Beyond its immediate domain, behaviorology coordinates with other natural–science disciplines and even overlaps with some of these. Understanding these overlaps helps build our interconnected perspective.
Unsurprisingly, some topics regarding robot life reflect human concerns. This column and the next set the stage for looking more closely at various topics of robot life. These topics include emotions and feelings, energy sources, reproduction, pre–installed experience, planned diversity, humor, social life, and various quality of life considerations.
During the last decades of the twentieth century, traditional natural scientists (like physicists, chemists, and biologists) were turning their attention to solving the many major (and minor) problems around the globe. In this period they have increasingly realized that these problems extensively involve human behavior, which causes many of them. Thus the solutions must also involve changes in human behavior.
Now we can consider managing superstition. In the majority of cases, superstitious and mystical accounts remained untested. Not only was testing energy–expensive, and thus unlikely to occur, but the accounts had grown layer upon layer of convoluted rationales and implications. Many included a range of non–natural agents and components, such that they became thoroughly untestable.
In discussing the boundaryless biological continuum for life forms that involves non–life and life, the last column pointed to the relevance of the Law of Cumulative Complexity. This column digresses to consider this law more closely.
Coverage of the vast verbal–behavior topic begins with some of its recent history, and then with some ancient history regarding the relation of evolution and physiology to verbal behavior. These provide a foundation for defining not only verbal behavior but also the verbal community. After that come some characteristics of verbal–behavior analysis.
We have expanded into some details about the natural laws governing behavior. This includes forays into respondent behavior and conditioning, and operant behavior and conditioning. Our various examples have begun to show the range and depth, that is, the complexity, of our human behavior and its causes, its independent variables. The complexity even extends to the application of these laws in interventions that can help solve local and global problems.
