May 3, 2015

May 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

Behaviorologists, who insist that the science of human behavior is its own separate discipline because psychology can’t and doesn’t represent them, find themselves beating a dead horse each time they point out that most scientists continue to believe in “mini-deities” in spite of the fact that they acknowledge that “human beings are a product of natural processes.” The reason this keeps occurring is not because of some “cultural fog,” but because of how we talk.

In “What is Reality to an Organic Unit of Behavior” (2014) Lawrence Fraley beautifully analyzes this “I” or “me”, the entity which supposedly manages our body and its behavior from within. Although Fraley has written wonderful works about the “behavior-controlling relations” that maintain our ancient belief in our “personal internal agent”, he doesn’t say anything and doesn’t seem to realize that it is our way of talking about this “personal self-agent”, which maintains the fact that we keep on living “within the bubble of that fiction.” What keeps getting lost in the complex behavior of academic writing is a much more simple behavior, talking, has continued unabated. I say simple, because pretty much everybody can and must do it, even the most successful academic. 

A good example of this is the little heard off personal life of Albert Einstein. When his marriage with his first wife, due to extra marital affairs, was falling apart, he made a misogynistic list of demands presumably in an attempt to keep his family together. He basically insisted his wife would be a slave to him. Unless our interactions show this “mystical agential self” is no more asserted, people will continue to talk out of their asses. Einstein said “there must be something behind the energy” and he pandered, in spite of all his knowledge, to of “a superior spirit” and “a superior mind.” Skinner’s personal life, by contrast, holds up to scrutiny. Everything we know about him was proof he really lived what he knew. One could also detect this in the sound of his voice, when he spoke of “the operant.” From his vocal verbal behavior it was clear “the particular form of that occurring orderly response” was “determined by the current configuration of the responsively sensitive neural bodily structures”.