May 11, 2014

May 11, 2014

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Behaviorist

Dear Reader, 

Texts do not investigate anything, but people do, not while they read, but while they talk. We often read writings in which it is supposedly said that we are exploring something, but when we are reading, we are not talking and because we are not talking, we are neither exploring nor investigating. When we are reading, we are only matching what we read to what we already know. If it matches, we continue to read, but if it doesn’t match, we stop reading. 

The only way in which talking is like reading, is that we only talk to match what we already know, but we don’t talk to explore, let alone to discover something new. The sad fact that most of our talking is like reading and doesn’t allow us to explore anything that is outside of our beliefs, is maintained by the common assumption that reading about beliefs is more or less the same as talking about it. However, reading about stimuli that elicit behavioral responses and confirm our belief is not the same as being exposed to them during a real conversation.

Although a book is easier to be tossed aside than a human being, books, texts and papers, have made it easier to do exactly that. Many writings claim to be able to explain things to us, when in reality they can only confirm what we already know. Also, we are led to believe that these writings demonstrate things to us, but we are only willing to read it, because it reiterates something that was already said or taught. We can’t and won’t read it if it wasn’t first said or taught.

Written words can’t make us think of anything else than what we already believe, but spoken words can. Certainly, our spoken words can make us read something else, but our written words don’t change the way we talk. Other than what people say, we have no access to what they think or say to themselves privately. Unless we talk with each other, we have no way of knowing what other people are thinking. Since speech can only makes sense when it is seen or heard, that is, if it is overt, Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) as well as Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) evolve during our life time like any other behavior of any other species, as behavior of the whole organism. References to invisible parts, such as our brains or our minds, cannot bring us any closer to ourselves or each other and cannot lead to the interaction which makes and keeps us conscious, because invisible or inaudible parts maintain the illusion that what is described, that is, the nonverbal, is more important than the description, the verbal. People who would have us believe otherwise, who emphasize that our verbal description is not the the same as the nonverbal which is described, don't know anything about the SVB/NVB distinction. Our verbal descriptions are only important to us to the extent that they describe our nonverbal behavior correctly and that they provide us with predictive control. Our descriptions are useless or confusing if they do not give us control over the behavior that is described. As we all know, many of such descriptions exist. We are only able to separate inaccurate from accurate descriptions in SVB. SVB is the category of verbal behavior which only contains our accurate descriptions, while NVB contains all our inaccurate descriptions.  

The consequence of this learning is nothing to be guessed at because it is visible and audible. NVB can bee seen and heard everywhere because human interaction is primarily based on inaccurate descriptions, which not only determine our individual lives, but also our lives together and how we organize the world. The same selective principles, the same environmental external pressures that gave rise to all living organisms across the generations, are responsible for the behavioral evolution of SVB and NVB. Whether SVB and accurate descriptions will be able to increase depends on the environmental stimuli that make it possible.

Prediction and control of our SVB and NVB, which are mutually exclusive categories of verbal behavior, is analogous to what we know about the similarity between learning and evolution. They work in exactly the same way. Private or covert speech is and has always been speech and should be treated as such. Therefore, we can and we should let others know what we feel and think and get it off our chest. Only in SVB do we embody our language and agree that our behavior is externally caused.

We will not all of a sudden realize that all human behavior, including what we keep calling our mind, is caused by environmental stimuli, because this is primarily a consequence of how we talk. To think that this or other writing is going to bridge that gap is unrealistic. It hasn’t and it can’t. We need to talk with each other to be able to differentiate between SVB and NVB. As stated, our accurate and our inaccurate descriptions can only be discriminated during our public speech. If writing leads to SVB, it is meaningful, but if prevents it, as it usually almost always does, it will lead to NVB. Such writing is problematic because it stands in the way of human  interaction.  

Other than spoken communication we have no way of measuring whether we are refining or preventing the flow of discriminative stimuli. It is not anyone's personal fault that we have been fooled so many times. We  can’t help seeing it that way, because we have been coerced into our false belief about our sense of agency. Once our burdensome private speech is expressed again publicly, we will know that it had to be said. Not saying it and not being able to say it estranges us from our environment and predictably gives rise to many mental health issues.

SVB is pragmatic in that it makes us think about what would happen if we would continue to talk in the way which we enjoy most. Because the usefulness of SVB is so self-evident, it is almost impossible not to think about its positive long-term consequences. The mere thought of achieving it in the future makes one want to dedicate oneself to knowing more about it and to creating the circumstances in which can and will occur. However, we also continue to behave as if only NVB is true, because of its consequences. Because we are punished for our inability to cause our own behavior, we are conditioned to have NVB.

Much of our misbehaving was reinforced by our escape from the punishing effects of NVB. Perhaps most of what is written is a function of our escape from NVB. With more SVB there would be less of an incentive to write or read. Also, we escape from the punishing effects of NVB by writing and reading. In doing so, we disconnect from our environment, In SVB we connect with our environment, which is inside as well as outside of our skin. Reading can’t challenge our belief in the inner causation of behavior and therefore prevents accurate public speech.