[from Mary Powers 960128]
Chris Cherpas (960127)
An EABer might also add that pleasant/unpleasant feelings,
per se, are a side effect. Some organism/environment
conditions are reinforcing, others punishing, others neutral
- all due to evolution.
How gratuitous and clever of evolution to come up with "side-
effects" that are so well matched to the reinforcingness or
punishingness of organism/environment conditions, and that
contribute to the illusion that organisms are "prime movers".
This is one of those factitious "I'm just along for the ride in
this here body" arguments that have been around since Descartes.
Emotional components of perceiving disturbances are part of the
process of physically mobilizing to do something about them, and
determining whether what one is doing is effective or not. What
better way to know something is wrong than to hurt?
This doesn't "restore humanity to the center of the universe".
It puts humanity in the large class of organized matter that's
been around for a couple of billion years and that we call
"alive". You may think that "we're just talking about biological
thermostats" - but by doing so you are satisfying your intended
goal of ridiculing PCT - and having fun doing it. But that's
OK - evolution made you do it, and you're only having your
biological thermostats adjusted anyway.
IV-DV pairs and loops are both useful ways to conceptualize
functional units
Funtional units of what?
IV-DV has its uses, I suppose, but you can't have been reading
the posts here very long or carefully without getting the idea
that PCTers think IV-DV is just plain wrong - an incorrect way to
deal with closed-loop systems. What you refer to as "whining" is
just people on the net repeating that over and over again -
apparently to a pretty deaf (and sometimes annoyed) audience of
IV-DV proponents, firmly planted in - yes - an S-R culture. Only
in such a culture, which seems to mainly consist of experimental
psychologists, would the concept of purpose be dismissed as a PR
ploy (that is, as something that would appeal to unenlightened
lay people and not _real_ scientists).
Finally, you really can't judge how fairly PCT has been treated
unless you have read some of the rejected papers and the remarks
of reviewers and editors.
Mary P.