Re: death of the mind.

From: Alex Green (dralexgreen_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 08/30/04 

Date: 30 Aug 2004 10:35:10 -0700

patty <pattyNO@SPAMicyberspace.net> wrote in message news:<YGwYc.68057$9d6.34533@attbi_s54>...
[snip]
> > Well, that points out one of the main problems with behaviourism.
> > A *domesticated* cat or dog, or a rat in a maze, will do
> > just about anything you want them to do. Which is why what's
> > called Taxicab Geometry works in Cities, and Psychiatrists Offices,
> > but it doesn't work in nature.
> > Since they know that you are paying for the food, and bouncing balls.
> >
>
> There may be something to this point. By severely limiting the
> behavioral choices available to the animal, one is tempted to ask
> whether what is being measured is the animal's behavior or the
> experimenter's behavior. Hopefully the EAB has that well under control;
> though i have never been able to figure out how they do it.
>

What the behaviourist is doing is providing a simple set of events (a
state) that can be modelled repeatedly and reliably by the cat. He
then induces the cat to change the state. If the cat contained no
model of the state then all its behaviours would be 'ballistic' (like
the behaviour of a sea anenome or some other simple organism). The
fact that the cat performs controlled behaviours adapted to the state
of the environment shows that it contains an internal model or state
that is being continually compared with the environment.

The cat seeks to produce particular changes and these particular
changes give us an insight into the cat's internal state. So
behaviourism should work and does work but the theory is wrong, the
cat does contain internal states.

Best Wishes

Alex Green

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