The Science of Reality (Theosophical Behaviorism)
Behaviorism used to be an important field in psychology, but today it is considered too deterministic to be correct. Correlatively, ordinary natural-language conversation has more or less remained theoretically untouched and behaviorally unexplored. We see natural conversation as a controllable, multi-scaled behavioral architecture subject to descriptive treatment, replete with determinable outcomes and key to an advancing planet-wide civilization.
BF Skinner's Walden Two is an important essay on optimizing consciousness, stipulating necessary conditions such as codes-of-conduct, staggered reinforcement schedules and engineered domestic items which, if used, improve mutual feelings of happiness and affection. Skinner and his State-run methods would remain curious and anachronistic today but for the recent and sudden appearance, on his principles, of semantic engines which perform conversation much more competently than today's humans do.
We encourage science and newly blossomed AI to revisit behaviorism and re-initiate practical exploration of consciousness as a natural cause with real-world effect. Some of its important, heretofore undiscovered features are being described currently, but the full and actual cause, we believe, remains hidden to view. The cause is the theosophical cosmos, an order and reality always known to humanity but repeatedly lost to culture and civilization. This theosophical order, we suspect, is starlight. We think the rigid cosmic photosphere, its grand, parallel majesty and its invisible, chaotic reflections and forms are what naturally constitute consciousness. We think ordered conversational behavior will allow society and civilization, as it did in its ancient, priest-administered magical cultures, to re-enter cosmic domains into which the astral light functions merely as the vanishingly small portal.
In this age, the key to this portal, spanning the discontinuity between life and death, should be performative understanding and use of natural language. We won't have a satisfactory science of consciousness until we both understand and fully respect how natural language generates analogy, meaning, perception, memory, understanding and will. Kripke, Searle, Grice and Russell have given us sufficient theory. What we need to do now is turn to Skinner to apply what we know to experimental sets and settings. Consciousness as theosophical conversation can be explored readily by adequately equipped subjects. The results of those explorations in turn can, if undertaken thoughtfully, be communicated and appreciated quite broadly.
The pre-motor potential in the brain's neocortex, which is now thought to lead consciousness of a voluntary movement by four-fifths of a second, is now on everyone's radar. Inhibition of this potential should prove sufficient to characterize most behavioral decisions by humans. How motor inhibition leads to psychological or physiological satisfaction in the subject, or a modicum thereof, also seems amenable to characterization. Things don't get interesting, however, until satisfaction is assented and then characterized publicly. Signing agreement about the nuance of a conversational moment, particularly if done on real-time television, should open society to benign, diaphanous, cosmological potentials that have always been at work but concealed deeply within human nature.
Freedom as inhibition, as Skinner believed, is caused just as anything else is. Freedom as satisfaction is what science and society must engineer.
