May 2, 2015

May 2, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

When I hear a nice song in a language I don’t understand, I feel inspired to write my own lyrics. I have been writing and singing beautiful songs lately. I realize how much I love singing. I like Brazilian and Hawaiian music and I use these melodies to write songs. I would like to be singing with a band and look forward to meeting other musicians, who can play the music I like to sing. 


As a verbal engineer I consider myself to be a natural scientist. I am not someone special, a celebrity or motivated by some higher purpose. Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB), the kind of vocal verbal behavior in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an appetitive contingency, isn’t possible as long as the speaker has any superstitious ideas.

Getting natural and becoming scientific about ourselves requires another way of talking. Our usual way of talking is Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) in which the speaker controls the behavior of the listener with an aversive contingency. Few people have the behavioral history that allows them to recognize that most talking is unscientific. Even scientists themselves don’t care at all about their way of talking. They may be scientific about their field, but they are as unscientific about vocal verbal behavior as anyone else. Although they are  sophisticated with words and academically approved with degrees, when it comes to talking, they are superstitious, held back, biased and insensitive. 

   

The majority of scientists continuous to believe in an inner self that causes them to behave the way they do. In other words, their education has failed to educate them to be able to talk in a different way. Although they may no longer believe in the supernatural, they have retained the fallacy of seeing themselves as the causal agents of their own actions and, most importantly, they sound like it. During instances of NVB in a verbal episode, the speaker dominates the attention of the listener. The NVB-stimulating speaker is reinforced by the NVB-stimulated listener, who, when he or she becomes the speaker, does the exact same. In NVB  the speaker struggles to retain and dominate the attention of the listener and the listener struggles to pay attention to the speaker. In NVB neither the speaker talks nor the listener listens, they both pretend.

Aversively-sounding scientists and teachers don't and can't teach well, as they don’t behave scientifically while they speak. They may be talking about the natural world, but they act as if they are separate from it. They have done a dismal job educating others about how behavior actually works. This is why most of mankind believes in non-existing entities and can’t solve any of their problems. And, this is also the reason we don’t have a scientific way of talking. 

SVB is a scientific way of talking. It is characterized by the ongoing well-being of both the speaker and the listener. During SVB the listener can effortlessly pay attention to the speaker as there is no aversive stimulation. When a verbal episode contains more SVB than NVB instances the results of such interaction show that no autonomous agent is causing this, but only our way of talking. 

  

Although scientist may agree that the natural world is determined, they have many problems applying this notion to others, specifically to themselves. The most pervasive cultural influence preventing scientific solutions to mankind’s problems determines that scientists talk like everybody else and produce mainly NVB. They have been conditioned to dominate, exploit, manipulate, coerce, alienate, distract, compartmentalize and dissociate, while they speak. 

Nothing keeps our belief in a behavior-controlling inner agent in place like NVB. Unless scientists lead the way with SVB things cannot and will not change. Regardless of many scientific discoveries, nothing has changed in how we interact with each other, because we keep referring to “I”, to “me” or to “you”, without realizing what we are talking about. Neither one of these exist.

A behaviorist account of who we are as individual organisms boils down to our neural and neuromuscular behavior. Neural behavior or thinking is not viewed by most of us as merely another kind of behavior that is determined by behavior-controlling environmental variables. This is not because it is so objectionable or difficult to understand, it is because of how we talk with each other or, rather, it is because of our lack of conversation. Indeed, we are not in the circumstances that would condition us to think otherwise. The assumption that papers, which are read by only a few specialized experts, would be able to change the vocal verbal behaviors of others is ludicrous. Emphasis on written instead of spoken words has prevented and continues to prevent learning.