May 5, 2015

May 5, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

I woke up from a good night sleep, which ended with a dreadful dream. Bonnie my wife and I had come to an edge. There was an abyss and in the distance a mountain range. It seemed to me I needed to be on that mountain range and I was sure my little towel would fly me there, if I held it spread out in front of me. I demonstrated to Bonnie how to hold it, so that she could fly too, but I noticed she didn’t believe it was possible. It then dawned on me that if she would take the jump, I would witness seeing her crash to her death. I didn’t want that, of course, and all of a sudden I didn’t understand anymore how it had been possible that I had been thinking that I could fly across this abyss? It was impossible and although initially this seemed like a realistic plan, I had been woken up due to her fear and I called off the jump.

When we analyze this frightening dream with the certainty that comes from the knowledge that human beings behave their environments neurally - that is, due to conditioning, we acquire individually different verbal and visual concepts with which we navigate and construct our ‘reality’, which remains inaccessible to others - we find that this dream has something interesting to convey. 

Although the dream appeared to be about Bonnie’s fear of flying, it was, of course, about me. The fact that my neural behavior concatenated this dream is undeniable. I woke up from this dream in which I was looking with Bonnie at this deep abyss and across at the distant mountain range. I held a small towel in my hands and Bonnie held one in hers and according to me it was possible to use that towel to fly across. 

 

It is not so odd to think of a dream within a dream, when one realizes that one can only think about the dream after one has woken up. Interpretations of this dream are only possible following an ‘awareness’ of the dream, that is, after the chaining of covert, nonverbal, neural behaviors, we are aware of the dream, or rather, we believe when we verbally express this chain that we are aware of ‘it.’ It is not even so odd then to think of a dream within a dream within a dream, because the chaining of neural verbal and nonverbal behaviors makes this possible. There is truth to the 'esoteric' fact that our body knows.  

May 4, 2015

May 4, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

When the listener responds to the speaker’s voice, the listener is either responding to an appetitive or to an aversive stimulus, that is, the listener either likes or dislikes the speaker. However, the listener’s response is a neural behavior of which he or she is either capable or incapable. For instance, the listener must have a behavioral history with English language, to be able to understand an English speaker. If such a history is missing, the listener will be incapable of having appropriate responses to English speakers. The listener’s history of reinforcement conditioned his or her body to appropriately respond to English stimuli. Whatever the listener is capable of perceiving as appetitive or aversive is always determined by his or her history of reinforcement. 

     

The saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder is factual in that the construct of an appetitive or an aversive sounding speaker is made possible by the neural behavior of the listener, who mediates the speaker. The listener who  identifies a speaker as interesting or uninteresting, as appetitive or aversive, is capable because his or her body was conditioned to do so, that is, auditory stimuli were repeatedly reinforced as such. What may sound good to one, may sound bad to another. In other words, the listener neurally or non-verbally behaves the speaker and thus provides reinforcement. 

Other than in the eye of the beholder there is no beauty. Everything that is perceived as out there, in the external environment, is in fact happening within the skin of each organism, who is conditioned to do so. Since such behavioral processes happen to individual organisms, listeners, as an audience of one,  feel energized or drained by a speaker. In the former the listener experiences the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) of the speaker, but in the latter the listener experiences the Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) of the speaker. Their body produces neural behaviors that make them attentive or inattentive. People describe their environment or others as something outside of themselves that is stimulating or tiring to them, but they don't realize that they refer to their body which has been conditioned by previous circumstances to increasingly respond stimuli in that manner. As long as they don’t listen to themselves while they speak, as they would in SVB, they don’t realize that they sound exactly like what they don’t want others to sound like and that the pot is calling the kettle black.The latter is an example of NVB.

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”.

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.

May 1, 2015

May 1, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M. S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

Today is the first day of May and it is a good moment to write with a new font called “Arial.” I like this fond because it is easy to read. If this writing were speaking, I would say it is easy to listen to. Other fonts take longer to get used to. I don’t recall having written with this font, so this is a new experience for me. Many people have told me when they began to listen to themselves while they speak they realized they have never done that before. In effect, they then talk with a different tone, which may be compared with the different font I now use. I have used swirly letters and block-shaped letters and found this strongly influenced what I was writing. This font feels like a good fit. I am sure I will use it for the rest of the month. It was nice to have used “Latha” font last month. 

“Latha” is spacious, but “Arial” is dense and clear. My thoughts are compatible with this letter type. I am reminded of a dream I had shortly before I woke up. I had crawled underneath a railroad bridge when a train was approaching. Suddenly the rails began to curve and bent away. I ran to get outside the rails, because only there I would be safe from the approaching train. I succeeded. However, some hulk-like character appeared. He held the rails in his hands, as if it was a rope and he was swinging it around like a cowboy. He was aiming at me. He threw his rope at me, but missed and the rails lay in front of me looking like a puddle of melted candle. I was not harmed by the dangers I had faced, but there was neither relief nor excitement about it. I remember thinking that I should be shocked or feel liberated, but there was no such experience. I woke up wondering what this dream might mean. After I got up I went on with other things and it is only now hours later that I am reminded that I had this dream.