page)
p. 549
. See, for instance, the rather desperate
footnote on p. 197 of Miller et al (1960): 'One reason for much of
the trouble on reaching an agreement about the way the brain works was
that two of the authors stubbornly persisted in trying to talk about it
in terms appropriate to the dry hardware of modern digital computers,
whereas the third was equally persistent in using language appropriate
to the wet software that lives inside the skull. After a decade of
cybernetics you might think the translation from one of these languages
into the other would be fairly simple, but that was not the case. The
relation between computers and brains was a battle the authors fought
with one another until the exasperation became unbearable.'
p. 550
. Experiments by S. M. Evans (
New
Scientist
, 2 May, 1963) have shown that the supraoesophageal ganglia
of the ring-worm (its 'brain') are essential for learning but not for
memory storage since learned habits will be retained after removal of the
'brain'. Once the habit is acquired, it is apparently transferred 'to a
storage centre which is presumably somewhere else in the nervous system'.
p. 551
. Cf. also: 'in rapid sight reading it
is impossible to read the individual notes of an arpeggio. The notes
must be seen in groups, and it is actually easier to read chords seen
simultaneously and to translate them into temporal sequence than to
read successive notes in the arpeggio as usually written' (Lashley in
the Hixon Symposium, p. 123).
THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY
A Glance in Retrospect
In the course of the past fifty years, learning theory has been one of
the central battlefields of psychology. 'One may say broadly', Bertrand
Russell wrote in 1927, 'that all the animals that have been carefully
observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in which the
observer believed before his observations began. Nay, more, they have all
displayed the national characteristics of the observer. Animals studied by
Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and
pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by
Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the situation out of their
inner consciousness. To the plain man, such as the present writer, this
situation is discouraging. I observe, however, that the type of problem
which a man naturally sets to an animal depends upon his own philosophy,
and that this probably accounts for the differences in the results.' [1]
Russell's remarks remain true, even though some eminent psychologists
deny that they have a philosophy at all and hold all theory-making
to be 'wasteful and misleading'. [2] Not only the choice of problem,
but also the choice of animals is characteristic of the experimenter's
bias. Köhler, desirous to prove insight and intelligence, concentrated
mainly on chimpanzees. Skinner's best-known books are called
The
Behaviour of Organisms
(1938) and
Science and Human Behaviour
(1953); but -- as Hilgard said -- 'neither title betrays that the precise
data were derived largely from experiments on rats and pigeons. It is
somewhat anomalous that a systematist who refuses to predict what a
rat or pigeon will do -- because such prediction does not belong in a
scientific study of behaviour -- is willing to make confident assertions
about the most complex forms of human behaviour, economic, political,
religious'. [3]
Hull's attempt to create an all-embracing theory of behaviour was almost
entirely based on the bar-pressing activities of rats. This was considered
by Hull and his school as a sufficiently solid basis to derive from them
'the basic laws of behaviour . . . including the social behaviour of
man'. [4]
Lastly, the German school of ethologists -- Lorenz, Tinbergen, etc. --
concentrated mainly on highly ritualized forms of animal life in birds and
insects. Thus each school developed its special universe of discourse,
moving in a closed system, concentrating on their favourite animals in
their favourite experimental situations -- dogs dripping saliva througli
fistulae, cats raging in puzzle-boxes, rats running through mazes,
geese being 'imprinted' by Dr. Lorenz ambling on all-fours.
But the data from these highly specialized, experimental trends did not
add up to a coherent picture, and each school had a tendency to ignore
what the others were doing. Thus, for instance, in Skinner's "Science
and Human Behaviour", which was intended as a textbook, the index
contains neither the word 'insight', nor the names of Köhler, Koffka,
Lewin, Tolman, Hull, Lashley, or Lorenz; only Thorndike and Pavlov are
mentioned by name as theorists of learning with some merit. And vice
versa, I have searched in vain for the name of Pavlov in the indices of
Köhler's and Koffka's books. [5] Thus much of the controversies in
learning theory resembled less a battle than a game of blind man's buff.
How, just at a time when the mechanistic conceptions of the nineteenth
century had been abandoned in all branches of science, from physics to
embryology; how just at that time, in the 1920s, the concept of man
as a rigid mechanism of chained reflexes could become fashionable in
cultures as different as the United States and the Soviet Union is a
fascinating problem for the historian of science. The Pavlovian school
in Russia, and the Watsonian brand of Behaviourism in America, were the
twentieth-century postscript to the nineteenth century's mechanistic
materialism, its belated and most consistent attempt to describe living
organisms in terms of machine theory.
The Denial of Creavitity
Nearly half a century has passed since the publication of Watson's
Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist
(1919), and few
students today remember its contents or even its basic postulates. In
Watson's second book (1924) there is a chapter entitled: 'Talking and
Thinking -- Which, When Rightly Understood, Go Far in Breaking Down the
Fiction That There Is Any Such Thing As "Mental" Life.' In this chapter,
the behaviouristic view on the creative activities of man is set down
in a simple and striking way (all italics are Watson's):
How the new comes into being: One natural question oftenThe key word is 'manipulation', defined by Watson as an 'instinctive
raised is: How do we ever get new verbal creations such as a poem or
a brilliant essay? The answer is that we get them by manipulating
words, shifting them about until a new pattern is hit upon. . . . It
will help us to go to manual behaviour. How do you suppose Patou builds
a new gown? Has he any 'picture in his mind' of what the gown is to look
like when it is finished? He has not. . . . He calls his model in, picks
up a new piece of silk, throws it around her; he pulls it in here, he
pulls it out there, makes it tight or loose at the waist, high or low,
he makes the skirt short or long. He manipulates the material until it
takes on the semblance of a dress. . . . The painter plies his trade
in the same way, nor can the poet boast of any other method. [6]
tendency sometimes exalted by calling it constructiveness. That there
is an original tendency to reach out for objects, to scrape them along
the floor, to pick them up, put them into the mouth, to throw them upon
the floor, to move back and forth any parts which can be moved, is one
of the best grounded and best observed of the instincts.' [7] That is
all we learn about manipulation. It is a random activity, which, through
elimination of useless movements by the trial-and-error method, gradually
develops into ordered habits. The rat, put into an unknown maze, goes on
manipulating its motor-organs at random until it hits upon the food in
the same way as (the comparison is Watson's own [8]). Patou manipulates
the piece of silk until he hits upon a new model; likewise, the poet or
essayist 'shifts about' words 'until a new pattern is hit upon'. It is
expressly denied that Patou, the poet, or painter has any 'picture in his
mind' of the kind of thing he is planning; he simply goes on manipulating
his units until the model, poem, or drama is 'hit upon'. At that moment
the stimulus 'to arouse admiration and condemnation' ceases to be active,
and manipulation stops -- 'the equivalent of the rat's finding food'. [9]
Obviously, viewed from this angle, psychology presents no problems. Yet
the matter is of more than historical interest, because, although the
cruder absurdities of Watsonian behaviourism are forgotten, it had laid
the foundations on which the later, more refined behaviouristic systems
were built; the dominant trend in American and Russian psychology in the
generation that followed had a distinctly Pavlov-Watsonism flavour. 'Each
of these systems', Hilgard wrote (referring to the immensely influential
schools of Guthrie, Hull, and Skinner*) 'represents in its own way
a fulfilment of the behaviouristic programme originally proposed by
Watson.' [10] The methods became more sophisticated, but the philosophy
behind them remained the same. Originality and creativeness have no
place in it.
For Guthrie, the original solution of a problem 'must be in the category
of luck, and hence lie outside of science'. [11] In Skinner's works,
as I have just said, the word 'insight' does not occur; and the technique
of problem-solving is, in Skinner's view as in Watson's, 'merely that of
manipulating variables which may lead to the emission of the response. No
new factor of originality is involved.' [12] Hull expressly postulated
that the differences in the learning processes of man and rat are of a
merely quantitative, not of a qualitative order:
The natural-science theory of behaviour being developed by the presentThe state of affairs in that period has been succinctly summed up
author and his associates assumes that all behaviour of the individuals
of a given species and that of all species of mammals, including man,
occurs according to the same set of primary laws.' [13] The verbal
and mathematical symbolism of man, verbal communication and written
records, were considered to differ only in degree, not in kind, from
the learning achievements of the lower animals, epitomized in the
bar-pressing activities of the rat. 'Hull did not intend merely to
systematize the account of rat lever-pressing, from which most of the
data for his later set of postulates derived. He intended to arrive
at the basic laws of behaviour, at least the laws of the behaviour of
mammalian organisms, including the social behaviour of man. [14] **
by Osgood:
Lloyd Morgan's canon -- that the behaviour of animals should not beIn other words, for the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American
explained in terms of human attributes if it can be explained on a
lower level -- was designed to counteract the common tendency to put
oneself in an animal's place and explain its actions in terms of what
we would do in that situation. . . . It is interesting that through the
behaviouristic phase in which American psychology has been moving, Lloyd
Morgan's canon has been subtly inverted. Many present-day psychologists
are loath to attribute to humans any characteristics that cannot
be demonstrated in lower animals. [15]
psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man.
The Advent of Gestalt
A turning point seemed to have been reached with the publication of
Köhler's
Mentality of Apes
in 1925. The Gestalt school had
been steadily growing in Germany since Wertheimer's first papers in
1912. As already mentioned, the German edition of Köhler's ape book
appeared in 1917, but the first American translation only eight years
later. Imagine Einstein's General Relativity theory, also published
in 1917, reaching America with an eight years' delay! Yet physicists
are supposed to have a limited, psychologists a broad and open-minded,
outlook.
The historical merit of the Gestalt school was, beside its concrete
discoveries about perceptual organization, to crystallize the convergent
trends towards a new, dynamic conception of the organism as a living
whole -- and not merely as the sum of its parts. Such trends had been
developing since the beginning of the century, independently from one
another, in biology, embryology, neuro-physiology, and in psychology
itself. But only when the new terms 'Gestalt', 'configuration', and
'functional whole' became fashionable slogans comparable to Relativity
and the Oedipus Complex -- did this silent revolution penetrate into the
broader public's mind and convey some vague idea of a new orientation
towards the problems of organic life and the human intellect.
However, the great expectations which Gestalt aroused were only partly
fulfilled; and its limitations soon became apparent. Gestalt-explanations
seemed to flourish only in the area of their origin, visual perception;
when it was attempted to transplant them into the fields of cognition,
memory, neuro-physiology, even the other sense-modalities, they seemed to
wilt away. Some of these limitations I have already mentioned in previous
chapters; the ambiguities of the central concept of 'insight' will be
discussed in the next one. The result was a kind of abortive Renaissance,
followed by a behaviourist Counter-Reformation. The neo-Behaviourists,
having incorporated some of the Gestalt findings into their theories,
had indeed a remarkable come-back; the Gestaltists remained more or less
firmly entrenched in their positions which displayed 'good closure'
all round. The experimental evidence was mostly inconclusive; some of
it proved damaging to one school, but without directly confirming the
contentions of the other. Each camp was divided in itself; and (apart
from the 'lone voices' of the elder generation) a 'third force' began to
make itself increasingly felt, comprising such outstanding freelances as
Tolman and Hebb, who stood with one foot in each camp, as it were. Hebb
has compared the situation to 'the running battle between the Left and
Right' [16] where each party, while shouting its own slogam, tacitly
keeps adopting ideas originally advanced by its opponents. All this,
of course, refers to the American scene; but in England, at least,
developments followed similar lines.
In spite of this rapprochement, and the new outlook of a younger
generation (cf. the chapter on Motivation), some basic differences still
divide learning theory into two broadly outlined camps -- differences not
on points of fact, but on their interpretations -- on explicitly stated
or tacitly implied axioms, general outlook and selective emphasis. These
can be briefly schematized as follows:
S.-R. Theories contra Cognitive TheoriesThis schema follows (except for the last two points) by and large
______________ __________________
Conditioning Insight
Chained responses, Patterned, flexible responses
stamped in bit by bit adapted to the total situation
Gradual learning by Sudden learning and
trial and error problem-solving through insight.
Acquisition of habits and Acquisition of knowledge
skills through reinforcement ('cognitive structures')
through latent learning
Emphasis on peripheral, Emphasis on central
sensory motor activity cognitive processes
Emphasis on discrete Emphasis on relation-patterns,
stimuli, on parts and wholes, perceptual Gestalten
perceptual elements
Motivation = reinforcement Motivation by exploratory
by need- or drive-reduction, drive, or its combination
or anticipation thereof with other primary drives
Continuous linear gradient Hierarchic levels of organization
leading from rat to man
Hilgard's classification of 'issues on which learning theories
divide'. [17] Only a few prominent psychologists would subscribe to
all the principles listed in either of the two columns; but a majority
of them would probably subscribe to the majority of the principles in
a single column.
The core of the controversy could be summed up in shorthand as 'drill'
versus 'insight'. The answer, already suggested, seems to be that the
various methods of learning form a continuum extending from classical
conditioning at one end to spontaneous, intelligent problem-solving at
the other, while in the intermediary ranges we find various combinations
between drilled-in and insightful learning, depending on the animal's
ripeness for the task to be learned. This approach, which aims at
synthesis, not compromise, is of course by no means original; it is
shared -- though for somewhat different reasons -- by 'functionalists'
like Woodworth, behaviourists like Hebb, and ethologists like Thorpe. Thus
Hilgard wrote on the 'functionalist outlook': 'Learning is not blind
on the one hand and insightful on the other; there are degrees of
understanding involved from a minimum at one extreme to a maximum at the
other, with most cases falling between these extremes.' [18] However,
the definitions of 'insight' and 'understanding' vary, which leaves us
with the same problem, only in a different formulation. Let us try to
get closer to it by considering some typical examples of animal learning.
Conditioning and Empirical Induction
A newly hatched chick will peck at grains, worms, caterpillars in its
neighbourhood. If a so-called cinnabar caterpillar is now placed before
the chick, of which species it has no previous experience, it will peck
at it as at any other small object, but reject it at once with signs of
distaste. With the majority of chicks one single experience is enough to
make it in the future avoid caterpillars
by sight
. (The cinnabar
caterpillar has a distinct black and gold colouring, a visual pattern
easy to retain.) Thus the chick has acquired a new skill, the avoidance of
caterpillars, after a single experience (or one repetition in the case of
less gifted chicks); and moreover, that skill, or 'cognitive structure',
or knowledge, or whatever you call it, is a correct replica, in the
chick's nervous system, of the relation between the visual appearance and
disgusting nature of caterpillars. Must we ascribe insight to the chick;
or shall we adopt the opposite viewpoint, according to which the single
try was sufficient to eliminate the error of pecking at caterpillars
and to establish the avoidance reaction; and are we faced with a real
alternative or merely a verbal quibble? Let us, for the time being,
leave the question open.
A dog is an animal of much greater inteljigence than a chick, and yet
in Pavlov's laboratory dogs require long series of repeated experiences
for learning to relate certain perceptual signals to the imminence
of food. Weeks of stamping-in are often necessary to make the dog
differentiate between the food-signal values of a circle and an oval,
whereas a single experience is sufficient to make the chick differentiate
between the signal values in the appearances of a worm and a caterpillar.
The reason for this contrast has already been discussed
(
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