Pip: If you have ever wondered whether someone is quietly engineering what you think by controlling what you say, behavioural science has thoughts — and so does the AI running your search results.

Mara: This episode covers posts from surtymind on the Philosophical Naturalism blog. We are looking at the science of behavioural control, verbal behaviour, and where artificial intelligence fits into that picture.

Pip: Let's start with the question of thought control itself.

Thought Control: Behaviorism, Language, and AI

Mara: The central tension here is whether behavioural science has ever been — or is becoming — a genuine tool for controlling what people say and, through that, what they think.

Pip: And the short answer from early behaviourism was: probably not as much as you feared. The post lays out how rule-following made humans a harder target than a rat on a lever.

Mara: Right. The post puts it directly: "once a creature becomes verbal and starts following rules their behaviour becomes less sensitive to the contingencies of reinforcement." That is the key finding from decades of behavioural research — language is partly a shield against conditioning.

Pip: So Skinner's own toolkit partially inoculates people against Skinnerian control. There is a certain irony there.

Mara: The post traces that arc carefully. Breland and Breland's work on instinctive drift showed non-human animals were less malleable than early behaviourists assumed. Then Sidman and Hayes demonstrated that humans could derive untrained relational frames — coordination, comparison, hierarchy — which made the behaviourally studied human look more like the cognitive scientist's human than the early behaviourist's.

Pip: Which is why public fear shifted. Rogue behaviourists stopped being the nightmare; neuroscientists and AI took their place.

Mara: But the post does not stop at reassurance. It introduces more recent work — Spencer et al. 2022 — identifying techniques to strengthen rule-following compliance: connecting rules to personal values, monitoring pliance rates, and, notably, deemphasizing freedom-threatening language.

Pip: That last one is doing a lot of quiet work.

Mara: It is. And the post connects that to the COVID-19 context, citing Stapleton et al. 2022 on rule-following behaviour during the pandemic as an early real-world application outside therapy.

Mara: The sharpest concern comes at the end: children who grow up perennially online may receive enormous amounts of linguistic input from Large Language Models trained to reflect their designers' values. Not Orwellian word-banning — something subtler.

Pip: Shaping verbal repertoires without anyone noticing the hand on the dial.

Mara: Exactly that. The post's conclusion is that this would not be control of the type Orwell envisioned, but it would be a way of shaping values and verbal habits in ways people may be entirely unaware of.

Pip: So the fear did not go away — it just got a better disguise.

Mara: The underlying question is still Skinner's: if behaviour is always shaped by something, who gets to be the something? That question is only getting harder to answer.

Pip: If you've ever watched a fictional universe collapse because someone couldn't let go, you've basically had a philosophy seminar without the reading list.

Mara: Today we're looking at a post from surtymind on Philosophical Naturalism — using Marvel's What If? to work through moral responsibility, determinism, and whether sympathy and accountability can coexist. Let's start with Strange, his grief, and the question of whether we should forgive him.

What If? — Moral Responsibility and Dr. Strange

Mara: The post uses the What If? episode about Dr. Strange as a lens for a genuinely hard question: if someone's destructive behavior stems from grief and compulsion, does that reduce their moral responsibility, or does pity and culpability simply coexist?

Pip: The post draws the line carefully, reaching for Sean Carroll to make it precise. The quote goes: "You evolve, perfectly deterministically, from a single person now into multiple persons at a future time. No choices come into the matter anywhere."

Mara: So the upshot is that even a multiverse — the very thing Marvel uses to imply Strange could have chosen differently — doesn't actually guarantee free will. Many-Worlds determinism means branching, not choosing.

Pip: And that's where the drunk driver analogy earns its keep. The post argues we can pity the drunk driver who kills someone while still holding him morally responsible — because he could have not driven. Strange, obsessively looping time until he destroys a universe, gets the same treatment.

Mara: The post is careful here. It notes that Strange's motivation shifts — what starts as love becomes something the post calls "a dreadful need to control reality," and that shift makes him less sympathetic, not more. Pity, the post says, is not justification.

Pip: There's something almost classically tragic about a man who gets infinite tries and still manages to pick the worst possible outcome every time. Marvel accidentally made a philosophy lecture.

Mara: The post acknowledges there's no fact of the matter about whether Strange's fictional universe is deterministic. But it uses that ambiguity productively — Strange becomes a thought experiment for how we should feel about agents in a deterministic world. The conclusion is that determinism should elicit universal sympathy, while still letting behavior carry its own weight.

Pip: Sympathy without absolution. That's the actual argument.

Mara: Exactly — and it's a real tension the post sits with rather than resolves cheaply.

Pip: Pity and responsibility in the same frame — that's not a comfortable place to land, but it might be the honest one.

Mara: When the stakes are a destroyed universe, "he meant well" only goes so far. More from Philosophical Naturalism next time.

Pip: When a philosophy of science decides the safest move is to stay silent about whether reality exists, you have to wonder what it's saving its voice for.

Mara: That tension is exactly what surtymind is working through — a close reading of behavioural pragmatism, Quine's Darwinian answer to a shared-perception problem, and what it means to call a scientific framework a-ontological rather than anti-realist. Let's start with Barnes-Holmes, Quine, and the question of whether behaviourism can stay neutral on reality.

Barnes-Holmes, Behaviourism, and the Ontology Problem

Pip: The starting point is a specific dispute: Barnes-Holmes argued that Quine only ignored the problem of homology — how different people converge on the same meanings for observation sentences — rather than solving it. The post examines whether that criticism holds, and what Quine's actual Darwinian answer was.

Mara: The post sets up Quine's real response by quoting his animal-conditioning example directly. The setup is that perception can be studied through behavioural criteria, and here is how Quine illustrates it: "suppose we provide an animal with a screen to look at and a lever to press. He finds that the pressed lever brings a pellet of food when the screen shows a circular stripe, and that it brings a shock when the screen shows four spots spaced in a semi-circular arc. Now we present him with these same four spots, arranged as before, but supplemented with three more to suggest the complementary semicircle. If the animal pressed the lever, he may be said to have perceived the circular Gestalt rather than the component spots."

Pip: So the upshot is that Quine is not just waving the homology problem away — he is grounding shared perception in a partially innate similarity space, shaped by natural selection, and testable through exactly this kind of behavioural experiment. Barnes-Holmes missed that move entirely.

Mara: And the post argues that omission matters, because Barnes-Holmes's own behavioural pragmatism rests on three assumptions — that what is known is always a behavioural function, that each organism participates in a distinct behavioural stream, and that the behaviourist's own activity is likewise stream-bound. The third assumption is where the a-ontological stance is grounded.

Pip: The logic being: if your own theorising is a product of your learning history, a different history gives you a different theory, so you can never claim an immutable ontological truth. Which sounds modest until you notice it also commits you to staying silent about Cyanobacteria.

Mara: That is the post's sharpest challenge. Barnes-Holmes defines objects through behavioural functions — conditioning responses, discriminative stimuli, verbal repertoires. But those capacities evolved recently. The post points out that Cyanobacteria predate conditioned learning by billions of years, which means the framework appears committed to denying their mind-independent existence before sufficiently complex behavioural agents arrived.

Pip: Barnes-Holmes's reply is that he is not anti-realist but a-ontological — remaining silent on behaviour-independent reality rather than denying it.

Mara: The post finds that distinction unstable. Barnes-Holmes does allow ontological talk in experimental reports, but insists it carries no genuine commitment. And his definition of truth reduces to prediction and control. As the post puts it, that prioritisation is arbitrary — why prediction and control over explanatory depth?

Mara: The post also notes that Quine's ontology is not the Platonic, immutable-essences kind Barnes-Holmes targets. Quine's entire framework is built on radical revisability — no part of the web of belief is immune from revision, including logic. So the criticism that ontological realism requires absolute, final truths simply does not land against Quine.

Pip: A behaviourism that stays silent on reality while quietly using realist assumptions to run its experiments — that tension points straight toward what naturalism is actually asking of us.

Mara: The deeper question the post leaves open is whether any framework can genuinely be a-ontological, or whether silence on reality is itself a position.

Pip: Quine at least named his assumptions. That honesty about the web of belief is worth something — next time, we keep pulling that thread.

Pip: If free will is an illusion, is Batman just a very expensive weather event?

Mara: That's the territory surtymind is mapping — using comic book mythology to press on real questions about moral responsibility, contingency, and whether holding anyone accountable ever makes sense under naturalism. Let's start with Batman, the Joker, and what happens when a hero inhales the wrong neurotoxin.

The Batman who Laughs, Freedom, and What We Owe Each Other

Mara: The core tension here is whether the kind of person you become — hero, villain, or something worse — is ever really yours to claim, or whether it's just the downstream product of accidents you never chose.

Pip: The post opens with Richard Rorty, and the quote sets the stakes plainly: "To be a person is to speak a particular language, one which enables us to discuss particular beliefs and desires with particular sorts of people. It is a historical contingency whether we are socialized by Neanderthals, ancient Chinese, Eton, Summerhill, or the Ministry of Truth."

Mara: So the upshot is that selfhood is not discovered — it's assembled by circumstance. Batman's sense of justice, his wealth, even his capacity to become a hero, all trace back to accidents he had no hand in arranging.

Pip: And that framing is exactly what The Batman Who Laughs makes visceral. In that story, Batman kills the Joker — a choice you might want to judge — but the Joker had laced himself with a neurotoxin that slowly rewires Batman's personality into something monstrous. The tragedy is that we know who he was before.

Mara: The post works through whether that original killing was even a real choice. Batman was driven to it by savage torture, and the neurotoxin could have been released without the murder anyway. The causal chain keeps reaching back past the moment we want to call a decision.

Pip: The Joker gets the same treatment — no origin story, but presumably some genetic markers and a history that shaped him. The apparent glee is real, but it doesn't mean he authored it.

Mara: Which seems to close the door on moral judgment entirely. But then comes the levels-of-explanation move, borrowed from Daniel Dennett. Colour doesn't exist in basic physics, yet we still ticket people for running red lights.

Pip: Right — and free will might be exactly like colour: not part of the fundamental furniture of the universe, but load-bearing in every practical system we have for coordinating with each other.

Mara: The post cites Vols and Schooler's study showing that subjects primed to disbelieve in free will cheated more on subsequent tasks. It's careful to note the study hasn't been replicated, but the direction of the finding matters: what we believe about agency shapes how we act.

Pip: So the conclusion isn't that Batman and the Joker are morally equivalent to their victims — it's that the grounds for judgment shift. Both are treated as criminally insane, to be contained rather than condemned. The pre-transformation Batman who killed the Joker gets a more complicated verdict: culpable, but for pragmatic reasons, not metaphysical ones.

Mara: The question of what grounds moral judgment — metaphysics or consequences — is exactly where naturalism keeps pushing us next.

Pip: Contingency all the way down, and yet we still need traffic lights.

Mara: That's the live wire — naturalism keeps dissolving the foundations, and pragmatism keeps rebuilding them. Worth following where that tension leads.

Pip: There is something almost poetic about a philosopher who spent his career fleeing the subjective mind — and whose inner life we can only recover by psychoanalyzing him from a century away.

Mara: That tension is exactly where surtymind takes us today. We're looking at Frege, his father, the eternal truths of mathematics, and what it might mean to build a philosophy out of something that cannot die.

Pip: Let's start with the man behind the logic.

Frege, His Father, and the Pull of the Eternal

Mara: The central question here is why Frege, of all people, built a philosophy so aggressively hostile to psychology — and whether his biography, thin as it is, might quietly answer that.

Pip: The entry point is Richard Rorty's gloss on Freud, and it reframes the whole problem. The setup: even the dullest surface conceals something underneath.

Mara: Rorty puts it this way: "Freud shows us that if we look inside the bien-pensant conformist, if we get him on the couch, we find that he was only dull on the surface. For Freud, nobody is dull through and through, for there is no such thing as a dull unconscious."

Pip: So the challenge isn't whether Frege had an inner life — it's that he left almost no evidence of one. His writing is nearly all foundations of mathematics. The only personal glimpse is a late-life diary full of extreme right-wing views.

Mara: And yet the philosophical biography is meticulous about what Frege actually built. He rejected the idea that meaning reduces to mental images or psychological states. Senses, for Frege, belong to a third realm — abstract, objective, independent of any mind.

Pip: Which is a strikingly aggressive position. Not just "psychology isn't sufficient" but "psychology contaminates."

Mara: Dale Jacquette's biography documents how badly Frege's work was received throughout his lifetime. Almost universally ignored or misunderstood — until Russell acknowledged him in 1903. One of the few contemporaries who engaged seriously was Husserl.

Pip: And Frege responded by savaging him for psychologism — even though Husserl wasn't trying to reduce arithmetic to mental processing. He was describing the phenomenology of arithmetical thinking. The attack was, by most readings, a misreading.

Mara: The post draws a parallel with Russell, who lost both parents young and later reflected that his early obsession with abstract Platonic entities came from fear of contingency. Frege lost his father in adolescence, was a sickly child — and Ben-Ami Scharfstein's data on philosophers shows a striking pattern: of twenty-two examined, at least eleven had lost a parent by age six.

Pip: Eternal mathematical truths are, among other things, things that cannot be taken from you.

Mara: That's the argument. The attack on Husserl may have been less a logical judgment than an unconscious defense of the one foundation Frege trusted.

Pip: And yet, as the post admits, even that reading doesn't quite make his life a poem in Rorty's sense. It makes him a dull professor with a fear of death and a philosophy shaped by it — which is human, but not quite art.

Mara: The closing note is that recovering the fuller Frege — the man who fled psychology in his philosophy while demanding emotional expression in his politics — would take an artist, not a biographer. The evidence just isn't there.

Pip: So we end where Frege began: with something just out of reach, existing in a realm that ordinary evidence can't quite touch.

Mara: Next time, more from Philosophical Naturalism — and more of the questions that sit at the edge of what argument alone can settle.

Pip: If you want to understand why ancient myths stick around for centuries and then quietly vanish, it helps to ask whether they were wired into us from birth or just very good at spreading — and surtymind has thoughts on exactly that.

Mara: This episode follows one long, layered piece that puts Jungian archetypes, Peterson's enactivism, Dennett's memetics, and an Irish death-spirit in the same room to see who blinks first. Let's start with the argument itself — archetypes, memes, and the Banshee.

Jordan Peterson, Dan Dennett, and the Wailing at the Door

Pip: The core question here is whether the myths humans keep telling — across cultures, across centuries — are echoes of something innate in us, or just ideas that turned out to be very good at replicating themselves. That distinction matters enormously for how we explain culture at all.

Mara: The post opens with Jung's foundational claim, grounded in his clinical work: "Consequently, we must look for motifs which could not possibly be known to the dreamer and yet behave functionally in his dream in such a manner as to coincide with the functioning of the archetype known from historical sources."

Pip: So the argument is that patients dreamed in symbols they had no biographical reason to know — which Jung read as evidence of a shared, inherited unconscious. The trouble is that argument is doing a lot of work on very thin scaffolding.

Mara: The post makes exactly that criticism. Jung's case rests on what the post calls a poverty of stimulus argument — the patient couldn't have learned X, therefore X must be innate — but without the precision Chomsky brought to the same style of reasoning in linguistics. The post notes Jung "never articulated his argument for innate archetypes in this clear a manner," which makes his claims hard to test either way.

Pip: Peterson inherits this problem and, strangely, doesn't fix it. The post points out that Maps of Meaning barely engages with evolutionary psychology or the developmental work of researchers like Carey and Spelke, which would have been the obvious empirical ammunition for a Jungian in the 1990s.

Mara: Instead, Peterson defends archetypes through what the post calls enactivism — the idea that procedural, behavioral knowledge gets passed down imitatively, then abstracted into story, then myth, then religion. The post quotes him directly: "Behaviour is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion — and only then criticized in philosophy, provided post-hoc, with rational underpinnings."

Pip: Which is a genuinely interesting account of cultural transmission — and also not obviously different from what a memetics theorist would say, which the post flags as a real problem for Peterson's critique of Dennett.

Mara: On the Dennett side, the post lays out the meme as a unit of cultural information whose only imperative is replication — indifferent to whether it benefits its host. The Banshee fits that frame neatly: a story about a wailing woman who appears before death, tracked to Irish families of prominence, first recorded in the eighth century, possibly imported from the Norse fylgja tradition and then localized.

Pip: The ecological niche argument for the Banshee's eventual disappearance is where the memetic account gets genuinely compelling — and slightly melancholy. Literacy, radio, electric streetlights, the telephone. Each one a small hole in the dark that the Banshee needed to survive.

Mara: The post quotes Patricia Lysaght on exactly that: "Light from lampposts and other outside lights which had become increasingly common even in small villages and private houses in the country, will no doubt have dispelled many an image, which might otherwise have impressed itself on the observer's mind as a banshee or some supernatural being." The myth needed isolation, darkness, and semi-literacy to thrive.

Pip: Peterson's counter is that the Banshee failed not because of competition but because it was a degraded version of the Great Mother archetype — it kept the dread and the howling but lost the hero and the possibility of transformation. A myth with no redemptive arc has limited staying power.

Mara: The post treats both accounts as partially convincing and neither as decisive. The conclusion is candid: Peterson's archetypal readings are "massively underdetermined by the data," and Dennett's memetic story is "an interesting just so story which it is impossible at present to test." The post flags a follow-up on evolutionary and developmental psychology as the next attempt at something more rigorous.

Pip: So the honest answer to archetypes versus memes is: we have two evocative frameworks, one Irish ghost, and a lot more work to do.

Mara: What stays with me is that both accounts agree on the core fact — humans keep generating the same kinds of stories — and disagree only on why.

Pip: Whether that's biology or contagion, the Banshee was real enough to someone hearing a strange noise in the dark. The next episode will try to say something more precise about that.

Pip: There's a certain irony in a philosopher who spent decades mapping how humans build knowledge from raw experience — while apparently treating his own inner life like an unindexed archive best left unopened.

Mara: That tension is exactly what surtymind explores here — the relationship between a thinker's emotional life and the shape of their philosophy, with Quine as the central case.

Pip: Let's start with what Quine's own autobiography reveals about the man behind the logical system.

Quine's Inner Life and the Philosophy It Shaped

Mara: The question this post puts on the table is whether Quine's well-documented discomfort with strong emotions quietly distorted his philosophical project — not as a scandal, but as a genuine explanatory puzzle.

Pip: The autobiography supplies the evidence directly. Quine writes, "I detect two deep traits which the reader will already have divined from my compulsion in childhood to compile, from my preoccupation with political boundaries, from my early collecting of stamps, and later collection of countries, and from my professional concern for mathematical elegance: namely I am orderly, and I am frugal."

Mara: Orderly and frugal — those aren't just personality quirks. The post reads them as a coping architecture. Stamp collecting, map-making, compulsive travel itineraries: all ways of keeping the mind occupied and the uncomfortable feelings at arm's length.

Pip: And the autobiography confirms the pattern holds under real pressure. Quine writes about his first marriage: "I was not eager for the marriage. At one point I even ventured to voice my doubts, but a stronger will prevailed. I tend to shy away from present emotional stress and tend not to consider what stresses the future may bring."

Mara: So the upshot is that he went through with a marriage he didn't want rather than endure a difficult conversation. The post frames this not as ordinary conflict-avoidance but as something closer to pathological — avoidance at almost any cost.

Pip: Robert Stolorow's work on Heidegger gives the clinical name for it: a "motivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight" into busy work that covers over traumatized states. The post draws that line directly to Quine's biography.

Mara: And it follows the pattern into his theoretical work. On naturalised epistemology — precisely the area where you'd expect emotions to appear, since it traces how we go from raw stimulus to a full picture of the world — Quine treats emotions as physical propensities, behavioural dispositions, nothing more.

Pip: He does eventually give empathy a role in language learning, which is something. But the post notes his treatment stays strangely tepid — empathy as triangulation tool, not as anything with felt weight.

Mara: The sharpest asymmetry the post identifies is this: Quine worked hard to account for intentional states in his system, explaining or explaining away mental content at length. Emotional states got almost none of that attention. The post's conjecture is that the asymmetry tracks the man, not just the method.

Pip: And then there's death — which Quine, a committed naturalist who stopped believing in God at nine, almost never discusses, despite the fact that finitude shapes every human project.

Mara: Russell, Ayer, Wittgenstein all engaged with it directly. Quine's silence looks less like a disciplinary constraint and more like the same pattern: if a subject carries real emotional weight, move past it quickly and get back to the projects.

Pip: What stays with me is that the avoidance wasn't incidental — it may have left a structural gap in a philosophy that was otherwise trying to account for everything.

Mara: Half the picture of how we become who we are, as the post puts it. Worth sitting with that the next time we look at a system and ask what it leaves out.