5HC : Chinese boxes or tea chests?

Iorwerth Thomas · 03 Feb 2005, 04:39 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Thu Feb  3 04:39:06 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Chinese boxes or tea chests?
In-Reply-To: <029201c5095b$6a0d5620$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F3795D8D7358E381E29AD7FB97F0 at phx.gbl>



>From: "James Wynn" <thewynns at earthlink.net>
>
>I don't know the whole history of Behaviorism[2], but wasn't it most
>popularized in B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom & Dignity"? He is hardly a
>fringe personality in the science of Behavorialism. Skinner argued that
>problems of human overpopulation could be handled by the emerging
>'technologies of behavior" which in order to be fully developed had to be
>sundered from the notion of human "free will", that an "automaton" resides
>within us (as opposed to the understanding that we are the sum of Nature 
>and
>Nurture). There are lots of critics of Skinner (count me with them), but
>none that I know of do so with empirical data.
>

>From conversations with a psychologist friend, I get the impression that he 
vaccilated between the two (he was an epiphenomenonologist (sp?), so 
consciousness - when he believed in it - didn't matter anyway).  He 
apparently subjected his daughter to operant conditioning, but that may be 
exageration - my friend doesn't like him overmuch.

Iorwerth

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