​To what degree is time actually consciousness?  The experience of the “passage of time”, that is.  I was watching my cat eyeballing a ledge and then launching himself there with precision.
He used his brain to process various visual the stimuli from the world and predict where he would be in the future with the coordinated exertion of specific muscles.
 
This is how all behaviors work, whether we are conscious of them or not.  My cat likely didn’t think about the jump at all – maybe the advantages of the new spot, maybe auditory stimuli of possible threats in the distance, etc.  But he had a learning history, both since birth and in conjunction with his feline DNA.
 
In fact, we are conscious of only a tiny portion of our behaviors, from breathing, to balance, to absent-mindedly tapping our toes.  What is the difference between consciousness and sentience?  The latter means to feel and experience.  All animals do this, to a degree.
 
We usually refer to consciousness as “awareness”.  That is, “I am doing this”, “I did that”, “I could do that”, etc.  It’s impossible to know whether my cat is experiencing these thoughts, as he has no verbal behavior to communicate them to me or anyone else.  But he is obviously experiencing the world, and communicates in many other ways his emotions and even wishes.  When his eye and paws twitch when he sleeps, I know he is dreaming.  
 
But humans can describe ways in which we are thinking. Part of it is verbal, that is, specific stimuli arranged in a grammar that contains information about relationships in the world that takes place in a shared verbal community.  It’s really hard to self-analyze, but I’d venture a guess that most of our thinking is sort of sub-verbal, that is influenced by verbal behavior but takes place without much if any verbal stimuli.
 
When I suddenly remember to take the cookies out of the oven, I likely think, “Oh, shit, the cookies!”, but most of the information suddenly flooding into my awareness, the stimuli coming into my attention - the kitchen, the oven, the rack, maybe the smell of smoke, etc.  – I just experience without any language.
 
In behaviorism we call this a Tact, or labeling stimuli.  The stimuli evokes labeling behavior.  “Look at that”. “There it is. I’m thirsty. The cookies have been in the oven for too long.”  This allows us to chain complex logics together to create “worldviews” which link to abstract stimuli in the past and future and allow us to analyze and make plans.
 
In this complexity, we see time emerge.  My cat experiences it, through memories and stimuli relations (e.g. feeling anticipation before the bowl of food is provided). He has no verbal behavior from which to create advanced and abstract logic systems.  But he does experience relationships.  If the can is different than usual, he may become skeptical and adjust his expectations.
 
 If the can isn’t a can but say, a banana, his behavior of swishing his tail and meowing, glancing at his bowl, won’t be evoked.  There was no history of reinforcement with bananas, so no “association” between it and food.  I could hold a banana every time I feed him,  so it will soon become a “discriminative stimuli” for reinforcement (cat food).  Taking out a banana will signal the impending presence of cat food.
 
To what extent then does consciousness exist without verbal behavior?  For my cat and I, most of our experiences are not noticed by us at any given moment.  Stimuli in our bodies and in our environments around us are evoking behaviors in us but often “our mind is elsewhere”.    Maybe daydreaming.
 
To the extent that we are experiencing stimuli, attending to it, and are placing it in a context of past and present, are we creating time?  Are we merely predicting past and future events, based on logical relationships were have developed in our learning history?
 
Of course, we only have access to the past.  Or rather, stimuli in the present a relationship to which past stimuli has been reinforced.  The experience of “This is can is cat food” is related to “last time this can was cat food”, referencing a memory of the can stimuli we experienced previously.
 
Before my cat jumped on the table, I don’t know what stimuli he was attending to; it could have been a very rote, absent-minded behavior.  Yet it required both a learning history of past stimuli (similar tables, counters, ledges, etc.) and his body’s ability to jump, as well as a projection of the geometry involved that would require specific muscle movements.  He essentially planned a future scenario based on past experiences. 
 
Yet time – the passage of time – requires attention.  The phrase “time flies” appeals to subjective experience of a passage of time which one has not been attending to.  The fact that this happens when one’s attention is occupied elsewhere makes sense; you literally have not been attending to a changing series of stimuli.
I suppose one could define time as just that – a series of changing stimuli.  But the *passage of time* requires noticing these changes.  “Passage” denotes an experiential process whereby changes in stimuli are noticed and tracked.  So, you could say experiencing the passage of time requires consciousness.
 
Without consciousness, there would be no experience of a passage of time.  Changes in stimuli would occur, and they would evoke responses in an organism. But without attending to these changes, no “passage” would be recorded or responded to.  Just the moment, one to the next, in a constant state of reaction to the extent the organism is capable of response, learned or otherwise.
 
Time, unlike any other stimuli, is a dimension that requires a change to have occurred.  Up, down, left and right can exist despite change.  A location can just be.  However, time cannot just be – it *requires* two or more other dimensions to transition.
 
Consciousness likewise requires time, as it is the process of attending to changing stimuli.  But it also requires a sort of geometry in which the relationships between stimuli are analyzed and predicted, not just experienced.  An organism experiences time as stimuli change and it responds according to it learning history.  But to experience that passage of time, it must make relationships – up down, forwards, backwards, warmer, colder, more colorful, wetter, stinkier, closer, farther, etc.
 
 
What we call “attending” is responding to specific stimuli, which can be in the external environment or internal to our body (our thoughts).  We can “notice” things outside like cars or tress, as well as inside like feelings or memories.  When we are attending to time, we are attending to changes in stimuli.
 
But we can only ever attend to a glimpse of this passage, owing to our limited cognitive faculties.  Some people have been found to have the ability to recall stimuli relations far greater than average.  They can recall stimuli changes that occurred far into the past.  What they wore or ate in certain locations years ago.  I’m afraid these days I’ve become more and more goldfish-like, unable to recall relationships even hours ago!
But for the most part, the experiential passage of time is similarly limited to a sort of hour by hour, maybe day by day window in which our ability to recall changes in stimuli is acute.  This is what we call “passage” – not so much the thing itself but the intensity with which we are responding to it.  Things happening to us right now are always a “big deal”, but which fade over time.  “Time heals all wounds”, etc.
 
Our cognitive limitations require us to budget our attention.  We learn to “focus” on what is important, that is, what stimuli provides the most reinforcement at any given moment.  The passage of time, as a period of acute responding to changes in stimuli, can be considered a “behavioral repertoire”; it requires the evocation of a series of learned behaviors that create connections between past changes in stimuli.  The food was there.  Now it is gone.  I was on the floor.  Now I am on the table.  Noticing this requires attending to numerous stimuli both in the environment and in our bodies.
 
But (often mercifully), we forget and move on to allow space for processing new stimuli and relationships.  The more powerful stimuli, however, remain to varying degrees as memory. This ability to capture time – to attend to it and then remember it – seems fundamental to consciousness.  I worked with people with brain injuries once and individuals with short-term memory loss were perfectly conscious for a given period of time, but would then lose it hours or days later.
 For them, the passage of time must have felt quite different.  Only limited changes in time could be attended to.  I once sat at a table drinking coffee with a man who had no idea how long we had been sitting there.  When the waitress began to refill our coffees less frequently, he complained about the service, not realizing that a $2 unlimited refill would only last so long.   He did not realize the length of time because the memories of changes in stimuli were not being created.  Or at least, were fading too fast to be of use.

Any day when I can avoid scurrilous nonsense about ABA is a good day. But I am motivated to write in the context of the general social view of behaviorism essentially having been reluctant at best, and hostile at worst basically from its post S-R developments, which went much further
taking operant conditioning into verbal behavior, emotions and thought, and essentially putting a nail in any cartesian myths left standing.
But as a hard science, relying heavily on the scientific method, empiricism, determinism, parsimony, philosophic doubt, etc., it required measuring & manipulating dependent and independent variables. These contingencies are hard to arrange due to the complexity of an adult human life.
Generally coming out of the field of psychology, it was at a disadvantage toward other approaches - we would say "mentalistic", which rely on theoretical models of psychological functioning that are difficult to analyze experimentally, but broadly descriptive and general enough to be of use.
Behaviorists had limited access to the vast data in one's learning history that would be required to identify relevant variables. And as a relatively young field, had not yet built up larger tested theories to allow for explanations of complex events such as language, thought and emotion.
But within decades, the data was pointing towards a startlingly powerful insight into human behavior - everything we do or think - is ruled by the interaction between our phylogeny and our ontogeny, our genetics and learning history.
All of our thoughts and actions that could be measured were found to be under the control of environmental contingencies. A strict relationship was found between environmental stimuli, the organism's previous interactions with it, and future stimuli.
The frequency, intensity, and duration of a behavior (bx) is under the control of these elements.
Let me give an example:
If John has engaged in eating an apple in the past, we know his body "enjoys" apples (the presence of apples has produced eating, we call this "reinforcement").
If he sees an apple (stimuli), he will be likely to eat one if he has not had one in a while (we call this the "establishing operation", the condition in which one is either deprived or satiated on a stimulus).
Here's the mind-blowing part: any bx John engages in just before receiving the apple with be strengthened (more likely to occur in the future). This could be walking, talking or thinking.
It could be morally good or bad bx, but it will be strengthened. Washes the dishes + apple = strengthened. Plays on his phone instead + apple = strengthened.
But the opposite is true. Dishes + no apple = weakened. Dishes plus no phone = weakened.
And further, if John doesn't "enjoy" something after the bx (we call this "punishment", it will also weaken. Dishes + grating music = weakened.
This is much more advanced than the classical conditioning in which only the stimuli *before the bx* is analyzed.
e.g. Pavlov's bell rang before he got the meat powder (which always induced salivation), so the bell came to produce salivation. In operant conditioning, we look at the stimuli provided both before (the antecedent) and after (the consequence) the bx.
But it goes further and looks at behaviors that need to be learned. Unlike automatic bx such as salivation, sneeze, etc. , the bx of talking, riding a bike, waiting, etc. need to be learned. From here we get to the relations of verbal operants which identifies how different types of language get reinforced.
Skinner broke them down into categories, each consisting of a verbal stimulus (a bird), the verbal bx (saying bird) and consequent stimuli (reinforcers or punishers). The mand is requesting: verbal bx reinforced by receiving reinforcement from the thing requested, or removal of an aversive.
The tact is labeling: verbal bx reinforced by occurring in the presence of something. (look at the bird!)
The intraverbal is abstract thought: verbal bx reinforced in the absence of a thing. (birds come from eggs)
There are more, but you get the idea. The nice thing about seeing these relationships is they provide a window into how, why and when we say different things. They identify a learning history between stimuli and bx.
It turns out that any bx you can measure will be constrained by what we call the 4-term contingency: the establishing operation (EO), the stimuli, the bx, and the consequence (R or P). Bx more difficult to measure (Skinner calls them "within the skin", which I always found macabrely funny).
I forgot to mention stimulus and response generalization. These are key to how our bx repertoire grows. A learning history with stimuli x will generalize to stimuli Y according to its degree of feature similarity: color, shape, texture, etc.
Response generalization is a variation in response that produces the same effect: response X and Y both produce effect Z.
Stimulus equivalence is a crucial to understand more complex and abstract behavior, as it provides a framework to analyze environmental contingencies of the organism*.
* btw, behaviorism appears to be at work in any animal that behaves. Early models used rats and pigeons as their environmental variables were most easy to control.
A more recent branch of behaviorism has been relational frame theory (RFT), which may be most popularly known clinically as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and developed in large part by the work of Stephen Hayes.
It takes the notion of stimulus equivalence and expands verbal operants into much more complex relational areas (frames), such as size, value, categorization, etc. Each of these operants identifies additional relationships between stimuli and bx that can be measured and manipulated.
All of this within the hard science philosophy of empiricism, determinism, parsimony, etc.
Due to the complexity of relations in our learning history between the stimuli in our environment and our responses, a predictive analysis of human behavior will always be incredibly difficult.
A phrase I've liked is "we are swimming in a sea of reinforcement", referring to the overwhelming number of relations going on in our lives, each involving all of our senses: the temperature of the air, the feel of our clothes, our interactions with others, etc.
How both the preferences our DNA builds for us, as well as how environmental stimuli has interacted previously and is currently, with those preferences to shape our future bx, is crucial to understanding about why we all do what we do.

The Matching Law states, in essence, that an organism will do what has been most reinforcing to them in the past.  That is, generally either what feels good when they do it - either because they have received something from the world (cake, kisses, money), - or because they have removed some discomfort (cold air, delaying a task, uncomfortable social setting).
 
The matching law is at once an incredibly powerful insight into human behavior and a deceptively simple notion.  Because while choosing to eat cake over a rotten fish is easy to understand, much of our reinforcement in life is far more complex and nuanced.  Take for instance, a person who commits suicide.  The matching law states that their history indicates that in the behavior of jumping off a cliff they anticipated more reinforcement than in doing anything else.
This would be a case of negative reinforcement, in which an attempt was made to feel better by relieving or removing some discomfort.   But what was so discomforting about being alive?  If there was no physical discomfort being endured, the pain was psychic, some kind of emotional torment.  And when we try to look at their life and biology, we might find a genetic mechanism by which the chemicals needed for joy, optimism, etc. were not being sufficiently processed.  But we might also find a history of trauma, of anti-social relationships, etc.  All of these become so numerous and tangled that the matching law almost seems irrelevant.
 
But it isn’t!  Our behavior must follow its declaration: we move towards comfort and away from discomfort.  An analysis of behavior attempts to identify the cycles of reinforcement (punishment too, but we’ll keep things simple here), as they play out across 4 parameters: one’s present motivational state (how much they want or do not want something, in this case relief from psychic pain) + the environmental stimuli (the world, the cliff, thoughts), + the behavior (jumping off a cliff) + the consequence (relief of suffering).  Our analysis takes what is sometimes called a “molar” view of behavior.  That is, an organism’s every behavior never exists in isolation, but is a dynamic, ongoing interaction between our physical body & mind, our environment, and what happened after all prior behaviors.
 
Some behaviors have died out (gone extinct), or have been replaced by other behaviors.  E.g. I used to try and feel good by getting negative attention from peers by acting goofy, but I grew older and found that I felt better when I learned to behave in ways that were more honest, thoughtful and productive when in social settings.  When I did that, I discovered new avenues of joy and comfort – new “reinforcers”.  (I think girls started to take me seriously – and sex is just about as reinforcing as anything, aside from maybe heroin).
 
Three classic critiques of behaviorism are as follows: 1. it is mechanistic and dehumanizing, 2. it is reductionist, and 3. it is inadequate for explaining complex human behavior.
 
All 3 are quite true in a way; behaviorism looks at the behavior, not the “whole human”, it looks for dependent variables in a systematic way that requires empirical humility, and it does not seek to explain what it cannot measure.
 
However, this is also its great strength.  Because for millennia humans have relied on myth, superstition, and intuition to determine why people do what they do.  Or, in more modern times, to develop elaborate (however often untested) theories about it.  To this day it is popular to talk about “free will”, “personal responsibility”, “common sense”, or “the problem of consciousness”.  Yet these are each mostly incoherent terms. 
 
“Free will” would seem to require acting without influence of neither one’s phenotypic makeup or one’s past learning history of the world.  This is a notion as mystical and fanciful as a unicorn, in that according to the laws of nature and determinism, no such thing is possible (I’ll avoid the notions of quantum indeterminacy here, but suffice it to say that the answer is in the name: appealing to indeterminacy to explain why someone does something is a contradiction in terms; one might as well wear a banana on their head as a hat because the position of the electrons in their brain’s sodium can’t be measured by speed and position simultaneously).
 
Personal responsibility can either refer to social rules or one’s determination of their own actions.  Since the latter is an incoherent notion (see paragraph above), the former is entirely compatible with a behavioral, determinist account: rules are essentially a learning history of relations between stimuli that don’t require direct experience.  That is, I avoid a rock flying towards me because I have experienced being hit in the head by objects and thus have been reinforced by (learned to) avoid them when they come at me.  But if I work in a rock crushing yard, I follow the rule of wearing a hard hat because even though I have not had one drop on me yet, I have learned (the rule) that it is possible and that my hat will protect me from discomfort (planning for negative reinforcement).  Our lives are filled by rules that are continually providing reinforcement as they guide us towards comfort and away from discomfort.
 
Common sense is simply my repertoire with certain stimuli.  I have experienced a set of events in the world, learned rules about them, and follow them according to how strongly I have thus far been reinforced.  A man who doesn’t wear a jacket in the snow lacks common sense” simply because – as the matching law states – he has not developed strong enough relations between the contingent event of being cold outside or the non-contingent event of putting on a jacket before leaving.  There can be all manner of reasons for this – often simply due to chemical mechanisms such as those that result in ADHD, in which attention to irrelevant stimuli were more reinforcing; think of the absent-minded professor who is daydreaming equations and forgets to put on his pants.  A lack of “common sense”, or “sense that has been directed elsewhere?
 
The problem of consciousness, it seems we often forget, first requires a definition.  What do we mean by “consciousness”?  Is it simply being alive and experiencing the world?  Bacteria do that.  Is it thinking about and planning for events?  Many animals do that, and many animals “reason” or learn from their local species’ culture – this is simply a learning history of stimuli relations; If I lick this stick and put it in this big hole and pull it out it will be lined with delicious (reinforcing) ants.  Is consciousness communication?  Skinner provided a very sophisticated taxonomy of verbal behaviors that a community develops by reinforcing vocal and gestural responses to stimuli, such as requesting, labeling, receptive identification and imitation.  While we can in no way claim to understand or be capable of explaining every magnificent manifestation of what we commonly call “consciousness”, much less the particular cellular mechanisms or networks of synapses in the brain that conspire to produce them, our understanding of the principles of behavior and learning – not in the least the matching law – has far more explanatory power than that with which we derive without it.
 
The simple idea that what any of us do, at any time of day, can be largely explained by this simple law: that we do what has brought us most comfort or relived most discomfort in the past, has a profound possibility of opening us up to treating each other with the kind of recognition, honor, sympathy, and respect that only the most holy and sainted among us might be imagined to display.  Your mean boss.  The bad driver on the road.  Your annoying stepmother, the playground bully, the thief, the murderer, the rapist, the pedophile – the very worst people in the world all have learning histories that tell a story of the interaction between their genes and their environment.
 
But so too the successful entrepreneur, or Nobel prize winner, or star athlete, or president, wise man, genius or anyone else who seems to display great aptitudes or attributes.  Man is a messy mixture of hormones, brain cells and various organs, sloshing around from meal to meal, relation to relation.  His world is a mess of privileges and disadvantages, social structures and lucky breaks. 
 
Yet the one thing he is not is an actor outside of these things.  And that one simple truth, born out in countless scientific studies – if not simple observation – reminds us that we are all only human (homo sapiens), nothing more.  We are no different than all the kingdoms of life from which we share a common ancestor.  We evolved on the same planet, from the same molecules, atoms, amino acids and fundamental forces of the universe.  Subject to electromagnetic radiation, the strong and weak forces, gravity and the laws that they each must obey.  So, to must we obey them. 
 
So, do we have choice?  What is our purpose if we are nothing but highly advanced automatons, trapped in an endless war with entropy?  To the former the answer is yes, and no.  We make choices, but the matching law determines what they will be.  We feel as though we are making them because society has always described our lives as such, and our intuition that we are acting without any cause outside our own “will” arises from our severely limited cognitive and observational capacity.  We can only ever hope to process a handful of the almost limitless physical processes and environmental interactions that have made us who we are and are presently operating on us.
 
As for our purpose, this is not for us to decide alone.  For as products of our environment, we cannot but act in ways in which we have learned.  As a species, we have applied our evolved physical and cognitive capabilities to develop incredible things: families, social structures, beliefs, religions, reasons, science, governments, countries, AI algorithms that we are at the cusp of being unable to comprehend.  The vast majority of what we do is obscure to us – we just do it.  We find enjoyment, make friends, find lovers, raise children, go to work – all of this not only creates meaning but is meaning.  That is, it brings us comfort and avoids discomfort, even if we often don’t really understand why.
 
Society has great power to make us act and think in ways in which its complex systems have designed.  Many rules we follow lead us to truth, while others towards falsity.  But the matching law is there to remind us that while we may not know why specifically, we know why generally. And while it is only a starting point to understand and analysis ourselves and those around us, it is a point at which we fail to recognize at our peril.

Under a neoliberal framework, the criminogenic and anti-social effects of poverty must be denied and/or re-conceptualized as failures of institutions such as schools, criminal justice, corporate polluters, or government.
 
While corruption at various levels in each of these institutions is clear, they are the mere band-aids of a capitalism that refuses to reckon with poverty.  What’s more, this capitalism has strong levers over each of these institutions via lobbying and other forms of political capture, making even their attempts at triage ineffective at best.
 
But the neat trick neoliberalism does, in vainly trying to reconcile itself with free market conservatism, is allow for basic assumptions about property and employment.
 
Conservatism: poverty is caused by choice

• no need for institutions to begin with.

Neoliberalism: poverty is caused by institutional failures

• If we had good institutions, poverty would be erased.

 
Each assumes that our underlying economic system is either good or good enough, with varying degrees of quality institutions.
 
Yet even in this perfect world, we still have massive wage inequality and poverty.  Good schools, quality policing, racial, religious and gender harmony, strict environmental regulations will still not impede the fact that our economy runs on poverty level wages.  The experience of poverty might be a little better - healthcare, small class sizes with social supports, humane policing, environmental hygiene.  But capital will be so limited for so many that their housing will still be restricted to certain neighborhoods.  Spending will be limited and therefore stress high due to precarity.  Expendability will be high as low specialization/skills means their labor will be easily replaceable.  Political advocacy will be low due to social ostracism intrinsic to the economic devaluation of their work. 
 
All of this raises stress and promotes indignation towards those born to more capital who live as if their worth is greater due to all the privileges life has subtly afforded them. 
 
Wealth provides exponential access to agency.  Paying rent, investing, taking vacations, sending your happy kids to college, having nice things, not worrying about pollution or crime.  And if your wealth comes from your own labor, a great sense of pride reinforces one’s sense of worth, or social praise within one’s skin.  And should you require any additional help in reinforcing pro-social instead of anti-social behaviors, all these added reinforcing stimuli are available as well.
 
If human freedom can be limitedly defined as access to reinforcement, a certain level of relative  capital is by far the determining factor in this phylogenic growth across the lifetime.
 
From William Baum’s Understanding Behaviorism:
 
A group's culture consists of operant behavior shared by the group members, acquired as a result of membership in the group, and transmitted from one group member to another. Evolution of culture occurs in a manner parallel to shaping of operant behavior and biological evolution—by variation coupled with selective transmission. In cultural evolution, the pool of cultural practices possessed by a society, analogous to a gene pool, is the culture pool. The traits that produce culture are behavioral specializations, imitation, and social reinforcers and punishers. The replicators of culture (practices) are the activities of group members passed along by imitation and instruction. They include nonverbal practices like dietary selection and manufacturing, and also verbal practices like stories, sayings, and rules. Practices of social reinforcement and punishment are fundamental replicators of human culture. Group selection and cultural group selection resulted in evolution of cooperative breeding and other cooperative activities
 
This basic process is fundamental to our phenotype and so will exist in every social system.  But a social system that radically reduces wealth inequality so as to maximize access to reinforcers to the most number of people is the most just according to a moral principle of a human right to freedom and dignity.  To the extent that any system devalues this access, it is consequently immoral.

​If all behavior is determined by relations between genes/environment and our learning histories, and there is no true freedom to act, then what is the point of making choices?  What are we doing?  How is it that it feels like we are "choosing" to do anything?
 
The science is clear on this point: every behavior we engage in (including thinking!) is a result of our learning history.  Our genes determine how our bodies respond to stimuli (what reinforces or punishes us, motivates us, satiates/deprives us, etc.). 
 
We then respond to that stimuli and the stimuli we do/don't receive afterwards (consequences) determine whether that behavior is reinforced (increases in future) or punished (decreased in future).
 
Complex, seemingly "emergent" behavior is a result of smaller units of these stimuli/behavior/consequent interactions.  So, if I ride a bike, or paint a landscape, or engage in a discussion, all of the little pieces of learned behaviors are a result of past learning histories linking together.
 
Much of our day-to-day behavior is pretty unconscious.  That is, we have learned it so well that we don't even have to think about it.  We ride bikes, driving, load the dishwasher, argue with our spouse, etc. without needing to think about forming the smaller units.
 
... feet on pedals, pressing gas, flipping cup, furrowing brow.
 
Now, we certainly can be conscious of these behaviors. At the minimum we notice them, but more complexly, we label them, categorize them, and make varieties of associations to other stimuli or behaviors and groups of behaviors.
 
Much of this is tied to language, which develops out of our verbal community, all learned through previous interactions.  Set of behaviors and their associations to probable events we call "rules" - whether the mail will come, whether we will get paid for work, etc. 
 
At each level, our behavior is determined by the reinforcement or punishment we have received for that behavior in the past.  New, similar behavioral responses can occur through a process of generalization.  Similarly, our learned behavior can respond to new, similar stimuli. 
 
We play different notes on the same piano. We push on different types of buttons.
 
But always having being reinforced or punished.  And according to current level of satiation or deprivation. Behaviors are more or less likely if we have felt more or less comfortable after doing them previously.
 
Then what is the point of making choices? To "make a choice" is, when conscious, to follow a learned rule. We can generalize new rules by applying logic, also learned, and a function of our current knowledge and cognitive capacity. We must be motivated, which is a function of circumstance.
 
The "point" requires thinking about our thinking.  At this point we are multiple levels of removal from our behavioral learning history.  I push the pedal.  I am riding a bike.  I can ride to the store.  Should I ride to the store?  Should I decide to decide to ride to the store?
 
At each level of consciousness, the variables, the learning histories increase in complexity. At the point of meta-analysis, our grasp of determinative factors is very weak. Through "mindfulness", we can learn to be more aware of the different levels. Yet, total mindfulness would be paralyzing. 
 
Typical therapeutic mindfulness begins with the early steps.  Often, this interrupts the behavioral chain and acts as a stimuli to develop new behaviors of labeling, categorizing, etc. our own behaviors in new ways. Yet mindfulness must be learned! 
 
Likewise, name a "good" or "bad" thing one might do, and there is a incredibly solid theory based on hard science and research to evidence that it was entirely determined.  
 
Like the molecules in a hurricane, it's impossible to know every precise interaction, but the general principals of how behavior works are known. When we self-examine, we're using doppler, measuring temperature and airflow, taking barometrics. We get a vague picture of why we do what we do.
 
When "choose" to do X or Y, we're engaging in the behavior of making estimates based on our past estimating behavior, our current knowledge.  We're operating according to hidden and knowable motivations. 
 
However, even knowledge of motivations are themselves usually estimating behavior applied toward memories (stimulus associations) of what has happened before. 
 
So why do anything at all, if we are confined to forever be playing out physical interactions laid down in corporeal form?
 
Because we have learned to.
 
At a basic level, our basic drives - food, water, sex, comfort, companionship are pushing at us from within.  But immediately beyond that we are social creatures - socialized into vast webs of rules of conduct and behavioral patterns shaped by the contingencies of society. 
 
of these are.  Behavioral principals, while often just the scientific proof for deeper social philosophies and intuitions that have existed for millenia, are, in their substantiated form, incredibly recent - hardly 100 years old. 
 
The logical implications of this understanding of human behavior often runs counter to many mainstream ideologies in human society.  The refutation that we have "free will", or some ability to act outside of our genetic/social learned histories, with some "homunculi", may be prime among them.
 
That so many imagine otherwise and must struggle with the fact, and in some sense have designed their worldview around it, points to the widespread existence of it as a sort of basic mythology. 
 
It pervades our legal, political, religious and economic systems, and imo continues to have very deleterious effects on human flourishing. 
 
To the extent that we talk about "personal responsibility" and blame people who "should have done better", or reward people for "chose to do well for themselves", we design social systems that perpetuate inequality and human misery, withholding opportunity to some while rewarding others.
 
As social creatures with amazing powers of cognition, we can create complex rules about true events in reality and generalize them to plan for optimal outcomes for ourselves and others. But it requires learning and cooperation.  Learning to cooperate.  We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.
 
We behave on the shoulders of our ancestors. 
 
Which way, left or right?  It feels like I am choosing.  My body and mind is making a choice.  But it is doing so as a result of my body given to me by a mother and father, a lifetime of learning, and through a society that has placed me here.
 
 
I am less "making a choice", than watching the various stimuli formed into verbal or non-verbal behavior as possible outcomes, or rules, then behaving the choice, and then reflecting (maybe) upon that choice via the stimuli that appears in my mind as an account of past actions.
 
We are all watchers. 
 
An interesting thought experiment is to refer to yourself in the third person, and suddenly notice how much the "I" - as it becomes he/she/they - seemingly slips into view as a behaving body within reality.
 
It is no longer outside, acting almost magically,  but firmly connected, intertwined with a world no longer separate but inseparable. 
 
He is typing this sentence.  He is pressing "reply"  Why?  He really had no choice.

​On a recent and especially thought-provoking episode of the Straight White American Jesus podcast (#59), "Why Don't They Care", Daniel Miller Swaj, Professor of Humanities at Landmark College, proposed the theory that a key to right wing thought is the defining of one's identity outward, towards what one is not, rather than inwardly, towards what one is, as is more common on the left.  Because of a narrow assumption of what is correct - through an unquestioning of tradition and authority - the identity is highly fixed, and defined by what it is not.  This then leads to not only a lack of empathy, but active antipathy, in which one is always on the lookout for out-group "enemies", or those in whom to find evidence of the righteousness of the in-group.  In a vicious cycle, the lack of empathy inhibits the learning about out-group experiences, which inoculates one from feeling further empathy.  Swaj then develops this further, arguing that this leads to perpetual insecurity:
 
If that's all that one's identity is [attacking others], it's a highly insecure identity, and the more that those who undertake all of these efforts to attack others, insist that they're doing so because they're secure and who they are, the more pronounced that insecurity is.
 
 
I find this line of thought compelling.  However, a couple things might be teased out as well.  To start, this aligns with political values research that finds differences between the left and right in what valence environmental events have.  Conservatives are found to be more reactive (psychologically and physiologically) to negative environmental events, and especially threats to their in-group.  This contributes to caution and avoidance towards novelty, and a hewing to remain closer to social order.
 
It seems clear that conservative thinking reinforces more conservative thinking.  In behavioral terms, advanced social responses are defined as rule-following.  Immediate or local stimuli do not need to be present to occasion reinforced responses (e.g. delicious flavor reinforces licking candy) if the behavior of rule following has been reinforced and a rule is developed out of combinations of responses to stimuli.  From Daniel Cerutti (1989, Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior),

In rule-governed behavior, previously established elementary discriminations are combined in complex instructions and thus result in complex behavior. Discriminative combining and recombining of responses produce behavior with characteristics differing from those of behavior that is established through the effects of its direct consequences. For example, responding in instructed discrimination may be occasioned by discriminative stimuli that are temporally and situationally removed from the circumstances under which the discrimination is instructed.
​
 While there do appear to be phenotypic dispositions that correlate with political ideology, they would seem to be sets of weak complex sensory tendencies that on their own do not form political thought, but could push certain individuals towards or away from certain idiosyncratic tendencies of behavior that fall along various points of the left-right spectrum.  Rather, one's political ideology is far more a product of a learning history that has reinforced sets of behaviors towards particular environmental stimuli and subsequent formation of rule sets.   For example, if I grow up in a house in which immigrants, democrats, the government, etc. are pointed to and spoke of in negative terms, and related rule following thoughts and behaviors are reinforced, then I will likely be shaped into a conservative.  The environment one is raised in will condition this identity.
 
But if conservatism is self-reinforcing through avoidance of novelty (negative reinforcement)  and preference for in-group or sameness (positive reinforcement), what is the internal logic of conservatism that drives this avoidance and in-group preference?  Human story-telling can be powerful reinforcers of rule-governed behaviors. 
 
At the highest level, this has always been the role of religion and myth, as well as archetypal symbolism throughout the arts, political rhetoric and family and local cultural narratives - each working together to reinforce basic sets of moral and value directions.  It is a defining feature of human society that we use these shorthand heuristics to guide our lives.  Because it is a mentally taxing effort to evaluate and process daily social situations, placing our "faith" in a set of core moral values allows us to give over to them some portion of our personal operational control, freeing ourselves up to either investigate these complex situations at our leisure or ignore them entirely and focus on other, more immediate and often simpler stimuli.
 
The term Prompt Dependency, from Applied Behavior Analysis, might provide useful additional insight here.  It refers to the process by which the independent performance of a behavior has not been reinforced as much as a behavior that has followed a prompt in the environment.  For instance, if I only take out the trash after being told, and when I take it out on my own I don't receive adequate reinforcement, I will be considered "prompt dependent" to a degree.  Prompt dependency is in direct conflict with most of our moral values: independence, courage, hard work, self-control, etc.
 
In a way, the conservative emphasis on tradition and status quo operates as a form of prompting for rule-governed identity to a greater degree than does the liberal openness to novelty.  For the conservative, the rule-set is simpler, more narrow, and less in need of questioning.  For the liberal, the rule set is always been challenged by novelty.  With each new experience, the behavior of learning something new, imagining the thoughts and experiences of another, understanding the history and context becomes reinforced.  Novel experiences, without as rigid an identity rule set to fall back on, must be responded to by the liberal without relying on the availability of social prompts that provide security and safety.  It is precisely this process, though, that reinforce the behaviors that forego the need to adhere to rigid-rule prompting and allay the aversiveness of new experiences. 
 
To illustrate, if a liberal does not believe all moral rectitude is to be found in a specific interpretation of a particular religious text, then a repertoire of alternative moral rule-sets must be learned.  To a conservative, homosexuality might be wrong because it says so in a bible.  However, a liberal who has forgone the ultimate authority of the bible (or at least that interpretation), must begin to apply different calculations.  Does the behavior cause individual or social harm, and why or why not?  Where does the behavior come from?  What have other societies thought about it?  What does the individual think about it?    Or, if the liberal is religious and seeks authority in the same bible, they may have developed meta-critique such as what was the historical context of the passage?  How has it been interpreted?  Are there internal contradictions between that particular piece of text and other themes in the bible? 
 
The history of human thought can be traced by the development of frameworks of inquisition and truth seeking with great, if not central, import to morality.   Philosophy looks deeply at things like epistemology or reason.  History examines what has happened in the past and science examines what can and cannot be observed as true facts about the reality.  Journalism reports on how people are living their lives and the systems in which they live them. 
 
All of this can be so much work!  But liberal rule-following reinforces greater fluency in utilizing these frameworks.  As such, this makes encountering novelty and adjusting one's moral perceptions more manageable. 
 
In 2023, with the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorizing and the seeming inconsequence of evidence and fact, this high-level rule-following seems to have been drawn into greater relief.  How do we know what we know and why do we believe what we do? 
 
I will end here for now, but a topic I would like to explore further is the importance of belief in free-will versus determinism, and how the belief reinforces one's rule-governed behavior, specifically in regard to political ideology.  As an epistemological matter, determining one's beliefs about the causality of human actions would seem greatly impactful to their moral stance on a given behavior, as well as what moral stance they believe a society should take.  This would seem relevant to variety of central ideas as widely ranging as criminal justice, economics, education, religion, and much more.
 
 
 
 
Discrimination theory of rule‐governed behavior, The Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Daniel Cerutti, 1989