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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