Hi ToKers/Gregg, I greatly appreciate the effort to delineate what we refer
to when we use the term 'behavior'.....However, I would like to think that
we can think outside of the 'box' of conventional thought once we are all
on the same page regarding what we think behaviors are. In your
presentation Gregg you mentioned, for example that objects show behaviors
too. So in that vein, Newton described Gravity as the attraction of bodies
to one another, whereas Einstein's out of the box explanation is that
bodies distort the fabric of space-time. The latter is congruent with
Relativity Theory so Gravity can be understood in the larger objective
context rather than as the mundane common sensical experience of gravity.
So for example Chance and I had a little side bar about how time controls
us, but we should be controlling time in order to comply with our genetic
destiny.....for example, it is now known that the Circadian cycle is 25
hours, but we comply with a 24 hour clock. Moreover, digitization of time
has distorted our perception of reality IMO. Perhaps a glaring example of
how our behavior is forced to conform to what Big Brother wants out of us
is the way in which we are induced to work for decades in order to have
material things, healthcare, etc, etc, and then we are forced to stop being
gainfully employed in retirement. We still potentially have many productive
years ahead of us but lack purpose or relevance a) because we define
ourselves by being employed, and b) that's how society sees us. The
'system' doesn't care about us once we are no longer seen as productive;
what kind of behavior is that? Societies are judged in part by how they
treat their aged. My point is that we are not behaving according to
criteria that we evolved to comply with. In my paper "The Phenotype as
Agent" I make the case for our behaviors being those that optimize our
interfacing with our environment in order to collect epigenetic data, which
is different from the way in which we usually think of behavior, only in
the now. In an emerging age of self-referential self-organizing people with
computers we could conform to our own set of principles in a way that would
be more consistent with our physiology.....I am thinking of the dichotomy
between Descartes and HD Thoreau, the former resorting to the rationale of
Mind-Body, the latter going back to Walden Woods in order to regain his
'self' and live deliberately. On a related note, when Frank Gehry's
psychiatrist was interviewed in a documentary about the architect, he
related that most people who come to his practice ask 'how can I change to
conform with the world?', whereas Gehry asked 'how can I change the world
to conform with me?" I hope we can consider such out of the box ideas come
April, if not before.....

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi List,
>
>   I am sharing some slides from a presentation I made at the conference I
> was at. It was organized by fellow list member Gary Brill. He brought
> myself and another scholar who works from a “Descriptive Psychology” frame
> together to talk about the concept of behavior. Although it was not well
> attended, I felt the exchange was productive.
>
>
>
>   One of the points I tried to make clearly is that previous attempts to
> define behavior in the field of psychology and behavioral biology have
> attempted to strongly distinguish between behavior and non-behavior. One of
> the central points the ToK makes is that we need to “start from the bottom
> or beginning” and define behavior in general and then realize that folks in
> biology or psychology or the human-person sciences are attempting to get at
> specific kinds of behavior, namely the behavior of organisms, animals and
> people.
>
>
>
>   The other cool thing from my perspective was that there is a very close
> line up with how Descriptive Psychology defines the behavior of persons and
> how the ToK does. Both essentially define the essence of persons behaving
> as persons as being characterized by a Deliberative actor self-consciously
> justifying their actions on a social stage. The Descriptive psychologists
> emphasized how this led to a parametric analysis of behavior that has been
> valuable. I found myself more fascinated by the conceptual correspondence.
>
>
>
>   To me, it has solidified one of the key conceptual insights about the
> nature of human nature. Namely, human beings are both primates and persons,
> and that these two dimensions of human beingness can be conceptually
> separated (even though enormously intertwined).
>
>
>
> Best,
> Gregg
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