It’s about Utopian ideas of control. But you can’t control life.
Here’s what I mean.
About a century ago, attempts were made by Hull and others to discover the ultimate formula, an algorithm, to explain all behavior. Psychologist/ scientists spent decades trying to find this Holy Grail. They proposed if they could find that secret formula, they could control society.
B. F. Skinner, beyond all the good he did, took society on a similar ride by taking his operant conditioning theory too far. Without any direct scientific experiments to back up his proposals, he took what experiments he had done… and proposed his ideas about Utopia… ranging from politics, to religion, to parenting, crime, biology and so forth. His goal also was to control society, and many were all too willing to try it out.
Others, in the past few decades, then took his work even further. Their proposal was that humans can’t ever know the truth because all we know and do is a result of reinforcement and punishment, and that those in power control those processes, so those not in control are just victims of that control. The “truth” is therefore not truth, but a facsimile of truth because of conditioning. Like Hull and Skinner, these Utopian goals are what is driving this movement. This extrapolation of operant conditioning by critical theorists has been used to attempt to tear down society and replace it with another system of control. We are living in that mess right now.
I ask myself if there is any need to put more lab rats in puzzles. I don’t think so. The studies of this type have pretty much exhausted the possibilities of gaining anything new and useful. What is left are novelties that aren’t going to cause any serious breakthroughs. Similarly, the quest for a chemical/ neural answer isn’t going to find a Holy Grail, either. The quest for societal control, using medical experimentation, has never turned out well. Yes, there might be some medical cures along the way, but the variability of life can’t be put into a Cartesian graph, or some new life predicting/ controlling formula.
The more I study, the more I ask why these scientists aren’t now in the field, spending more time and money working with live animals and people, rather than going down these rabbit holes. These various schools of behavior/ learning/ psychology are still stuck in their silos. Besides, it is now almost impossible to do animal experiments, other than farming them out to corrupt third world countries where there is no oversight of what they are attempting. Furthermore, they are diving headlong into control experiments that we only saw when reading science fiction books. It’s not about the betterment of animals or society; it is about control.
What does this have to do with dogs? Well, maybe it is time to “ask” the dogs what they need rather than trying to count how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Might it be better to go into nature and discover what it has to say or get a dog and see what develops. Variability, random and purposeful, is a fundamental property of life: it can’t be fully discovered or controlled, either in a test tube or in the real world.
Just sayin’…
Plan accordingly.
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