We have now come just about full circle. People’s increased understanding of behaviorology makes them move to apply it to the widest range of humanity’s individual and group concerns, using the behaviorological technologies that we can derive from the principles and concepts of this natural science of behavior. How can we help this happen?
For problems at the individual level, solutions reinforce the behaviors that produced them. Then the behaviors that solve problems serve as models for the behaviors of others that share the problems. That is, the occurrences of reinforcing solutions for some individuals function as evocative stimuli for the imitative solution behaviors of other individuals. When contingencies on the group make these solution practices become widespread across a group, they begin to affect the group as a group, often becoming socially institutionalized (e.g., formal education of individual group members).
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.
Unsurprisingly, many topics regarding robot life reflect human concerns. This column begins looking at some such topics of robot life. These topics include emotions and feelings, energy sources, reproduction, pre–installed experience, planned diversity, humor, social life, and quality of life considerations.
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.
Several commentators (such as Lee McIntyre in his MIT–published 2006 book, Dark Ages—The Case for a Science of Human Behavior) have put forth calls for the development of a natural science of human behavior (like behaviorology). The difference between natural science and social science is relevant to understanding the place of those calls.
The robotic perspective describes the limitations on perspective that pertain to a completely natural lump of organized (e.g., biological) matter. These limitations apply broadly, equally well, to everything. With adjustments for quantitative differences, they apply to me and to you and to all other evolving biological lumps of “living” and behaving matter.
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.
Misestablished reality involves behaviors of knowing some stimuli as the causes of some sensory–neuron firings that are actually not the stimuli that induced the sensory–neuron firings. This kind of inaccurate behaviors of knowing, regarding particular inputs, leaves the reality of these inputs misestablished. This means that these inputs likely affect subsequent behavior with similar inaccuracy.
Three main points pertain to discussing reality scientifically. The firings of sensory neurons provide the only, and limited, avenue to “contacting” reality. We “behave” reality through some of the behaviors that the firings of sensory neurons induce. And nothing precludes the existence of the environment, or reality, independent of neurally behaving it and knowledge of it.
