June 10, 2015

June 10, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This writing will be my first response to “Zen and Behavior Analysis” (2010) by Roger Bass. I will first respond to the abstract as this will allow me to take some pot shots at this paper.  "Bass believes that Zen poses a “challenge for behavior analysis to explain a repertoire which renders analysis meaningless.” I don’t believe this is the case. Zen doesn’t pose any challenge to behaviorism. To the contrary, Zen is challenged by behaviorism which pigeonholes it as the religious nonsense it really is and has always been. Imagine for a moment that Zen and behaviorism are two different languages which arose from two verbal communities. The aforementioned statement would then read as “Russian poses a challenge to English to explain a repertoire which renders English meaningless.” Such a statement is of course utter nonsense. Japanese is a language,, but Zen is a religion. 

Zen is not a language. It claims that language is not needed, specifically not the scientific language called behavior analysis, which debunks Zen’s authoritarian view. Supposedly, the meaninglessness of analysis “results from” what is triumphantly described as “the unique verbal history generated by Zen methods.” However, there is nothing unique about a religion which makes grand claims,, but which, ultimately, doesn’t and can’t deliver.

“Untying Zen’s verbal knots” presumably requires many years of practice with methods, such as meditation and riddles to suppress and undermine any kind of conversation. The dissociative effects this causes presumably result in “Enlightenment and Samadhi”, but all of these can only be accomplished by strict subservience to a Zen master, someone who is allowed to distract his or her students from their verbal behavior. Zen’s illusive “primary outcomes” are not to be questioned and “cannot be described in any conventional sense”, but “Samadhi or Satori” are said to be automatically reinforcing behaviors. The mystical notion of “stimulus singularity” reminds me of Chomsky’s mentalistic “poverty of the stimulus” argument. I won't go into that.

Could one call that  a Zen koan? Fact remains,, whether one considers, Zen, Catholicism or Islam, religious authority figures have always dominated other people by yanking words around in every language. There is really no need to “untie any verbal knots,” because without religion these knots simply don’t occur.  It is equally irrelevant to imagine what would have happened if Shakespeare had been a Zen Buddhist, Hamlet’s verbal behavior is believed to have been enriched as he would be able to say “To be or not to be or neither.” However, the question why Hamlet became philosophical is answered by the environment from which he gets his ideas. The fiction that someone is capable of moving "beyond a verbal framed normal-life view” and is “enlightened” is based on the inferiority on the disciple and the superiority of the so-called enlightened one. All talk about how Zen practice is done has to be hierarchical .

June 9, 2015

June 9, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is my seventh response to "Radical Behaviorism and Buddhism: Complementarities and Conflicts” by Diller and Lattal (2008).  Who could have thought I would be writing seven responses to this paper?  This is my final response. By comparing Buddhism and behaviorism, those who are into Buddhism are supposed to think they are like behaviorists and behaviorists should view themselves now as Buddhists. What else could the purpose of this paper be?  To convince non-behaviorists or non-Buddhists that behaviorism is cool?  If that was the goal, I would think that non-behaviorists would be even more turned off by behaviorism if it was compared with Buddhism. How would a non-Buddhist become interested in behaviorism by comparing it Buddhism? 

I guess the author’s inability to reach nirvana became the establishing operation for writing this paper? It would explain why they wrote “The notion of effective action leads directly to the consideration of the pragmatic outcomes of behaving in accordance with Buddhism and radical behaviorism”  (underlining added) . Of course, there is only effective action for behaviorism. Buddhism with its ten thousand rules is incapable of being pragmatic, but Baum, who presumably is an expert on this topic, point s out the importance of what Buddhism as a philosophy “allows a person to do.” Let us make no mistake about this “behaviorism is based on pragmatism.” We would have known that without Baum. Overrated Buddhist knowledge stands in no comparison to behaviorism in terms of its ability to “satisfy human needs and further human interests.” Thus, it is Buddhism and not behaviorism which is going to die out, because of its dismal record. It would be not pragmatic if Buddhism, which is ancient and well-respected, were incorporated to legitimize behaviorism 

"A scientific understanding of human affairs” would indeed lead to a “technology that could be employed to improve the world,” but our involvement with pre-scientific ways of conduct derails such progress. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVb) is such a  technology, but it has only been acknowledged and implemented by me and by a few others. Like Carr, I insist on the bidirectional causality of behavior. Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB )  will continue if we keep making the speaker more important than the listener.  When we engage in SVB we will shape new kinds of behavior, but when we continue with NVB, we are not learning anything new. 

"Mindfulness meditation” is not shaping any new behavior and those who practice it still continue with their NVB. I have talked with thousands of meditators, and they practice NVB like everyone else, the Dalai Lama included.  Being able to “tact the contingencies that the individual [the speaker] is establishing for others [the listener] may lead to improved social interaction, and  ultimately, improvement of the human condition”(words between brackets and underlining added). I wonder if this is really about how we talk. “Instead of escaping the suffering of life and achieving nirvana” pragmatic people are realistic enough to acknowledge that how we talk is tremendously important." I doubt  that this is true. “Remaining present in the world, meditating and praying until all sentient beings have reached nirvana” is not going to do anyone any good. Nothing is gained by the Buddhist “ultimate self-control response” ,which is against talking. Let’s be very clear:Buddhist austerities are another form of aversive behavioral control . SVB is appetitive and is not about depriving ourselves from sensory stimulation. To the contrary, it increases and attunes our sensory stimulation to such a point that speakers and listeners feel stimulated as they all listen to themselves while they speak. Buddhism isn’t and will never be a science and “verification by personal experience” is meaningless. 

I guess the authors were trying to talk with themselves when they stated “with Buddhism, there is a feedback loop between behavior and its consequences; behavior and consequences interact to improve the life of the individual” (underlining added). This so-called interaction, however, has nothing to do with what happens between the speaker and the listener. It is at best a good example of a speaker who wants others to listen to him or to her, but who is not even listening to him or herself. As stated, such speech is NVB.  

It’s ludicrous that behaviorists write and even get published a paper in which they praise the “devotion of boddisatvas” whose attempts supposedly “bring about vast changes for all sentient beings.” What sheer stupidity is this?  Unless Buddhists  learn to have SVB, they can only pretend to have  “a scientific way of thinking in which self-examination is required.” I have not found one Buddhist with SVB.  The so-called rigorous questioning that is presumably done by Buddhist is a fake, as it only involves “personal verification." SVB on the other hand, is based on scientific questioning, that is,, it can and must be verified by others. 

In SVB, the speaker’s SVB is mediated by the listener, who then becomes a SVB speaker to the speaker, who then becomes a listener. This ongoing turn-taking and nothing else maintains SVB.  When SVB occurs, communicators find “this process of questioning the truth by which one lives” is not part of SVB. Each time speakers  get side-tracked by esoteric nonsense, they create NVB as they produce a frightening contingency for the listener.

Only during SVB are “contingencies constantly analyzed and adjusted to most efficiently achieve the desired goals” but in NVB we only theorize about them. By the way, weren’t Buddhist supposed to let go of “ desired goals?” I am just saying. “The desired goals”, of course, are better relationship as a result of better conversation. 

Finally, at the end of the paper, the Hahn (2003) mentions something in the right direction. “If you get caught in an idea and consider it to be the truth then you miss the chance to know the truth.” Naturally, it takes a mentalist to “get caught in an idea”, but leaving that aside, behaviorists still get caught in Buddhist ideas because they haven’t  yet become scientific about their way of talking. In other words, NVB  has continued in spite of the fact that the truth was already known about behavior being a function of environmental variables. The variable maintaining NVB is how we sound while we speak. If we don’t listen to ourselves while we speak, we keep missing the fact that we produce a sound which maintains NVB.  In SVB we have a different sound and mood which goes together with different behavior. 

I had a lot to say about this paper about Buddhism and behaviorism. It got me fired up as I have often met presumably meditative people who didn't want to talk. SVB is meditative communication, but NVB is mechanical,, unidirectional, hierarchical interaction. Actually, NVB isn't interaction at all, because it is a one-way street.  SVB cuts through all the red tape and exposes those who are pretending to be better than others. 

 

If our purpose is to have improved social interaction,,we must attend to how we sound while we speak. Every speaker must be his or her own listener. This, however, is only possible if listening to ourselves becomes more important than listening to others. Due to the high rates of NVB, we are more inclined to listen to others than to ourselves. To listen to ourselves,, we must stop listening to others. Only if we are no longer forced to listen to others can we begin to listen to ourselves. In NVB, we listen to ourselves as if we are listening to someone else, but in SVB our speaking and listening behavior is joined again.

June 8, 2015

June 8, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

This is my sixth response to “Radical Behaviorism and Buddhism: Complementarities and Conflicts” by Diller and Lattal (2008).  I first want to finish my thoughts on Carr, who, like Skinner, was a real gentle man. I feel fortunate to have heard him and I write about him because I am inspired by him. Carr’s lecucture is a verbal episode in which we can hear lots of  Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) instances. I highly recommend everyone to listen to his lecture on You Tube. If you google this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kkocTdn0iY , you will be able to hear for yourself what a wonderful man he was.

 

His enthusiastic approach which rubbed off on his students made him write “Most people respond that my approach to behaviorism must be idiosyncratic, and that I am surely a prophet ahead of my time. Of course, I am not ahead of my time; instead, I am solidly in the mainstream of operant behaviorism.” Carr is absolutely unique among behaviorists in that he emphatically addresses bidirectional causality, specifically how it relates to our vocal verbal behavior.

Going back again to the paper on “Radical Behaviorism and Buddhism”, it should be clear to behaviorists that “Buddhists who retain the notion of free will” are mentalists. The statement that without free will “liberation from the life cycle is impossible” should make behaviorists laugh, but the authors go further to make their point and compare Buddhism with Christianity. In Christianity free will is also “necessary for individuals to choose to live in particular ways to achieve salvation.” After that they go on to claim that “free will in Buddhism and in behavior-analytic determinism have functional parallels.” It is unbelievable how far people will go in making it seem as if they are having SVB, while in fact they are engaging in NVB. This is typical holier-than-thou behavior.  

The behaviorist Chiesa (2003) writes “When situation or historical variables are implicated, it may be easier to be compassionate towards individuals who engage in behavior that may be considered bad than when the individual is, because of his assumed free will, responsible for his or her own behavior” (underlining added). In NVB we try to be compassionate, but only in SVB we truly are. There is no need for “increased compassion towards individuals who engage in undesirable behavior.” If we are to stop their undesirable behavior, we must know of what is this behavior a function. It is a function of unidirectional interaction, my way or the highway or NVB? 

The bidirectional causation of the behavior of both the speaker and the listener becomes clear when the speaker receives feedback from the listener, who is able to give this feedback, because he or she is allowed to become a speaker. The speaker is able to receive this feedback because he or she becomes a listener and is capable of being a listener to both the speaker who is different from the listener and the speaker who is the same person as the listener. 

A deterministic outlook doesn’t necessarily result in SVB.  Most likely it results in NVB, because it goes against what everyone believes. It is easy to see that radical behaviorism, which goes against what Buddhists,, Christians and even atheists believe, leads to an emphasis on words such as “deterministic” and “function”, while ignoring nonverbal, biological aspects of the interaction which play a much bigger role than our recently developed cognitive abilities

It gets even more esoteric when the deterministic functional account is claimed to be equivalent to the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, “the idea that every moment is a moment of rebirth”. Although the Buddhist s deny the possibility of “the transmigration of the soul” it is presumably "possible for the individual to be changed into something other than its previous form.” Moreover, “this notion of reincarnation is foundational” in Buddhism.  It is important to reflect on the fact that a bunch of behaviorists wrote this paper to make behaviorism more attractive to New Agers. The process of trying to convince the reader is always essentially a sales process. SVB, however, is not a sales process and is not understood as long as people think that talking is about buying into a message or not buying into it.  In NVB we are only busy with whether we buy it or not, whether we are sold on a message or not,, or whether we are selling our message or not,. 

Similarly, Buddhists remain busy with a self or not.  And, a NVB way of talking also keeps behaviorists preoccupied with a self.It should be noted that the authors write “rather than speaking in mystical terms, the transitions to which it refers are happening in the life of the individual” (underlining added) . Indeed, they are not speaking and even if they were speaking it would sound the same. 

Surely, “an organism is changed when exposed to contingencies of reinforcement”, but the behavior of a New Agers or self-abdicating breath-watchers, is not going to be changed by behaviorist’s belief in the similarity between behaviorism and Buddhism. It is astounding these authors state "in a science of behavior, it may be sufficient to speak of order at the level of environment-behavior interaction and not appeal to other universes of discourse.”  (underlining added).  I remind the reader that the authors, are not speaking, but writing and the reader is not hearing anything, but is  only reading. Writing and reading appeal to “other universes of discourse” than speaking and listening. To confuse the two is to engage in NVB.   

We engage in SVB not because we are convinced, about it, but because it is possible. When it comes to death, of course, the organism stops behaving, but the environment with whom the organism interacted will continue without him or her, that is,, the environment will be changed due to his or her departure. Only the behavior of those who have survived the person can now be analyzed. It is completely wrong to conceive of Buddhism and behaviorism as “systems in which death may be conceptualized as a continuous state of change.” 

Central to radical behaviorism is the behavior of the organism which completely ends when the organism dies, while only the behavior of other organisms “who have shared an environment with the deceased” continuous in a changed form. Thus,, there is no “important behavior” of an “important person” (Buddha,  or Skinner)  which “continues in the collective works.” Only those who live can know, read, write or talk about and teach these works. There is neither a Skinner nor Buddha who lives on. The presumed notion of continuous change is an inaccurate depiction of death. To really talk about death is to have SVB, but to talk about so-called ongoing change is NVB. 

Also the notion that “cultural selection is the mechanism” by which “the essence of the originator…may be said to be preserved... albeit in modified form” (Glenn, 2003) (underlining added) distracts from the fact there is no originator and that nothing is said. If something is said it will only be by others than these presumed originators. They don’t “preserve in modified form” some other organism, but they are affected by papers, books, lectures or this blog, which is not the same as interacting with these persons when they were alive. 

We cannot be affected in our behavior by someone who is not there,, by an absence. The wish for something to be there which is not there, signifies our inability to change, which , as Glenn (2003)  has stated, may be due to cultural selection.  The Buddhist concept of “nirvana” , or the “escape from the life cycle and the suffering inherent therein”, is a failed attempt to cope with loss. Supposedly our higher self is not attached and doesn’t grieve. Fact remains, that we do grieve and we don’t “become another person after one in –and one out breath.”  Behaviorism hasn't been effective at all in the “removal of the construct of the self,” but SVB  makes it effortlessly possible.

June 7, 2015

June 7, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

This is the fifth part of my response to “Radical Behaviorism and Buddhism: Complementarities and Conflicts” by Diller and Lattal (2008).  When I woke up this morning from a good sleep, it smelled like smoke.  There is a fire going on. Interesting how smelling the smoke, how an olfactory discriminative stimulus, immediately led to window-closing responses, that one nonverbal behavior led to another nonverbal behavior. I also said to my wife Bonnie, “wow it is really smoky out there” and she agreed that I should close the windows, that is, she mediated my verbal behavior. 

The cat Kayla greeted me and accompanied me seated on my shoulder while I was closing the windows,, I also talked with her about the smoke,, but she didn’t mediate my verbal behavior. She isn’t capable of that. However, she detects the smoke as a nonverbal aversive stimulus. Like us, she would try to escape from the smoke. 

In Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) the speaker’s voice functions like an aversive stimulus. Just like the smoke caused the window-closing behaviors,, the noxious stimulus of the speaker’s voice immediately causes nonverbal behavior in the listener. We don’t usually pay attention to the fact that the body of the listener is always immediately affected by the voice of the speaker because we give more importance to what is said than to how it is said. It can be argued that during NVB the attention of the listener is distracted from the nonverbal and fixated on the verbal. Essentially, the listener is scared away from his or her own nonverbal response because of the aversive sounding voice of the speaker. Said in Freudian terms,, the listener will then ‘defend’ him or herself verbally from the speaker.  

My wife woke up and showed me one of the zucchinis she has grown in her vegetable garden. The smoke has lifted and she has opened the windows again. Fresh morning air comes through the house and takes away the smoke that previously entered. We talked about the relief  we felt that the smoke had gone away and we were reminded of one time the smoke stayed around in Chico for three days.   

In Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) the voice of the speaker is experienced by the listener as an appetitive stimulus. In the same way the cool and fresh air, affects us,, the voice of the speaker affects us positively if he or she listens to him or herself, that is,, if he or she is nonverbally experiencing what he or she is saying. In NVB in which the speaker is not listening to him or herself while he or she speaks,, the speaker is not nonverbally experiencing what he or she is saying. Consequently, in NVB the listener is coerced into verbal fixation and dissociation from his or her nonverbal experience. In SVB, by contrast,, the speaker’s voice provides an affective nonverbal environment in which the verbal  can become clear due to the connection between a speaker’s verbal and nonverbal expression. Since this connection is expressed by the speaker, it can be experienced by the listener. In NVB this connection is not expressed by the speaker and can therefore also not be experienced by the listener. In SVB, the windows can and will be opened to let the fresh air in, because there is fresh air. If we open the windows in NVB, we will only let in smoke. 

Let’s now get back to discussing the paper. “The verbal behavior associated with describing a self as an entity relates to function, rather than to topography, and function is ultimately context dependent.” In SVB we are no longer trying to “describe the self as an entity” and we realize that this urge arose in the absence of SVB, that is, due to the dominance of NVB. We have an urge for SVB and we try to have it when it is absent. Once it is there, the urge to have it is dissolves. Likewise, we have no need for fresh air when we have fresh air. We long for fresh air only when the air is polluted by smoke. In NVB we “describe the self as an entity”, but in SVB there is no such urge. The fact that the issue of self doesn’t arise during SVB, and only arises during NVB tells us that SVB and NVB are response classes which are functionally related to environmental variables and thus are context dependent. 

We get carried away by talk about "topography" only during NVB, but SVB facilitates conversation and exploration of functional  relationships.This issue of function versus form is important in the analysis of problem behavior and is described in “Learning” (Catania,2013) .  Topography of the self -injurious behavior of a child with developmental disabilities is not going to be of much help in changing this child’s behavior. Unless we find out of what this behavior is a function (e.g. getting attention,, escaping from difficult task or organic source) , we will not be successful in altering it. Unless we look at the common consequences of the behavior, rather than its form, we are likely to exacerbate it rather than improve it. 

Catania explains, “when a class of responses seems insensitive to its consequences, as when the first [attention-seeking] child’s self-injurious behavior seemed not to extinguish,, we must entertain the possibility that we have improperly defined the class, and that it is part of a larger class the members of which continue to have the consequences it once shared with them" (underlining and word between brackets added ). Two such “larger” classes are SVB  and NVB. 

In “Behavior is not ultimately about behavior” Carr (1993) adds another piece of the puzzle, which is often brushed underneath the carpet. He describes the great difference between “unidirectional versus reciprocal causality” of behavior. He argues against the often made stereotypical accusation that behaviorism is “mechanistic”, and “conceptualizes humans as objects to whom we do things”.  This unidirectional, S-R (respondent )  behaviorism which preceded Skinner’s R-S (operant ) behaviorism, maps  onto NVB. 

Reciprocal causality, explains scientific aspects of  interaction that expose NVB as unidirectional, mechanistic and antithetical to human relationship.  Moreover,Carr’s research “demonstrated that the problem behavior of children [with developmental disabilities] has systematic and profound effects on adults who teach the children (Carr, Taylor & Robinson, 1991)  (underlining & brackets added). Likewise, there are “systemic and profound effects” on anyone who talks with anyone,, that is,, there is always bidirectional causation whenever we engage in conversation. Talking is never unidirectional even though in NVB we made it seem as this was the case . 

 

In NVB, we have an inaccurate conceptualization of human interaction. The “dynamic ongoing system”, which contains all the variables of both the speaker and the listener and which is SVB, became visible due to the fact that a passionate and clinically-oriented behaviorists like Carr began to recognize that he and his colleagues were “not talking about unidirectional effects but, rather, about child behavior altering adult behavior, and vice versa.”  

 I have listened to a You Tube lecture byCarr and was instantly struck by how he sounded!!!! I highly respect him as his devotion to his profession made him acknowledge that he was profoundly altered by his interactions with developmentally disabled children. 

In SVB we can finally begin to experience, understand, accept and appreciate the fact that we are altered by all our interactions with others. Carr’s findings extend to every conversation. Carr,wrote that paper because he wanted behaviorism to be viewed as a study of purpose rather than a study of behavior. His views align with SVB. Not surprisingly, Carr was liked very much by his students and  he taught, like me, classes in Principles of Psychology class,.