Behavior passivity refers to the nature of behavior, all behavior, including all human behavior, of any type or level of complexity. Like all real events in nature, on this planet, in this universe, behavior is natural, that is, it comprises natural events. It is an inevitable reaction.
The behaviorology discipline also makes contributions to the capabilities of other natural scientists. As mentioned previously, after becoming basically familiar with behaviorology, scientists in many disciplines are more able to remain naturalistic in dealing with subject matters at the edge of, and beyond, their particular specializations. Perhaps you are such a scientist.
To summarize our current scientific understanding of consciousness, consider several interacting points. Conditioning involves energy transfers between the environment (internal and external) and the body in ways that, as our physiology colleagues can show, trigger cascades of neural impulses that variously induce several processes that include mediating behaviors. That is, stimuli are always involved in any production of the neural impulses that mediate covert or overt behaviors of any kind (i.e., respondent or operant).
At this point, the children arguing in the back seat, and even the beautiful, high sierra scenery, must fail to evoke any other consciousness chains, not only ones that alternate with each other but also ones that alternate with the chain that remains focused on the curves. The single consciousness channel must remain completely preoccupied with focused driving for the duration of those particular cliff–hugging sharp curves.
Other characteristic of consciousness responding, beyond those we covered in recent columns, also prove worthy of our consideration. One of these involves consciousness apparently happening as a kind of “single–channel” covert process (although more research is needed). This process often occurs separately from any concurrent occurrence of overt behaviors that could be happening under direct stimulus control.
Coercion causes problems. The scientist who led the effort to discover the parameters of punishment and coercion in the experimental laboratory, Dr. Murry Sidman, called these problems “fallout.” He called the three main types of this fallout “escape,” “avoidance,” and “countercoercion.”
Initially those networks became connected by gene–directed growth. Later, restructuring occurs—throughout life, on a moment by moment basis—due to the energy traces from conditioning processes. Physiology–discipline resources provide more details, which leads me (And you?) to love the coordination and cooperation that inheres among natural–science disciplines, along with their usually timely self–correcting interactions.
Consider the covert verbal behavior that constitutes the common kind of purely neural behavior that we call thinking. This opens the path to seeing consciousness combine brain processes and behavior chaining. We often use the term thinking to describe this kind of covert neural verbal behavior, but we recognize that thinking need not be verbal, and happens in other sense modes as well. Ever find some piece of music playing “inside your head?”
The implied problems get compounded when people use “self awareness” interchangeably with “consciousness.” To reduce confusion, we generally avoid the self–awareness term. However, some uses of it, or at least of awareness, seem legitimate so let’s explore them a little.
Consciousness involves covert behaviors and the contingencies that produce them. The behavior–behavior relations that constitute covert behavior chains, including those typical of consciousness, can occur as either respondent or operant behaviors.
