The reward of there being no reward
An opening dialogue to our Substack
We, Sander and Jo (aka JoB), have been for years in a continuing discussion at the intersection of psychology and philosophy (and, as will become clear, many other intersections besides). This Substack is just a way of taking this discussion to a public online place. So, what better way to get going than through a public online dialogue about its title “There is no reward”. Such dialogues will, most probably, be a recurring feature here next to some independent contributions of each of us. In all of them we aim at zero simplification and the exact same amount of “scientese”. We strive for full contact interaction, also with our readers, where all holds are barred that go for the (non-existing) reward of quick punches, one-upmanship and gotcha’s.
Let’s get to it.
JoB: You chose the title for the Substack, Sander, so the obvious thing would be to ask you why you chose it. Instead, I will ask you why psychologists and neuroscientists are so hung up about rewards in the first place. Is it because they feel they need some first principle on which to hang their mechanistic theorizing? To me it often feels as if this whole domain of psychology is burdened by an inferiority complex vis à vis what ‘real‘ reproducible science à la physics ‘should’ look like. Reward then functions a little like the psychologists’ version of gravity. You know I find this quite ironic given the whole notion of mechanistic theories have long become problematic in physics. Why copy an approach that has collapsed under its own weight? I can understand psychologists not being up to speed on physics but even this ignorance can’t explain the self-flagellation consisting in modeling our psyche on the study of free electrons. Given you chose this title I feel there’s something both deeply problematic as well as profoundly interesting about the notion of reward. Pray tell.
Sander: I won’t congratulate you extensively on how quickly you pierced into the soul of psychology, lest I’d be mistaken for a large language model. And I risk getting out of my depth quickly in physics discussions. But the parallel with gravity is a delightful one indeed. The subtext is that the pull of reward has some predictive power when ‘coarse-graining’ psychology but that reward talk reveals very little about the underlying ‘mechanics’ of our psychology. It’s tempting to speculate about what an Einsteinian turn would look like for psychology. Einstein showed that gravity is an “emergent force” caused by more fundamental processes: The warping of space-time.
Maybe what we describe as reward or ‘punishment’ will actually turn out to be such an emergent or apparent force. That moves us from an extrinsic point of view —rewards as objects out there that attract us— to an intrinsic one —rewards are always crucially dependent on internal states: Am I actually thirsty? What is my goal here? The intrinsic view aligns with our first-person perspective: I don’t recognize reward as the driver of my own behavior, I’m not a reward optimizer, even at my most ‘automatical’. Instead, I’m a goal realizer (on my best days), broadly taken as realizing those patterns in myself and my environment that help me continue to exist.
It was William James who contrasted magnets’ ability to get together with Romeo and Juliet’s ability to do so. Magnets have only one way to pull, and don’t have any abilities to circumvent obstacles between them. For James, a good measure of intelligence is whether you’re able to achieve the same goal with different means. Like Romeo and Juliet can. Reward is like the magnet model, but it does not explain the work on (or around) the obstacles, and how that work makes the reward. What shapes our behavior is not reward, but rather beliefs and (sub)goals we need to form and navigate to overcome obstacles.
The salient experience of pleasure or reward —so salient that we see it as the outside attractor— may be caused by the rate at which we approach our goals, tracked as the ebbs and flows of uncertainty relative to our goals and beliefs. The apparent ‘reward force’ may be just a function of the curvature on that belief space. Heavy masses —the goals and needs of our existence— warp our belief spaces and push our behavior (instead of the pull of rewards). That makes any cognition motivated, and any motivation cognitive.
I will leave it at this metaphoric glimpse of an alternative view, recognizing that all this raises questions and needs unpacking. This I see as one of the missions for this Substack.
For now, let me anticipate your inevitable question about deeper, ethical motivations for this title. It’s true that reward has been a culturally prolific meme. The flexibility of our mind is such that, when we want something to be our goal, we can make it so. Especially when that goal is of the neatly quantifiable kind like monetary rewards or social media ‘likes’. That’s why Hannah Arendt warned: “The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism [in which reward is central] is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain obvious trends in modern society.” Incentive engineering and gamification are appealing strategies when you need to coordinate large-scale societies, on- and offline. But they’re ultimately alienating and mind-numbing. Or in the words of another respectable philosopher (JoB): “There can be little doubt that an end goal of any behavioral therapy is for ‘patients’ to learn to ‘behave’.”
A conspiring and competing ecology of goals and beliefs matches better with the complexity of behavior. It makes room for human agency and flourishing beyond reductive ideas of utility or reward maximization.
JoB: I like a good chiasmus and “Any cognition will turn out to be motivated, and any motivation cognitive.” chiasms well. But if you put your Einstein on the table, I’ll raise you to a Bohr. I think you’re right in saying that our needs like heavy masses warp our belief space to the extent that even our perceived time can seem to stand still or speed up. Maybe the need for a drug can even be literally compared to a black hole of reward which lets nothing escape anymore (and, indeed, our competitive society of rewards is maybe the mother of black holes). Still, by linking, like you do, cognition to motivation (and motivation to cognition again) you use 2 concepts that seem incompatible, whilst also seeming to be each independently indispensable. And this is eerily close to Bohr’s idea of complementarity that I see everywhere (which should not surprise if it is, as he saw it, everywhere). I’m sure we’ll get into that on this Substack (ad your & the reader’s nauseam probably) but, for now, I just want to say that this idea is inimical to Arendt’s modern theories because it simply blocks explaining anything one-dimensionally - for example as a function of reward or selfishness or whatever Dawkins or Pavlov wanted us to only have. For me, there being no reward is, then, a very rewarding idea as it lets us out to navigate the sea of knowledge in a mode of discovery instead of judgment. If this makes us nauseous at times, it is a small price to have our ethics without eating it too.
Sander: Here you’ve intuited my third and final reason for “There is no reward”: Its bitter-sweet ring. It’s a less sappy way to say it’s about the journey, the joy of obstacle-clearing, instead of the destination.
But it’s also about deriving a devious pleasure or relief from apparently bleak insights. There is no reward in life! We lose anchoring but gain freedom. The consolation of science is a much more acquired and brittle kind than that of art and literature. But one worth pursuing in an increasingly science-steeped world. A tall order —so much for managing expectations—, so let’s get started.