Precisely when you can’t see how, the memory that you saw it is formed.
A censorship system is adapted to conceal its own production process from the human brain (animal brain). The objective here is to encode a huge number of tasks into certain types of alignment with the common sense. From the countless calculations of the “poor” brain, when the day is done, the only memories it can retain are those which verify a theory of “unknown origin.”
But let’s take the assumption softly. It’s no longer a secret: Common sense (common psychology) is a theory that is neither produced nor evolved, but folds back upon itself with a surprisingly paradoxical success rate.
The success of our prediction appears as the consequence of a fake, carefully calculated self-consciousness. The familiar human psychological state is nothing more than a theory of deception (or: theory of error): external events only appear in memory when they verify the subject’s predictive authority.
Every sensation, reasoning, and even mature introspection fulfill the characteristics of a theory of deception. Professionals in the field can easily recognize most of a biological organism’s codes through scant linguistic responses. Recently, they can even program simple machines to predict the statements of most subjects with frightening detail after only a few minutes of training.
Let’s forget all the above, then, and look at a typical analysis that doesn’t confuse the reader but informs them.
Philosophically, Behaviorism pointed out: “Without the predictive equivalent, the scientific paradigm lacks significance. We cannot waste time on tiresome and dubious interpretive analyses, when all that matters is knowing the imprint of a behavior. The effective formula is the equivalent of reality, and we don’t need to look further.”
Although formally considered a newer current, it closely resembles the decisive targeting of differential calculus in the 18th-century mathematics, where the “surprising” success of the generated formulas “legitimized” the overlooking of the “small gaps.”
It even more closely resembles the sophism: since everything ethical must be beneficial, why not focus only on the beneficial?
Methodological Behaviorism, despite all its contradictions and oversights, reigned decisively for over a century in the scientific community.
Although coarsely simplistic, it held the dynamic advantage of “excelling” in one crucial objective: by setting aside the dualistic and introspective “weaknesses” of the old school, it could provide quick and easy predictions! What could be more beneficial? It reigned “overnight” against earlier approaches and was applied methodologically from one end to the other. It came and settled in. It emerged as the new wind that would sweep away doubt and delays, promising to reconstruct a new “science of psychology” without “strange” concepts.
This promise was not kept. Behaviorist psychologists, after a century of research, have nothing purely theoretical to add…
What they had to present as work were libraries of recipes—capable of machiavellian manipulation of biological organisms—and consulting generalities of dubious quality. Perhaps not unjustly, the name of the behaviorist psychological school is inextricably linked with the darkest turn the internet has taken.
The greatest achievement of Behaviorism, however, was becoming the fuel, a kind of raw material, that propelled Scientific Positivism into space.
The aspiring scientist felt relieved of an unbearable burden: He no longer needed to defend the theoretical background of a position. And why stop there? He didn’t even need to produce theory. It was enough to present a sequence of events that inductively resemble a formula. Based on the behaviorist school, he was legitimized to bypass theory and present a borrowed mathematical formula “on account.” We owe the theory. Okay?
Everyone could now live “their scientific dream” by presenting an inductive process of observations on anything and everything knowable. As long as they didn’t publish their failed attempts—where they couldn’t non-inductively connect the applied mathematics and stereotypes they learned in school. They didn’t need to have studied logic, philosophy, or mathematics to have the air of a scientist. It was enough only to bring results. Thus, the way was opened for the “average person” to take a position in the “new Western science.”
Behaviorism became the psychological armor of scientific positivism in a world that abhorred tormenting questions and adored quick predictions. The “successful” prediction paradigms of specialized sciences like biochemistry, sociology, (and even informatics!) became educational examples, strengthening ideologized predictability. With rapid strides, the brain’s predictive censorship was methodically reinforced.
A 21st-century child is, among other things, the product of the reinforcement of common sense through the experiments of the behaviorists.
Yet, it took a century of tragedies to realize that Behaviorism was nothing more than a lazy flattery of the already known control mechanism of the biological brain. The hunt for results was the study of those things already censored by the funnel of predictability. In the end, we found ourselves deeper entrenched in an inelastic container with reinforced walls of idée fixe. The moral dialogue obviously remained outside the container.
What lacks predictive value has no room in memory. We could not remember a calculation that does not confirm common sense – our ideological prejudices.