Consciousness, New Thinking About
Glen M. Sizemore
gmsizemore2 at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 27 02:40:42 EST 2002
No. I think that psychologically functional parts of the environment can be
called "stimuli" and that units of behavior can be called "responses," but
only a small part of behavior (reflexes and conditioned reflexes) can be
called "stimulus-response." I am talking about operants not respondents.
This distinction was made in the early '30s.
As I pointed out previously, to be conscious in the sense of self-aware is
to respond discriminatively to one's own behavior. So the processes that I
am talking about are what compose "consciousness." I know you don't agree,
but I don't really care.
Other people's utterances alter our behavior as listeners through the
process of operant discrimination - at least, there is no reason to think
this is not true. So "...our immediate interpretation of language..." is an
example of the discriminative control of operant behavior.
"matt" <matt at automagic.org>
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