Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[Maia]

Oh Quarky! Thanks!

(((hugs)))

Try some roasted qualia on a stick. (passes around the garlic butter and bread)

 

[Limbo]

Make a pendulum and use it to communicate with your unconscious mind through the ideomotor effect. Simple yes/no questions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiFAAvkNTMw

Then ask yourself, what part of you is 'aware' of the ideomotor movement necessary to answer your questions and micro-managing the movement? What part is answering your questions, and is it 'aware', and are you 'aware' of that part of your mind?

Ask it...is it aware?

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Is it possible that this might make more sense when I haven't just finished a thirteen-hour-day with Alzheimer's patients? Or will it never be more comprehensible than it is at this moment?

Probably not. There was quite a bit of compressed telegraphed speech left over from earlier conversations in there.

The basic point being -- dualism is a waste of time because it has a central unsolvable problem. If we go with monism, then we have one of two choices, so say the Cartesians -- materialism or idealism. Idealism posits that the only substance is mind and matter is illusion (or action of mind -- mind creates what we see as matter). Materialists posit that all is matter so mind is a result of matter acting in the world (opening and closing of ion channels in semipermeable membranes, etc.)

I don't like Searle particularly but I do like his approach in rejecting the Cartesian baggage and saying that the original mistake was to start counting in the first place (one substance, two substances, bleh)

However, I think I now have a new understanding of the illusory nature of the dualistic paradigm. It seemed to come to me at about 5:30, while Mr. Croker was kicking me under the table, eating his bib, and trying to pull his tray to the floor... as so many profound ideas do...

What a flirt.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

All righty! Moving on to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” tasty roasted qualia with garlic butter, PTSD, and John Shelby Spong. The “hard problem of consciousness,” (term by David Chalmers, although he hardly made the concept up, “ refers to the difficult problem of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. Chalmers contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomena. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set, and he assumes that the problem of experience will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained.” This POV is opposed by reductive materialist such as Dennett, and also by eliminative materialists such as Paul and Patricia Churchland.
First of all, I do think that there are some very valid points in the entire argument, both for and against, but that nobody is really going about it in a way that ultimately makes much sense. This doesn’t particularly matter if people enjoy philosophical ideas for their own sake, but the final implications continue to elude everyone involved. David Chalmers is getting at something valuable, but he doesn’t seem to know what or why; Dennett correctly opposes the content of what he actually does say but severely overreaches in his own conclusions (as usual. And as always, the eliminative materialists are idiots.)

The “hard problem of consciousness” isn’t hard at all, and doesn’t really exist. When we clear away all of the excess verbiage, all that Chalmers is really saying is that experienced consciousness is subjective to each person. But this isn’t a “problem”. This is nothing but a common-sense observation. What becomes a problem is that he doesn’t seem to actually believe that this reality can co-exist with physical explanations for consciousness in the brain. This is why, strange as it may seem, this argument and others like it are actually based on theological ideas, although this basis will often not be overtly expressed. Once this single fact becomes clear, everything else falls into place.

A number of bizarre concepts, such as qualia, would otherwise never become bones of contention in the first place. If a qualia is actually a “subjective quality of conscious experience”, per Wikipedia, then there’s just no reason at all for it “pose a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem.” It has nothing to do with materialist explanations or with the “hard problem” one way or the other, because a qualia is something entirely different from the way it has been defined by either side. This is how we see that arguments against theology can never themselves rise above the level of anti-apologetics. Dennett’s elaborate arguments against qualia miss the point as entirely as do Chalmer’s passionate advocacy for it. The fundamental question is and remains: “So what?” At the end of the day, I am still the person that I was before we had the entire qualia discussion. If everything about a reductionist materialist view of consciousness is true, here we still are, reading a thread about consciousness, puzzling it, pondering it, arguing passionately for our points of view, still wanting one outcome or another, still being whatever it is that we actually are.

This is the point of view which nobody in the “consciousness camp” really seems to be starting from: as accidental beings, as physical beings, as beings in the non-theistic universe, we still strive desperately to understand ourselves. We use our minds to try as hard as we can to comprehend our minds. We struggle to penetrate mysteries. Maybe we are scared and unhappy at the thought that we might be “only machines”, but if we reject this idea, if we try to prove that we are more, then at the very least we’ve proven that these machines want more. These machines have become human. This is what it means to be human, no matter what words we are using. If there is a “hard problem of consciousness”, this paradox is it.

Yes and excellent post.

One of the issues that often arises, and has already arisen in one of these unending consciousness threads is "can we study consciousness scientifically?" with one side claiming that it is impossible because science deals only with the objective and consciousness is subjective, so consciousness is out of range.

I've always considered this a bizarre claim because we already use subjective states in science (everything we do ultimately is subjective) and we already study subjective states scientifically. That is what large parts of psychological research consist in.

But it is doubly bizarre because it seems to be based on a form of special pleading.

We can describe an animal's actions scientifically. See horse run. Describe what horse does. Model the process by which horse runs. Good science (well only good if we do it several times and control variables).

We can do the same for mental states, even to the point of examining neural actions. We see neurons, see neurons release neurotransmitter, etc. We can model what happens with this and correlate the model to particular mental functions. We already do this with certain mental functions in sea slugs and computers.

When it comes to consciousness, however, the claim is made that we cannot reduce experience to brain states. Well, yeah, we can't. But so what? We don't experience "blue" when we describe brain function, we describe the process by which blue is or can be experienced. Whoever's brain we examine experiences blue -- the whole system does it. We also don't move translationally when we describe a horse running. Why are we supposed to experience suddenly what someone else's neurons do when we watch them fire? We don't ask that of any other physical system that science models.

Consciousness is ontologically subjective. No one else can experience what you experience except you. But it does not follow that neuron function does not cause consciousness because we can't experience "blue" when we see the proper network of neurons firing in just the right way to cause the experience of "blue".

Can we be absolutely sure that we have the neuroscience correct if we end up with an extensive theory of the neural correlates of consciousness? Well, no. We can't be absolutely sure of it. But there is nothing outside of mathematical proof that we can be sure of absolutely. We can model, test, and if we repeatedly produce a system that appears in all respects conscious, then we can't possible do better than that. Some will say that all we can do is correlate brain states with experiences. Yep, that's all we can do. That's what virtually all of scientific explanations amount to -- that and having a theory that undergirds the whole thing and gives it explanatory power. We already got the theory (or, at least a three word summation -- neurons do it). We need to do the hard work of providing the correlations; and with that we have a full enough explanation of the neural basis of consciousness.

I don't see anything hard in this, aside from mixed up terminology.

At this point the philosophers will bring up Leibniz and his identity theorem. And I think they make a fatal mistake in applying it because when you listen to what they often say, they stay in the realm of someone looking at a neuron and claim -- those neuron firings don't have the property of experience -- when you have to look at it from the system-of-neurons-doing-the-work's perspective. It is in their action that experience arises. To say that neural networks -- acting -- do not have the property of experience simply means that you have decided ahead of time that no materialist explanation is possible.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Well, that's Heidegger's tack in invoking Being-there for consciousness in situ: you are already out there in-the-world in experience, it's only when you abstract -- 'draw from' and 'draw back from' [pardon: a little brand-H wordplay] -- "experience" to refect upon it that dualism crops up. I think he manages it, delving into the presocratics even researching monism and where it started to go wrong in Plato's cave, but the peculiar German via Greek hyphenated-nomenclature becomes such a burden that to sustain it we often end up back in our everyday dualistic speech patterns ("ahh, nominative case, especially first person, missing to being-there was: that is, 'how I've missed 'me''"). So there are such versions of monism-speak available, but they always leave us nostalgic for English as she is spoke: grounded neologisms in Being and Time instinctively flocking to the intellectual coast to gaze longingly across the channel at the flown facts and elementary propositions of the Tractatus. It's enough to make an old pragmatist cry... excuse me.

Anyway, screw the "level"-stuff for now. "Awareness is the relation of..." is a promising start I think, given that relating thing-A to other things, to class them as "A-things" or "not-A-things", must almost surely be near the base if not the basis of cognition, and its part in awareness (in the AI [LISP] paradigm, it's all relative: truth-functions all the way down, turtles).

Well, existentialist Nazis are always fun.

Didn't Heidegger get stuck and never really finish Being and Time (and some folks think he got the whole time thing backward anyway)? Seems like we could get stuck in this thread for an eternity. Unless someone as smart as he was comes along to help, and that sure ain't me.

I guess we could have a lot of fun adopting the language and speak in multi-hyphenated words.

After all isn't it a prerequisite of Being-in-Foot-Locker if one wants to purchase-Air-Jordans?

Awareness as 'relation of' is a good start. But relation of what?

 

[Frank Newgent]

Awareness as 'relation of' is a good start. But relation of what?

http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/images/canbegwti.gif

 

[PixyMisa]

(And as always, the eliminative materialists are idiots.)

And you were doing so well.

No, they're not idiots. Dennett, for example, is an eliminativist (?) with respect to qualia, and he is entirely correct.

The central point is that it is all mechanics, and this is simply true.

This is the point of view which nobody in the “consciousness camp” really seems to be starting from: as accidental beings, as physical beings, as beings in the non-theistic universe, we still strive desperately to understand ourselves. We use our minds to try as hard as we can to comprehend our minds. We struggle to penetrate mysteries. Maybe we are scared and unhappy at the thought that we might be “only machines”, but if we reject this idea, if we try to prove that we are more, then at the very least we’ve proven that these machines want more. These machines have become human. This is what it means to be human, no matter what words we are using. If there is a “hard problem of consciousness”, this paradox is it.

Certainly both Dennett and Hofstadter have made that point.

 

[Maia]

And you were doing so well.

No, they're not idiots. Dennett, for example, is an eliminativist (?) with respect to qualia, and he is entirely correct.

I don't know about picking out the eliminativist approach for specific arguments, but there are fatal flaws with the entire basis of the paradigm itself and how it was originally put together. I'd be willing to bet that they're not what you're thinking of, though. IMEO (in my educated opinion), an old theoretical outlook which hasn't stood up to the test of empirically evidence-based practice was sneakily repackaged to disguise the fact that it was completely outperformed by other therapies.I will explain the crucial eliminative materialist problem tomorrow (before the grueling weekend schedule begins!)

 

[Malerin]

I don't know about picking out the eliminativist approach for specific arguments, but there are fatal flaws with the entire basis of the paradigm itself and how it was originally put together. I'd be willing to bet that they're not what you're thinking of, though. IMEO (in my educated opinion), an old theoretical outlook which hasn't stood up to the test of empirically evidence-based practice was sneakily repackaged to disguise the fact that it was completely outperformed by other therapies.I will explain the crucial eliminative materialist problem tomorrow (before the grueling weekend schedule begins!)

Can't wait to hear it!

 

[PixyMisa]

I don't know about picking out the eliminativist approach for specific arguments, but there are fatal flaws with the entire basis of the paradigm itself and how it was originally put together. I'd be willing to bet that they're not what you're thinking of, though. IMEO (in my educated opinion), an old theoretical outlook which hasn't stood up to the test of empirically evidence-based practice was sneakily repackaged to disguise the fact that it was completely outperformed by other therapies.I will explain the crucial eliminative materialist problem tomorrow (before the grueling weekend schedule begins!)

Okay. I'll certainly grant you that just because a person is right about one specific point doesn't mean they're not an idiot, and I'll also grant that you - and some eliminative materialists - might well be talking about something different to me in using that term.

 

[blobru]

Well, existentialist Nazis are always fun.

This just in from Heidegger's spinning grave: "'Existentialist'!?"

Didn't Heidegger get stuck and never really finish Being and Time (and some folks think he got the whole time thing backward anyway)? Seems like we could get stuck in this thread for an eternity. Unless someone as smart as he was comes along to help, and that sure ain't me.

I guess we could have a lot of fun adopting the language and speak in multi-hyphenated words.

After all isn't it a prerequisite of Being-in-Foot-Locker if one wants to purchase-Air-Jordans?

Not sure about the fun part, but right on all other counts. I only bring up Heidegger as an example of the dubious utility of avoiding dualism-speak at all costs. B&T is a seriously great work of philosophy, but a grueling read, even for philosophy, due to its oddball grammar: the nominative, accusative, and genitive cases disappear (bye-bye I, me, and myself -- nice knowin' ya) so the philosopher nazi can describe thinking about / relating to a hammer in the dative (being-to-hand), using it in the ablative (being-at-hand), and the thinker/user in the locative (being-there). No subject-object dualism: consciousness always arising out of the changing environment. Tremendous feat of concentration, and ingenious; but as I say, not sure how useful, when you're always having to translate back and forth between specialized monism- and conventional dualism-speak just to understand what the heck you're talking about. Easier I think to stick with ordinary language and grammar, occasionally footnoting its 'dualism' as an accidental bias.

Being-sorry-for-this-long-winding-winded-aside.

Awareness as 'relation of' is a good start. But relation of what?

Present perception (of environment + need) to non-present perception (pattern + memory)? Ok, bring on the gestalt and inkblots, then.

 

[westprog]

experienced consciousness is subjective to each person. But this isn’t a “problem”. This is nothing but a common-sense observation.

The problem, as with every scientific fact is finding a scientific explanation. Subjective experience is not part of science, so far.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

The problem, as with every scientific fact is finding a scientific explanation. Subjective experience is not part of science, so far.

Yet it is amenable to scientific investigation. Meaning it's knocking on the door and no one will let it in?

 

[westprog]

Yet it is amenable to scientific investigation. Meaning it's knocking on the door and no one will let it in?

There's been considerable progress in finding out what affects subjective experience, but none at all in figuring out how it comes to exist. Indeed, as we can see from this particular part of the discussion, defining it is in itself extremely difficult.

I'll re-iterate my view on definitions. In any language, if it is to have some bearing on reality, it can't have every word defined in terms of other words. At some stage, a word must refer to reality, and be the end of the line. It might be possible to have a language in which every word was defined in terms of other words, but such a language would be entirely empty of meaning.

If that is the case, then it's inevitable that certain words will not be definable. They will be the wellspring from which other definitions come. IMO awareness, consciousness, etc, are such words. Incapable of definition, but fruitful of meaning.

 

[James in New York]

(raises hand)

Can I drop the class right now and still get a 100% refund?

Hell yeah.

 

[Maia]

I did a long, long post on eliminative materialism once, and now it will never be found again. A search was unsuccessful. I'll try to recreate it, but I may miss points I made before.

Basically, eliminative materialism is a theoretical stance put forth as an alternative to so-called "common-sense", "ordinary", or "folk psychology" ways of understanding the mind and mental states. (There may very well be eliminativist methods which can be used in order to discuss or understand specific concepts-- in other words, essentially denying the existence of whatever is being discussed or understood-- but that's not what we're talking about here; this is the original theory.) Earlier forms of eliminative materialism were really impossible to tell apart from reductive materialism in most ways, because they posited that mental states were basically reducible to brain states. In the 1970's and 1980's, however, as developed by people like Paul and Patricia Churchland, eliminative materialism became a radically different theoretical outlook. Under this theory, mental states are not reducible to neurological states, even though they do take place only in the brain (in contrast to what someone like Dennett is actually arguing, so I do have to give him that much.) And no matter how elaborately this is explained, it never really does seem to go beyond this bizarre combination of reductionism and dualism. A number of objections to so-called "common-sense" psychology are certainly brought up, but when examined, they all boil down to the same thing: the theoretical framework which poses our behavior and mental states as being controlled by our beliefs is somehow faulty. "Folk psychology" is classified with "folk physics, folk biology, and folk epidemiology", none of which turned out to accurately represent the natural world. Analogies are repeatedly and regularly drawn between "folk psychology" and beliefs in demons, angels, apparitions of God, etc., complete with clear statements that the psychological and psychiatric community will soon discard all theoretical models related to "folk psychology" just as surely as this outmoded medieval silliness was discarded.

There are many different arguments against eliminative materialism, none of which I'm going to get into here, but I think that the problems with these arguments themselves can be best summed up by this quote:

Defenders of folk psychology object that these theoretical considerations cannot outweigh the evidence provided by everyday, ordinary experience of our own minds, such as our introspective experience, which seems to vividly support the reality of mental states like beliefs.

Nobody who argues against eliminative materialism seems to have understood the way that Paul and Patricia Churchland have really pulled the wool over everyone's eyes any better than this, and there's really something almost unbelievable about it to me. If anyone's ever seen the "color-changing card trick" video, the arguments against eliminative materialism reminded me of nothing so much as that. When we watch it, we're trying so hard to keep our eyes on our cards that we don't notice the way that the colors of everything else in the entire video have changed. Then, there's that little problem with not noticing the gorilla in the background...

The very first thing which anyone should have picked up on in the eliminative materialism argument is the idea of "folk" or "common sense" psychology. It is the absolute foundation of this theory, because everything is defined in opposition to it. But it is never clearly defined. Who are the folk? What is the common sense? What is the theoretical basis? Who came up with it? Who defined it, and where is the definition recorded? Which scientists and researchers worked on it? What is its history?Where are the books and articles about it? Where are the studies on it? Who has argued for and against it? What are its parameters? Exactly which claims are and are not made by it? Not even one of these questions is answered, and yet this incredibly vague definition of the supposed theoretical platform against which eliminative materialism is itself defined is allowed to stand. Nobody ever, ever questions it. Unbelievable. That's the only word. But somebody certainly should question it, because when the Churchlands yap on and on about "folk psychology", they know exactly what they're talking about, and that's not it. They're being very sneaky about attacking an established theory of mind without ever calling it by name, and I think the reason why they do this is that they know they could never succeed if they took it on directly.

What we do see in the history of eliminative materialism is that the theory itself began to radically change at a very specific point in time. The time when it changed is the key to what really happened, and what true eliminative materialism really is. Before the late 1970's and early 1980's, it was essentially the same thing as reductive materialism. After this point in time, what it was really arguing was that our beliefs don't determine our mental states or our behavior, but that our behavior stands on its own.

Stripped of its weaselly claims to represent something else, guess what this is? Straight, good old-fashioned behaviorism. And I have to say that I think this is what the Churchlands have been always been arguing for. But to understand how all of this makes sense, we have to look at what else was happening in the mid 1970's and early 1980's. Dr. Aaron Beck was developing his cognitive-behavioral theories. Unlike eliminative materialism, it was never intended as a set of ivory tower mental exercises, but as a practical and therapeutical tool against depression. His pioneering work, Cognitive Therapy of Depression, was published in 1979, and he laid out the foundations of his theories. Our mental states are perpetuated by our beliefs about ourselves, the world around us, and our future. If these are negative, they create the negative cognitive triad. This triad must be broken through examining and identifying irrational negative beliefs, and then by modifying them through practical therapeutic techniques.

Even though this is called cognitive-behavioral therapy, the truth is that it's strayed pretty far from the behavioral roots, especially by the 1990's, by which time Paul and Patricia Churchland were really going strong.
In CBT, the negative beliefs are understood to take place on three levels: surface, intermediate, and core. We acknowledge these realities, because if we don't, people will not get better. And the key to the entire thing is that CBT is now THE standard evidence-based practice for a very wide range of pathologies, from depression to anxiety to panic disorder to anger management to antisocial disorder to addictions to obsessive-compulsive disorder to... it's a long list. How do we know? That's the best part of all.

We know this because CBT has been proven, as it must be, through the empirical tools of evidence-based practice. It has been proven to work better than other therapeutic treatments in over 100 studies, as measured by improvement on every kind of standardized testing instrument. Something like eliminative materialism doesn't ever have to be subjected to this kind of testing, because it is not a real world application. People like the Churchlands don't ever HAVE to find out if it works in the real world, and if they did have to, they'd be in for quite a shock, because it really is nothing but behaviorism. And in clinical practice, behaviorism does not work, and CBT does. That's why it's standard clinical treatment and behaviorism is not. That's why we use CBT in applications in the real world, in clinics, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient and inpatient mental health, and everywhere else you could ever think of. "Folk psychology" is no such thing, and people like the Churchlands know it-- it's really CBT theory, the theory that our beliefs determine our mental states and our behavior, and it has been proven over and over and over again to be true in in the real world. If they want to try to prove that it's not true, then let them actually come out and test its practical application, which is behaviorism. But it would be nice if they could be honest about what they're really arguing with eliminative materialism, because they're not being honest.

 

[AkuManiMani]

What we do see in the history of eliminative materialism is that the theory itself began to radically change at a very specific point in time. The time when it changed is the key to what really happened, and what true eliminative materialism really is. Before the late 1970's and early 1980's, it was essentially the same thing as reductive materialism. After this point in time, what it was really arguing was that our beliefs don't determine our mental states or our behavior, but that our behavior stands on its own.

Stripped of its weaselly claims to represent something else, guess what this is? Straight, good old-fashioned behaviorism. And I have to say that I think this is what the Churchlands have been always been arguing for. But to understand how all of this makes sense, we have to look at what else was happening in the mid 1970's and early 1980's. Dr. Aaron Beck was developing his cognitive-behavioral theories. Unlike eliminative materialism, it was never intended as a set of ivory tower mental exercises, but as a practical and therapeutical tool against depression. His pioneering work, Cognitive Therapy of Depression, was published in 1979, and he laid out the foundations of his theories. Our mental states are perpetuated by our beliefs about ourselves, the world around us, and our future. If these are negative, they create the negative cognitive triad. This triad must be broken through examining and identifying irrational negative beliefs, and then by modifying them through practical therapeutic techniques.

Hehe.

There are a lot of devout behaviorists about in this forum. I'd like to see what rebuttals they might have

 

[AkuManiMani]

A number of bizarre concepts, such as qualia, would otherwise never become bones of contention in the first place. If a qualia is actually a “subjective quality of conscious experience”, per Wikipedia, then there’s just no reason at all for it “pose a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem.” It has nothing to do with materialist explanations or with the “hard problem” one way or the other, because a qualia is something entirely different from the way it has been defined by either side. This is how we see that arguments against theology can never themselves rise above the level of anti-apologetics. Dennett’s elaborate arguments against qualia miss the point as entirely as do Chalmer’s passionate advocacy for it. The fundamental question is and remains: “So what?” At the end of the day, I am still the person that I was before we had the entire qualia discussion. If everything about a reductionist materialist view of consciousness is true, here we still are, reading a thread about consciousness, puzzling it, pondering it, arguing passionately for our points of view, still wanting one outcome or another, still being whatever it is that we actually are.

Yea. I never really understood what was so contentious or radical about the concept of qualia or why there was so much hoopla over "materialism" vs. "dualism" vs "idealism". Whatever "-ism" on ascribes to we're still here experiencing the world and its full of "stuff" that we sense and interact with. What different does it really make what label we put to all of it? Most of the high profile philosophers on the subject [like Dennet and Chalmers] have valid points but then they go to ridiculous lengths to prove the "-ism" of the other guy wrong and end up making very silly arguments.

This is the point of view which nobody in the “consciousness camp” really seems to be starting from: as accidental beings, as physical beings, as beings in the non-theistic universe, we still strive desperately to understand ourselves. We use our minds to try as hard as we can to comprehend our minds. We struggle to penetrate mysteries. Maybe we are scared and unhappy at the thought that we might be “only machines”, but if we reject this idea, if we try to prove that we are more, then at the very least we’ve proven that these machines want more. These machines have become human. This is what it means to be human, no matter what words we are using. If there is a “hard problem of consciousness”, this paradox is it.

Exactly. Why should the label of "machine" make us feel our lives and existence are of any less value?

 

[AkuManiMani]

At this point the philosophers will bring up Leibniz and his identity theorem. And I think they make a fatal mistake in applying it because when you listen to what they often say, they stay in the realm of someone looking at a neuron and claim -- those neuron firings don't have the property of experience -- when you have to look at it from the system-of-neurons-doing-the-work's perspective. It is in their action that experience arises. To say that neural networks -- acting -- do not have the property of experience simply means that you have decided ahead of time that no materialist explanation is possible.

The only real way the issue can be dealt with is to continue to study consciousness from the "outside" and the "inside" until the descriptive gap is closed and our understandings of the two perspectives are elegantly interchangeable.

 

[kellyb]

Something like eliminative materialism doesn't ever have to be subjected to this kind of testing, because it is not a real world application. People like the Churchlands don't ever HAVE to find out if it works in the real world, and if they did have to, they'd be in for quite a shock, because it really is nothing but behaviorism. And in clinical practice, behaviorism does not work, and CBT does. That's why it's standard clinical treatment and behaviorism is not.

How are you defining behaviorism there, and can you give me an example of how it was demonstrated to be ineffective?