Walden II
Skinner started his career as an English major, writing poems and short stories. He has, of course, written a large number of papers and books on behaviorism. But he will probably be most remembered by the general run of readers for his book Walden II, wherein he describes a utopia-like commune run on his operant principles.
People, especially the religious right, came down hard on his book. They said that his ideas take away our freedom and dignity as human beings. He responded to the sea of criticism with another book (one of his best) called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He asked: What do we mean when we say we want to be free? Usually we mean we don’t want to be in a society that punishes us for doing what we want to do. Okay -- aversive stimuli don’t work well anyway, so out with them! Instead, we’ll only use reinforcers to “control” society. And if we pick the right reinforcers, we will feel free, because we will be doing what we feel we want!
Likewise for dignity. When we say “she died with dignity,” what do we mean? We mean she kept up her “good” behaviors without any apparent ulterior motives. In fact, she kept her dignity because her reinforcement history has led her to see behaving in that "dignified" manner as more reinforcing than making a scene.
The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded. There is no true freedom or dignity. Right now, our reinforcers for good and bad behavior are chaotic and out of our control -- it’s a matter of having good or bad luck with your “choice” of parents, teachers, peers, and other influences. Let’s instead take control, as a society, and design our culture in such a way that good gets rewarded and bad gets extinguished! With the right behavioral technology, we can design culture.
Both freedom and dignity are examples of what Skinner calls mentalistic constructs -- unobservable and so useless for a scientific psychology. Other examples include defense mechanisms, the unconscious, archetypes, fictional finalisms, coping strategies, self-actualization, consciousness, even things like hunger and thirst. The most important example is what he refers to as the homunculus -- Latin for “the little man” -- that supposedly resides inside us and is used to explain our behavior, ideas like soul, mind, ego, will, self, and, of course, personality.
Instead, Skinner recommends that psychologists concentrate on observables, that is, the environment and our behavior in it.
Thats B.F Skinners book, and it sounds incredibly like the island.
Strange.
B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of “operating” on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around it world, doing what it does. During this “operating,” the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant -- that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer. This is operant conditioning: “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.”
Imagine a rat in a cage. This is a special cage (called, in fact, a “Skinner box”) that has a bar or pedal on one wall that, when pressed, causes a little mechanism to release a foot pellet into the cage. The rat is bouncing around the cage, doing whatever it is rats do, when he accidentally presses the bar and -- hey, presto! -- a food pellet falls into the cage! The operant is the behavior just prior to the reinforcer, which is the food pellet, of course. In no time at all, the rat is furiously peddling away at the bar, hoarding his pile of pellets in the corner of the cage.
A behavior followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
What if you don’t give the rat any more pellets? Apparently, he’s no fool, and after a few futile attempts, he stops his bar-pressing behavior. This is called extinction of the operant behavior.
A behavior no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behavior occurring in the future.
Now, if you were to turn the pellet machine back on, so that pressing the bar again provides the rat with pellets, the behavior of bar-pushing will “pop” right back into existence, much more quickly than it took for the rat to learn the behavior the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes all the way back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing on the bar!
Schedules of reinforcement
Skinner likes to tell about how he “accidentally -- i.e. operantly -- came across his various discoveries. For example, he talks about running low on food pellets in the middle of a study. Now, these were the days before “Purina rat chow” and the like, so Skinner had to make his own rat pellets, a slow and tedious task. So he decided to reduce the number of reinforcements he gave his rats for whatever behavior he was trying to condition, and, lo and behold, the rats kept up their operant behaviors, and at a stable rate, no less. This is how Skinner discovered schedules of reinforcement!
Continuous reinforcement is the original scenario: Every time that the rat does the behavior (such as pedal-pushing), he gets a rat goodie.
The fixed ratio schedule was the first one Skinner discovered: If the rat presses the pedal three times, say, he gets a goodie. Or five times. Or twenty times. Or “x” times. There is a fixed ratio between behaviors and reinforcers: 3 to 1, 5 to 1, 20 to 1, etc. This is a little like “piece rate” in the clothing manufacturing industry: You get paid so much for so many shirts.
The fixed interval schedule uses a timing device of some sort. If the rat presses the bar at least once during a particular stretch of time (say 20 seconds), then he gets a goodie. If he fails to do so, he doesn’t get a goodie. But even if he hits that bar a hundred times during that 20 seconds, he still only gets one goodie! One strange thing that happens is that the rats tend to “pace” themselves: They slow down the rate of their behavior right after the reinforcer, and speed up when the time for it gets close.
Skinner also looked at variable schedules. Variable ratio means you change the “x” each time -- first it takes 3 presses to get a goodie, then 10, then 1, then 7 and so on. Variable interval means you keep changing the time period -- first 20 seconds, then 5, then 35, then 10 and so on.
In both cases, it keeps the rats on their rat toes. With the variable interval schedule, they no longer “pace” themselves, because they no can no longer establish a “rhythm” between behavior and reward. Most importantly, these schedules are very resistant to extinction. It makes sense, if you think about it. If you haven’t gotten a reinforcer for a while, well, it could just be that you are at a particularly “bad” ratio or interval! Just one more bar press, maybe this’ll be the one!
This, according to Skinner, is the mechanism of gambling. You may not win very often, but you never know whether and when you’ll win again. It could be the very next time, and if you don’t roll them dice, or play that hand, or bet on that number this once, you’ll miss on the score of the century!
Thats skinners theory
Originally posted by rickyduck
I'll make this as brief as I can:Meet Hans Oersted:
Hans O. discovered electromagnetism in 1820.
In 1999 the 'Oersted' satellite was launched with the purpose of charting Earth's magnetic field. The findings led scientists to believe that there might be a polar reversal imminent, the effects of which could be cataclysmic: if Earth were to lose its magnetosphere, it would be vulnerable to massive radiation from the space/sun. The satellite also revealed an anomaly in the magnetic field under South Africa; it is pointing the opposite direction from the rest of the Earth's field and has been growing for hundreds of years. Please Google this info. A similar idea was also used in the film 'The Core'.
Meet Hannes Alfvén:
His contribution to science - mainly in the field of electromagnetism - revolutionized how scientists view the universe, winning a Nobel Prize on the way. He spoke English, German, French, Russian, and some Spanish and Chinese; and studied oriental philosophy and religion. He spent time in the Fiji Islands. He was fascinated by the "green flash" - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs at sunset. By no coincidence (Green Lantern and Flash comic):
He also wrote fiction: The Great Computer: A Vision (1968) telling the story of computers taking over the world. Google "Hannes Alfvén".
Alfvén plus Hans O. equals Alvar Hanso.
The above outlines the reason for - and a means to control - the island...
Scientists, fearing the cataclysmic events of a polar reversal, prepared an environment for the survival of the human race. They either directly or indirectly engineered the kind of people who would make up a community fit for survival and propagation of a new world. In the main, this means characters without father/mother figures; and/or characters with skills for survival: a doctor, an engineer, a survivalist, a mercenary; and characters of sufficiently varied genetic background: african, caucasian, asian, etc. to ensure a healthy gene pool for generations.
Then on an island which already had a massive natural source of electromagnetism, they constructed an artificial magnetosphere, alluded to in Walt's/Hurley's comic:
to repel the deadly cosmic rays that Earth's magnetosphere used to repel. The hope was that the community could thrive, grow and, eventually, repopulate/recover the world.
The Dharma Initiative under Alvar Hanso (if both of these thing exist in the Lost reality - much of the Orientation film is red herrings for the 'survivors'😉 used a technology based on remote viewing and electromagnetism to power this magnetosphere and to influence the lives of the future island candidates. As stated in another of my posts: every strange (and a lot of mundane) occurrences in Lost can be attributed to electromagnetism as wielded by the collective consciousness on the island (see "Enlightenment Theory"😉. When all the candidates were in place, i.e. on the plane, the collective consciousness knocked everyone out, brought it down, cryogenically preserved them, dismantled the plane (placing enough debris in the ocean to ensure an "everybody dead" verdict); years later, some plane debris was placed on the beach with the passengers and the scene was set to give the illusion that they had JUST crashed. Then the collective consciousness woke them up.
The joke/password about the snowmen is an allusion to being cryogenically frozen.
The collective consciousness is that group of scientists that became so totally absorbed into remote viewing and electromagnetism that they now operate on frequencies of electromagnetism (covering everything from light to sound) only. They can read minds as well as manipulate iron and other conductive material. Claire wondered why there was not one comb or hairbrush on the entire plane; the reason: the slight electrostatic charges that hairbrushing creates is interference for the collective consciousness.
Much of the Orientation film and what Desmond says is false and purely to ensure that our heroes press those bloody buttons every 108 minutes. The purpose is threefold: to provide a focus for the community - a reason to go on and something 'meaningful' that goes beyond rational decision-making; secondly, to protect the hatch/power-supply/scientists behind the concrete; and, thirdly, to download the information from the Oersted satellite as it orbits the Earth every 108 minutes (please Google this) to get the latest on the magnetic poles.
The collective consciousness messed with this bird's navigation (based on magnetism - birds have magnetite in their beaks).
Sayid tells Jack that either the compass is wrong or North has moved. In fact, North has moved.
Walt seems to become a knife-throwing expert. He isn't. The metal knife was guided by the collective consciousness in an attempt to bring him closer to Locke, who is the island's most faithful servant.
The presence of this ship is an indication that this island has always been known as a source of great magnetic power (the word "magnet" comes from "Magnesia" the land where the first black rock with powers of attraction was found). The location of this ship is an indication of the island's volcanic past - pushing the island higher - the ship is now inland. (Lava cools to form basalt; at the point basalt solidifies it takes on the same magnetic field as the surrounding location, thus providing information of the magnetic field's past.)
BF Skinner's dubious theories form the basis for the methods used by collective consciousness to socially engineer this 'utopia'. They are the voices in the trees, they are the visions, they are the black fog (metal in a magnetic field), the monster (mechanical, but designed to embody each survivor's personal fear). They use every psychological trick in his books to manipulate the survivors into forming a stable long-lasting community ON the island; and their means to this end are extensive.
The two images above are an explicit example of how the influence of the Dharma's collective consciousness has pervaded in the survivors' lives: notice the octagonal ceiling in both shots; and the metal balls in the second scene.
The opening shot of most episodes - the eye - establishes that this epsiode's main character will percieve what the collective consciousness wishes to show them. In this episode, Boone has an epiphanous vision courtesy of the collective consciousness and is later murdered with a falling plane!
Locke can walk now. Locke has no feeling in his legs. Locke's ability to walk is based on the collective consciousness' will. It makes him obedient. This level of obediency may be required of all the survivors eventually. His legs move because the collective consciousness allows those tiny electronic impulses from his brain via the spine to get through to muscles in his legs.
To summarize: our heroes never actually crashed; they are the future of mankind - the survivors of a cataclysmic polar event of which they are unaware; they are on the island to survive, procreate and repopulate the Earth. They are unaware of this plan which is sustained by a sophisticated collective consciousness and a group of scientists using electromagnetic power, and psychological techniques of reward and punishment.
There is more, but that's the gist.
That explains the eyes. I am nothing to do with this theory. It is off this thread on another forum:
http://www.4815162342.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3377&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
I just thought it was very good, but on the forum they have pointed out the mistakes, there are many other theorys on this site.
That sure was brief. ✅ interest, somemore food for thought!
Two flaws; A) where does it say Locke has no feeling in his legs? That was just in the episode when the island was trying to take away his ability to walk, which hasn't been totally explained. And it was Locke--not Boone--that received the vision. Secondly, the black fog is the monster. The Oerstead thing ain't no coincidence, though, that's for sure.