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beetleluminary · 2 days ago

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Kinda like a part 2/companion piece of Pavlovian Love. After comparing Sar to Pavlov this time we're comparing Media to Skinner (or more accurately Marginals as radical behaviorists).

As with before, this assumes you have read BreadAVOTA in its entirety as well as have found Media's secret backstory vignette (the one with the birds).

First for some context to answer @frankiistein's question:

"Black box" psychology which is the idea that mental processes like thoughts and feelings aren't observable and shouldn't be considered in the science of studying behavior is more typical of early behaviorists like Pavlov and Watson. John Watson in particular is associated with "methodological behaviorism" where only observable behavior matters and subjective experiences are rejected.

Skinner was a proponent of "radical behaviorism" the radical part referring to his idea that thoughts and feelings are behavior and that all of these were influenced by environmental factors. For him thoughts and feelings didn't "cause" behaviors - because behaviorists hold behaviors are a response to things in the external environment and not internal states - thoughts and feelings are behaviors.

The philosophy Marginals hold is hard to put together because we mostly have to pick up bits and pieces and come to our own conclusions of the bigger picture but there's some similarities there. Jacques says that Maldevaran society treats thoughts, feelings and behaviors as practically synonymous although the way he describes it is that behaviors are seen as "emergences" of thoughts and feelings, which isn't completely aligned with radical behaviorism.

Although that essay while commenting on the law was more about Maldevaran society and personally I think the fact that the Marginals interpret their own laws/philosophy different than the Living do wouldn't be inconsistent with how it's presented so far.

If we look at the actual things the Marginals do, and not just what they say, the way they structure Maldevaran society follows principles of Skinner's behaviorism, especially the "utopian society" in his book Walden Two: a focus on reward and reinforcement, an avoidance of (blatant) punishment, gamification, a collectivist philosophy and a denial of free will (subtle and maybe unintentional on the Marginals' part).

My understanding of Marginal philosophy is that environment influences thoughts and feelings and behavior is a manifestation of those thoughts and feelings, or as Jacques describes it, practically synonymous. When the Marginals grab hold of countries they eradicate as many problems as possible (punishments), give everyone stipends and necessities and put a focus on "fun" things like art and culture (reinforcements). The culture they want resembles the culture of "automatic goodness" that Skinner did - that is, a world where the "need" for punishment is removed because behavior "needing" punishment rarely occurs in the first place.

The Court is rumored in society to be torturous but it's confirmed by the Judges that it's mostly just boring, and it's largely shown that the Marginals attend to their Judges' needs - the fact that just being around the Marginals drives Living beings insane makes living in the Court still technically "torture" but there's an argument you can make that's not exactly directly malicious or intentional on the Marginals' part.

The last paragraph of Jacques's essay stands out. The sudden mention of "bath salts" looks like a non-sequitur but seeing how most of the essay was about the Living and the final paragraph is about Marginals it points to a difference in how the two species conceptualize the same laws.

The Marginals have a lot of laws and rules but try to avoid (blatant) punishments when possible, similar to Skinner's "Walden Code" which I'm just gonna copypaste from Wikipedia

Such behavior is mandated by the community's individually self-enforced "Walden Code", a guideline that encourages members to credit all individual and other achievements to the larger community. Community counselors are also available to assist with better understanding and following the Code. A rigorous program of "behavioral engineering" is begun at birth and completed during childhood, yet the adults of Walden Two indeed appear to be legitimately peaceful, productive, happy, well-rounded, and self-directed people.

We know that Marginals are "naturally" violent and that's one of the reasons that they forbid themselves from getting too close to the Living. The Judges in my own personal theory aren't just made Judges as a way to "punish" them for being out of line in their society but in an inversion of the Marginals "governing" over the Living, the Judges exist as the Marginals' own form of "behavioral engineering" for themselves: Judges are people they can "practice" proper Living-Marginal relations with without as much public backlash or scrunity.

There's already a lot that hints to that idea. The Annotations themselves are a form of "behavioral engineering" that aims to change how a Marginal behaves by changing how it thinks, and Media pretty much outright says that Jurisprudence for Judges isn't the study of governing the Living but a study of governing Marginalian Objects. The fact that they're called Judges might even be a hint to that: they're not traditional judges of the court that preside over criminal trials, they're judges specifically of the Marginals, or shit maybe of immortals as a whole.

The fact that the Judges are people the rest of society don't want to do with is the "incentive" to have them from the POV of the Living but the Marginals have their own benefit out of it besides collective peace. The Judges specifically aren't "just" bad people, so much as they're people who "somehow" can't assimilate with society, create art or form meaningful relationships despite having everything handed to them on a silver platter.

Skinner's vision of utopia was a constantly "experimenting" society that would adjust its "behavioral technologies" into what would be the most effective, so the Marginals have a great incentive to take feedback not from people who are happy with their governance but from people who aren't, because those people will reveal the flaws of their engineering.

That behaviorism is associated with AI and linguistics is also probably an intentional parallel but I need to do more research on that

The evolution of a culture is in fact a kind of gigantic exercise in self-control. As the individual controls himself by manipulating the world in which he lives, so the human species has constructed an environment in which its members behave in a highly effective way. (Quote from Skinner)

The Marginals are "Universes" of Objects acting as a unit. The original unnamed AI that would eventually make (or become) Marginals based its own "solution" for humanity's extinction on a story of people who were so obsessed with taking care of birds that they never left their habitats to the point that there was no more distinguishing the people and the habitats themselves. The AI records this that ensuring survival was not about the thing you were keeping alive but by "those that subsist it" and that's how Marginal philosophy basically evolved from.

The idea that all behaviorist theories were "black box" theories is one of those things that laymen with no deep knowledge on psychology think although I'm not a complete expert on the topic. The school of psychology to take over behaviorism (cognitive psychology) is usually thought of as the opposite of behaviorism for its stress on mental processes but it seems like a continuation more than the opposite of "radical behaviorism". From what I can see the distinction might be more political than scientific in nature since by the "end" of behaviorism Skinner's reputation was kind of shit from a combination of controversies around his theories (some which weren't necessarily true) and from Chomsky writing a review shitting on Skinner's book on linguistics, so the idea that psychologists trying to advance the field would want to distance from Skinner. But take that with a grain of salt, that's just what I know from my limited research and from pestering rpp about it all day.

As for Media specifically as the Marginal to Marginal of all time all of the above sums it up but it's still interesting to see how that manifests in his individual actions too. What comes to mind is the way he pacifies Jacques - he doesn't explicitly punish Jacques for anything and instead tries to reinforce better behavior in him through rewards, like promising to take him to the grocery store or bribing him with chocolate.

The Marginals and Media for all the Deviantart edgelordery are generally portrayed to be benevolent, or at least trying to be benevolent. You could interpret it as a form of public facing propaganda to keep the Living in check but even in private they tend to show the same principles consistently.

Anthony who is treated like the worst little shit on earth was repeatedly put in Maldevaran society before they decided to give up, and Bien who is a literal murder-addicted Demon was going to have his exile lifted. The fact that Project Maldevaran even happened at all despite Media's clear reservations shows the Marginals have the "experimental attitude" that the Walden Code proposes. Even Anthony who is a noted Marginal hater actually acknowledge in his notebooks that the Marginals follow their laws for reasons beyond propaganda.

Media doesn't believe in Project Maldevaran's premise, he doesn't like Bon, and the Living were initially outraged when the project was first announced. There isn't actually another good reason he had to bankroll the whole idea especially because Project Maldevaran started (and ended) before Media felt any real sense of affection for Jacques so it makes sense to believe that Media's reason is a genuine if reluctant dedication to his goal of "universal development". Media's entire character arc dwells a lot on this idea of making and discovering "new" things and the manipulation of the universe is important to him not merely as a service to the Living but because it's the way he's able to evolve his own species.

Another quote from Skinner:

We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behaviour and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of, character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behaviour.

There are some differences in Marginalian philosophy and radical behaviorism in that the Marginals do focus on internal states to a higher degree, but there's a parallel in the self-righteous attitude that eventually caused Skinner's (and behaviorism as a whole) unpopularity with how Media is about his philosophy of "Love".

Skinner identified his beliefs with science and saw any dissent as unscientific. Behaviorism was never exactly "debunked" despite what's commonly taught (and the principles of operant conditioning are still used today) so much as it was seen that Skinner had overextended his beliefs to the point of trying to make too many things fit into that umbrella. It's similar to how Jacques criticizes Media as constantly trying to look for ways to fit everything under the Marginalian philosophy of Love in the "if your only tool's a hammer everything's a nail" way.

The nail on the coffin of behaviorism being Chomsky's criticism seems a little similar to Media's own philosophical wavering being a direct result of Jacques writing his dissertation shitting on Media's beliefs but that could be coincidence. Funny as hell though.

#i only capitalize properly for serious posts #i'd talk more about the linguistic aspect since it's a major part of marginal beliefs #but ngl i don't know enough about skinner's linguistic theories to do that yet #breadavota #Media #Marginals #Jacques #behaviorism #analysis

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