That larger context involves three different and overlapping disciplinary levels of evolution. These result from three different but related kinds of selection. And all three kinds of selection involve consequences of one sort or another. So the context of all our column topics exists as three kinds of evolution through selection by consequences.
This column considers a greater range of functional relations to which robot behavior must be sensitive regarding programmer–unanticipated events. This range goes well beyond respondent conditioning, extending into all the key areas covered by the term operant conditioning. As you recall from the first set of columns (see references) operant processes occur continuously throughout life.
While discussion of robotics could occur from any of our available perspectives—agential, environmental, or robotic (as described over several recent columns)—the discussion of robotics here derives from our standard, scientific environmental perspective. This avoids any terminological confusion that could stem from trying to deal with both robotics and the robotic perspective at the same time.
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.
This column contains examples of ordinary, though unpleasant experiences, called “daily downers,” that certainly seem at least indirectly to provide a kind of evidence that reality seems to exist independently of our neurally behaving it. The examples constitute a kind of support for reality’s possible—some would say probable—although unknowable, independent existence. So does reality exist?
Consider some reality implications. The current evolved state of our physiology provides no other access for inputs (i.e., energy traces) of any kind from further afield than our sensory neurons, as extensive or as limited as they might be, even with instrumental supplements. All inputs, even with such supplements, must come through our sensory neurons (e.g., photoreceptors, phonoreceptors).
This column looks more closely at how reality stems from the firings of sensory neurons. Recall that this discussion questions, and tries to answer, how knowing about reality happens. This discussion can neither question nor answer whether or not reality exists. For now, we just presume that reality exists.
The behaviorological analysis of the contingencies surrounding protracted dying prompts new science–based practices related to ethics, person/body death, the easing of the bereavement of survivors, and especially the managing of the social–death experience in ways that reduce its negative impact for both the dying and survivors. A thorough discussion of such practices belongs to other more detailed sources (e.g., Prof. Fraley’s book on Dignified Dying…). Meanwhile this column emphasizes reducing the negative impact of the social–death experience.
The discussions in this column avoid the order in which the three kinds of death usually occur across the extended time span of a terminal illness. In that order, when the three types of death occur slowly, social death usually occurs first, followed by person death, and then by body death.
The question concerns life’s meaning. What is the meaning of life? This column also attempts answers which, though different, also may not seem satisfactory, at least to some people.
