Dogs And Early Attempts At Behavioral Predictions

There was a time when it was proposed that if you listed all the stimuli that an animal would respond to, and every response possible that an animal could do, you could predict with precision what stimulus would cause a specific behavior, or working backwards, pick a behavior and you could pick the specific stimulus that caused that behavior.

Attempts were made to make long lists of stimuli and responses. Guess how that worked out? 

It didn’t. 

This was an early attempt at creating a universal law for physiology that would also explain all behavior, and vice versa. There is a similar effort going on today. Scientists are studying biochemistry, as if some kind of pill could be invented to control behavior. Kind of like finding Love Potion Number 9.

It reminds me of the efforts the Communist government of the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate profits (assuming that private industry was ripping off the public) by controlling the costs and prices of services and goods. It failed spectacularly. The macro economy of a country is too complex, both laterally and horizontally. Micromanaging smaller enterprises is also impossible, and such micromanagement kills incentives and innovation. You can read about this history in Thomas Sowell’s, Basic Economics. 

The behavior of organisms is even more complex than economics. That is partly why I am concerned about the future implementation of AI. No computer can successfully manage life on this planet. (That’s kind of the point of The Matrix… ).

I find it interesting that many of the same advocates of mechanistic approaches to behavior also state there is no such thing as free will, because free will implies there are problems with their utopian ideas.  In other words, some propose that if we knew all the chemical reactions going on in a human, we would find that the entire existence of mankind was predetermined from the moment of the Big Bang. 

I don’t buy that argument. 

If all you try to do is memorize a list of actions and reactions, and try to make a dog fit your list, you will never figure out your dog and you will never become a good dog trainer. There is too much to memorize, too much to correlate when multiple factors are going on at the same time, and life is too dynamic to fit some kind of rigid model. While it is important and interesting to study stimuli and response probabilities in a laboratory, those general observations will unravel in the chaotic contexts of the real world.

There are better ways to learn about behavior and train dogs properly. 

Plan accordingly.