Podcasts about behaviourism

SMART goal setting is the gold standard for achievement and success. Michel & Daniels (2002) said that goal-setting is “quite easily the single most dominant theory in the field, with over a thousand articles and reviews published on the topic in a little over 30 years.” In 1990, two researchers published a book that caught the attention of many people in business and management circles. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham developed a theory of goal setting, providing a framework for achieving success. They said that whether we are consciously or unconsciously pursuing our goals, we do so nonetheless, and this goal-directed action shares three common features;* Self-Generation The actions of living organisms are fuelled by a source integral to the organism.* Value Significance All goal-directed behaviour has value significance for the organism in terms of its survival.* Goal Causation Goal attainment is caused by consciousness, the person's vision, expectation, and imagination for a future state.Locke and Latham were highly critical of the behaviourist view. Behaviourism stated that your actions are a consequence of environmental contingencies. In other words, your behaviour is a consequence of the promise of reward or the threat of punishment. Instead, Locke and Latham stated that there is causal efficacy of consciousness in goal pursuits. In other words, goal pursuit is caused by consciousness. Goal Setting Theory assumes that human actions are directed by conscious goals and intentions.The SMART Goal Setting FrameworkThe SMART framework is derived from Locke & Latham's work on Goal Setting Theory. Cognitive behavioural therapies, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (Hayes et al., 2006), take it a step further, suggesting that setting goals guided by our values is of critical importance. Therefore, before setting any goals, it is essential to clarify the underlying value(s) that drive these objectives. There are different versions of this acronym. In Harris' version, taken from the book The Happiness Trap, SMART stands for:S - Specific: specify the actions you will take, when and where you will do so, and who or what is involved. Example of a vague or non-specific goal: “I will spend more time with my kids.” A specific goal: “I will take the kids to the climbing wall on Saturday.”M - Meaningful: The goal should be personally meaningful to you if it is genuinely guided by your values, rather than trying to please others or avoid pain. If it lacks a sense of meaning or purpose, check in and see if it is really guided by your values.A - Adaptive: Does the goal help you to take your life forward in a direction that, as far as you can predict, is likely to improve the quality of your life and that of others? Is it adaptive?R - Realistic: The goal should be realistically achievable. Take into account your health, competing demands on your time, financial status, and whether you need to develop new skills to achieve it.T - Time-bound: To increase the specificity of your goal, set a day, date and time for it. If this is not possible, set as accurate a time limit as you can.Download the worksheets* Personal Values Worksheet* SMART(er) Goal SettingWhat are the benefits of achieving this goal?What are the potential pitfalls and what will you do if they arise?Write a commitment statement.Follow the Russ Harris worksheets hereEssential Mental Skills Is Launching SoonThe Essential Mental Skills Course is launching soon. It is a structured introduction to mental skill development and contains lecture videos, slides, resources, a workbook, and kicks off with a live group Zoom orientation call. This course brings together what I've learned from my 30 years in business, 10 years in psychology, lecturing and private practice experience in a single system to help you achieve better mental health and optimise your performance in work, sport or business. Find out more and join the waiting list here. Get full access to Peak Performer at peak.humanperformance.ie/subscribe

There are many different beliefs about why children hit, and based on those beliefs, what the most helpful response to a hitting child is. Old religious paradigms believed that children were innately evil or bad and needed to be shamed and punished into being 'good'. Behaviourism believed that children needed to be taught through punishments, or removal of rewards, to teach children to stop hitting. Cognitive paradigms believed that children need to be taught that hitting hurts, in order to stop hitting. Medical models might believe that there is something wrong with a child physiologically. Some physiological maps believe that a hitting child has an immature nervous system and that they need to be taught to be calmed down. In Aware Parenting, a hitting child is in fight or flight, or hyperarousal. By definition, they don't experience being safe. There are three reasons for this: 1 ~ They aren't safe; 2 ~ The present situation is reminding them of a past trauma that they haven't yet healed from, so when they revisit that, they go into fight or flight. 3 ~ They have accumulated unexpressed painful feelings sitting in their bodies which their system interprets as a sign of not being safe, so they move into hyperarousal. The older models, with their shame, punishment, information, or calming methods, do not address the cause of the hitting, and are likely to either add more painful feelings to a child's system, and thus more fighting, or flight. Or, the child may stop hitting, but that's because they've gone into freeze, or dissociation. All the painful feelings are still sitting in their bodies. They're not feeling truly relaxed and connected to their innate nonviolence; instead, they are bypassing the feelings that are there. With Aware Parenting, our role is to help the child actually know that they are safe now. If we punish, or shame, even with an "it's not okay to hit", that won't lead to safety. If we get harsh, or disconnect, that doesn't help them experience being safe. However, when we move in close in particular ways and offer either loving limits or attachment play, we can support our child to know in their body that they are safe now. When they experience being safe, they no longer need to be in fight or flight, and will stop hitting. Then they can continue the innate physiological process of completion of the stress and trauma process, which includes releasing the feelings through either crying and raging with our loving support (if we've offered a loving limit), or laughter and play with our loving support (if we've offered attachment play). In addition, they are releasing the tension mobilised for fight or flight, which includes vigorous movement - such as the vigorous movement or a tantrum, or of a power-reversal pillow fight. They are also experiencing a sense of successfully completing the process, by being powerful this time, which helps change memories of danger and powerlessness into those of safety and power. This active process is different to the calming down that other approaches advocate for, which tend to lead to dissociation instead of true relaxation and resolution. When a child moves through this whole process, they emerge out the other side, naturally relaxed and nonviolent. We didn't need to shame them, punish them, teach them, or calm them. They innately know how to become truly relaxed. They just needed us to know how to support them to do that, and to not prevent the process from happening! If you want my free PDF to learn more about this, you can find it here: https://marion-rose.myflodesk.com/help-my-child-stop-hitting-free-pdf You can find out more about my work at www.marionrose.net and my books at: https://marionrose.net/books/ You can also find me here: https://www.instagram.com/theawareparentingpodcast/ https://www.instagram.com/_marion_rose_/ https://www.instagram.com/awareparenting/ www.facebook.com/MarionRosePhD

What did you want to be when you were a child?Before the world filled you with doubts. Before you learned to subjugate yourself to it's rules. What did you love to be?I loved @Michael's quote from Gustave Flaubert in this context'Genius... is childhood rediscovered'One of the most influential schools of psychological thought is that of Behaviourism. That children are blank slates. And we can program them to be whatever we want.Yet to be human is something much more than one of Pavlov's salivating dogs.We are born with something, that flavours everything we do. Today's podcast episode is our discussion of the book, Mastery by Robert Greene.I was joined by:Eduardo Dos Santos Silva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardodossantossilva/Michael Ward: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-ward-7a4671227/Saurabh Debnath: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saurabh-debnath/00:00 Introduction and Initial Impressions00:06 Different Versions of the Book01:01 Author's Background and Controversial Works02:41 Personal Reactions to the Book03:39 Comparing Mastery with Other Books07:12 Themes and Commonalities Among Masters13:38 Education and Mastery23:20 Socioeconomic Disparities and Their Impact25:16 Global Perspectives on Poverty28:47 Aid to Africa and Global Wealth Disparity30:10 Work-Life Balance and Cultural Pressures in India32:38 The Influence of Social Media and Role Models35:37 Economic Systems and Societal Values39:41 The Concept of Mastery and Personal Growth46:59 The Role of Coaches and Mentors48:26 Ego and Mastery in Various Disciplines56:02 Final Reflections on Mastery and Ego

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Carol Sanford (⁠⁠https://carolsanford.com/⁠⁠) is one of the most important thinkers of the last few decades. Like no-one else, her work calls out the deeply damaging effects of Behaviourism on all aspects of our lives, especially learning and education, and advocates for a living systems approach to business, education and community. Carol's latest book, ‘No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves' is in some ways a synthesis of many of her most powerful ideas that she has developed through a lifetime of practice and learning from various indigenous and wisdom traditions. But it also calls out the damaging Behaviourist ideas that have ‘become ubiquitous in all our lives and institutions' and undermined our trust in our abilities to know ourselves and think for ourselves - in all of our various and richly diverse ways. As Tyson Yunkaporta calls it in his amazing foreword to the book, “the sharp and pointy gift that keeps on giving”. As someone living with ALS, Carol's voice can be a little hard to understand at times, so if you would like it you will find a transcript link here: ⁠⁠https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wkr31QCA2MO5y9AynAq0L7Qb1bStlk0muFralyIfBeM/edit?usp=sharing⁠⁠ (as well as the automatic transcription on Spotify and some other podcast platforms). As Carol says in Part One: “I use the 7 First Principles of Living Systems to be rigorous in examination, precise in focus and in order to rise up and venerate life. Otherwise, we fool ourself for the sake of our ego.” (https://carolsanford.medium.com/the-regenerative-education-system-and-practice-part-1-23ffcc86326e) Part Two:  Principle 1 - Engage with wholes Principle 2 - Evoke essence Part Three:  Principle 3 - Realise individual potential Principle 4 - Development of mind and beings Principle 5 - Work within nestedness Part Four:  Principle 6 - Laser focus to nodal Principle 7 - Regenerate energy fields (Due to Medium paywall, I am also sharing all of the articles, Parts 1-4, here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12HWRFUbzmWpv4_k7JxLFgn7F99r8UG4o/view?usp=drive_link) Carol refers to Alice Waters, chef and restauranteur who started the Edible Schoolyard movement at Berkeley. ⁠⁠https://search.worldcat.org/title/Edible-Schoolyard-:-a-universal-idea/oclc/1280875278⁠⁠ About Carol: For four decades, Carol has worked with great leaders of successful businesses such as Google, DuPont, Intel, P&G, and Seventh Generation, educating them to develop their people and ensure a continuous stream of innovation that continually deliver extraordinary results. Carol is a founder and designer of ⁠⁠The Regenerative Business Development Community⁠⁠ with lifetime members of almost 500 members, meeting in locations around the world and now online with leaders from multiple companies learning together in bi-quarterly events as well as an Annual ⁠⁠Regenerative Business Summit,⁠⁠ Carol is also a founder and designer of The Regenerative ⁠⁠Change Agent Development community⁠⁠, with members from three regions- Americas, EMEA, Deep Pacific with over 30 events a year in person and online with regenerative change agents learning about and creating change together. Carol is the best-selling author of No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves, ⁠⁠The Regenerative Business⁠⁠: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes; ⁠⁠The Responsible Entrepreneur⁠⁠: Four Game-Changing Archetypes for Founders, Leaders, and Impact Investors, ⁠⁠The Responsible Business⁠⁠: Reimagining Sustainability and Success;  and ⁠⁠No More Feedback⁠⁠: Cultivate Consciousness at Work.  Her books have won over 15 awards so far and are required reading at leading business and management schools including Harvard, Stanford, Haas Berkeley and MIT. Social Links LinkedIn - @carolsanfordkeynote - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolsanfordkeynote/ Instagram - @carolsanfordauthor - https://www.instagram.com/carolsanfordauthor/

This podcast questions the centrality of Behaviourism in our lives, and how in our quest for simplifying human behaviour into a particular trait, we can (unknowingly) do so much harm to the others. The podcast is based on a collection of stories from my personal lives. A lot of these stories are reflections from everyday life when we learn to live in awareness. I call them moments in Synchronicity.

Episode 80 – MI and Behaviourism   Glenn and Sebastian welcomed Dr James Anderson to the podcast to discuss MI and behaviourism. James is a psychologist and Chief of Psychiatry at Bassett Healthcare Network in Cooperstown, NY.  James is interested in the integration of behavioral health into primary care and improving the ability of our […] The post Ep 80 – Motivational Interviewing & Behaviourism appeared first on Glenn Hinds Motivation & Coaching Consultants.

It's Christmas Takeover time and today's episode is hosted by Oliver Sherratt, a year 12 student at Abingdon school studying A level psychology. He delves into the intricate and fascinating world of psychology approaches. These six approaches will lay a base for your understanding of what we know psychology to be as well as igniting a flame within you which will spur you onwards to learn more about the great subject. Today's episode will be a brief and concise whistle stop tour and thus I encourage listeners to read more in depth after listening to fully cement their understanding. Come along for the journey! A great taster for those thinking of choosing psychology A level.

Part 1: intro to metaphysics of mind and physicalism, 'hard' & 'soft' behaviourism.  Part 2 (starts 29min50sec): dualism against behaviourism, Putnam's super-Spartans, circularity and multiple realisability, asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and evaluations.  Michael Lacewing, Sally Latham and Adrian Samuel talk with Simon Kirchin.  (Music by Alex Grohl.)  

This episode features Dr Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa. Ben is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Seattle University. He works in critical animal studies, the history of science, documentary studies, and science fiction studies. In this episode, we talk about his 2023 book The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life, which was published by the University of California Press. By the way, this is an open access book – released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license – which means that anyone can read or download the book for free from anywhere in the world.

What can the world of dog behaviour teach us as parents? Is it all about compliance and control? Do I really want my child to sit on command??   Join dog behaviourist, Jo Moorcroft, and I as we discuss what we can learn as home educating parents from the ever advancing world of dog training. Sounds like everything home educating isn't? You might be surprised! Check it out and do join in the conversation in our Home Education Matters FB group.

In this episode, we discuss the leading American linguist Leonard Bloomfield and his connections to the psychological school of behaviourism and the philosophical doctrines of logical positivism. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts References for Episode 32…Read more ›

Special guest: Dr Robert Morgan In today's episode, Poppy is joined by primary education lecturer Dr Robert Morgan from University of Greenwich, London. We discuss 'behaviourism' and what this means in the classroom, and question whether intrinsic rewards can be as powerful as external rewards and sanctions, and what this means for our pedagogy in the modern world.

Diana Fleischman is an American evolutionary psychologist. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, and hormones and behavior. Diana will be hosting her own show with us, so we thought you'd like to get to know her! Diana's Substack, Twitter, and website.

My friend Zoë (hi Zoë!) is taking a course on learning design. In it, she heard about Behaviourism, Cognitivism, and Constructivism, and while she said that she found it confusing, her main takeaway is that "you need a bit of each". I recorded this episode to help her have a clearer sense of what these three words really mean, and that "a bit of each" is emphatically not the right message. I thought that others might benefit from the same summary. This is a frequent topic in education courses, and I think it generally gets a pretty poor treatment. Hopefully this will clear things up for a lot of people. Enjoy the episode. *** RELATED EPISODES Note how the distribution of episodes reflects the importance of topics. Behaviourism is important to know about but it really isn't current as a way of thinking about learning, it's more of a historical relic with some lasting applicability to animal training. Constructivism is a mistaken and misleading theory that keeps negatively affecting educational practice and never seems to go away, so I keep having to talk about it. Cognitivism is a really effective approach which deserves to be known more widely - it took me a long time to find out about it, hence why the episodes about it tend to be more recent. Behaviourism: 3. Don't Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor Constructivism: 42. Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Ken Robinson; 65. Beyond the Hole in the Wall by Sugata Mitra; 87. Experiential Learning by Colin Beard and John Wilson; 88. The Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-based, Experiential, and Inquiry-based Teaching; 90. Discovery learning: the idea that won't die; 124. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences Cognitivism: 79. What learning is; 80. The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters; 82. Memorable Teaching by Pepps McCrea; 85. Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham; 95. The Reading Mind by Dan Willingham; 132a. Direct Instruction and Project Follow Through; 132b. Direct Instruction: the evidence; 135. Professional writing expertise; 136. Congitive architecture and ACT-R; 136+. Interview with Prof. Christian Lebiere on ACT-R and Cognitive Architecture REFERENCES I mention the following article as one where the authors (eminent figures in cognitive architecture, one of whom is a Nobel Prize winner) ask Constructivists to stop misrepresenting their work and saying things in direct contradiction to the evidence. Anderson, Reder, & Simon (1999). Applications and Misapplacations of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education. SUPPORT You can support the podcast and join the community forum by visiting https://www.buymeacoffee.com/edubookcast.

The answer to the title is a BIG. FAT. NO! Ha! Today I speak with the beautiful Lael Stone. I had to get her back again! She's an author of a new, wonderful book called Raising Resilient and Compassionate Children. She's the creator and director of a school, Woodline Primary. Lael works with the Resilience Project and she is the creator and co-host of the Aware Parenting Podcast. But wait, there's more....she's worked with teenagers teaching sex ed, and she was also a doula for many years. Oh my gosh, is there anything that she hasn't done? So, if we know the Behaviourist Approach is no longer working for us and we know the impact it has on children, what do we do instead? Have a listen to find out! Em and Lael discuss: - What is Behaviourism and why are schools still relying on it? - The good girl/good boy paradigm - The negative affects of Behaviourism  - Do you look at children through the lens of good and bad? - How do we start making the shift? - How do we manage children's big feelings? - Why self-compassion is an essential ingredient - Children and unmet needs - Looking behind the behaviour- What does that mean? - Why harsher consequences are not the answer and neither are rewards - Supporting students to help them recognise what they need - The smallest piece of connection matters - Why it's hard going against the grain   You can find Lael at @laelstone on Instagram or head to her website https://laelstone.com.au/ Find Em @thegradguide_ on Instagram or on Facebook at The Grad Guide Click the link below to join TGG Mentorship- Doors CLOSE Monday 30th Jan 7pm https://www.thegradguide.com.au/mentorship

In this episode I’m joined by the fabulous Professor Rebecca Ferguson, where we get Misty eyed, Brock the mold and Ash the tough questions (weak pun that one) as we explore behaviourism through the lens of Pokémon Go. We mentioned a couple of publications, here they are for your referencing pleasure: Tobin, J., Buckingham, D.,… Continue reading How does behaviourism help players ‘catch them all’ in Pokémon Go?

Please sign and share this petition to bring Collaborative Proactive Solutions to Australian Schools!https://www.change.org/CPSinAustralianschoolsPlease write to Education Minister, Sarah Mitchell and request that CPS (Collaborative Proactive Solutions) be introduced to NSW schools: office@mitchell.minister.nsw.gov.auCall to Action: Towards the end of this episode, Sarah and Lou make a plea for listeners to contact the Minister for Education in WA.  Here's the contact details so that you can write to Minister Sue Ellery:Address:12th Floor, Dumas House, 2 Havelock Street, WEST PERTH WA 6005Telephone:61 8 6552 5700Fax:61 8 6552 5701Email:Minister.Ellery@dpc.wa.gov.auIn this episode Lou and Dr Sarah Bernard talk about life growing up for Sarah and her discovery of her own neurodivergence.  They also discuss Sarah's blogs about Ableist School Reports and letters, Autistic play and Behaviourism.  They delve into a discussion about the Aged Care and Disability Royal Commissions and Sarah's career as a Geriatrician and they finish with a focus on WA, where Sarah lives and the sort of advocacy that parents will endeavour over the next little while.  A really uplifting and educational discussion with a beautiful and lovely person.PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, RATE AND REVIEW!Please join the Square Peg Round Whole podcast Facebook private group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/536225331089755Please like the Facebook PUBLIC page: https://www.facebook.com/Square-Peg-Round-Whole-Public-PAGE-108284341497676Instagram: @squarepegroundwholepodcastTwitter: @PegWholeWebsite: www.squarepegroundwhole.com.auResources discussed during this episode:1. Tim Chan - Autistic Advocate, website: https://www.timhchan.com/2. Dr Mary Dougherty, Founder, Autistic Doctors International, website: https://autisticdoctorsinternational.com/3. Book: Neurotribes by Dr Steve Silberman: https://www.booktopia.com.au/neurotribes-steve-silberman/book/9781760294366.html?dsa=s1-east&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzqSWBhDPARIsAK38LY_xnqNsAMst4L0a-4TeBZtk_LmhtBMGWoYfs6GJNgLmN_3y935fPnIaAuSeEALw_wcB4. Book: Neuroqueer Heresies by Nick Walker: https://www.wob.com/en-au/books/nick-walker/neuroqueer-heresies/9781945955266?gclid=Cj0KCQjwzqSWBhDPARIsAK38LY_GbwlSrP9XeyZszwJ05P-FDqq4x9QbwrIjhnYL7wOVAIHSwl1g0bcaApcfEALw_wcB5. The Neurodivergent Doctor Blog - https://neurodivergentdr.wixsite.com/website6. UK Report: Positive Behavioural Support in the UK: A State of the Nation Report  https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/bild/ijpbs/2022/00000012/a00101s1/art00001?fbclid=IwAR0UHhrtfNHdoHViEYH3IKqEu7hNAmQErpMY7iMEJcjbSwRlWiHSo5ae7Zk

The cognitive revolution in psychology began in the mid 20th century and supplanted behaviourism as the dominant theoretical paradigm explaining human cognition and behaviour which continues today. We explore the origins of cognitive psychology, what it has revealed about the workings of the mind, cognitive maps and mental models, why it is like a computer but not like a computer, neural networks, and why despite great advances, it fails to capture the totality of what it means to be human.Show notesCognitive psychology - E. Bruce Goldstein  (2018)Cognitive psychology and its implications - John Anderson (2020)A common neural code for similar conscious experiences in different individuals - Naci et al. (2014)Bang! You're dead - Alfred Hitchcock (1985)Edward TolmanGeorge MillerDonald BroadbentKenneth CraikSaul SternbergActs of meaning - Jerome Bruner (1993)The Here and Now Podcast on FacebookThe Here and Now Podcast on TwitterSend me an emailSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/thehereandnowpodcast)

This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article."  Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show.  Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there,  you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me".  The other, "Day Tripper",  was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV,  The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though.  As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]

John Klyczek - The Toaist Professor joins us to chat about his new book “School World Order - The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education”. We have a great chat about the secret societies involved, eugenics, academia, gameified learning, workforce training, dumbing down, Ed Tech, behaviourism, pedogogy and genetic sampling.    In the second half we talk about community teaching, data collection funnelling all the way to contact tracing, vaccine passports, the Hegelian Dialectic, tartkinesia, big Pharma, two tiered society, The Tao, The Way, the right to be forgotten, nature and the logos, the solutions - classical theory, Omicron is the boy who cried wolf, Darren's quarantine, travelling, the news, government and media, propaganda fear, becoming what you fight against, inner and outer experience.   schoolworldorder.info   Thank you for your support.  To gain access to the second half of show and our Plus feed please clink the link http://www.grimericaoutlawed.ca/support. Help support the show because without your help we can't continue to address these controversial topics. If you value this content with 0 ads, 0 sponsorships, 0 breaks, 0 portals and links to corporate websites, please assist. Many hours of unlimited content for free. Thanks for listening!!   Support the show directly: https://www.patreon.com/grimericaoutlawed   Get your Magic Mushrooms delivered from: Mushroom Spores, Spore Syringes, Best Spore Syringes,Grow Mushrooms   Spores Lab   Get Psychedelics online   Our audio book page: www.adultbrain.ca Darren's book www.acanadianshame.ca   Other affiliated shows: https://www.13questionspodcast.com/ Our New Podcast - 13 Questions www.grimerica.ca The OG Grimerica Show www.Rokfin.com/Grimerica Our channel on free speech Rokfin   Join the chat / hangout with a bunch of fellow Grimerican's  www.grimerica.ca/chats   1-403-702-6083 Call and leave a voice mail or send us a text   GrimericaFM https://s2.radio.co/s053ed3122/listen Check out our next trip/conference/meetup - Contact at the Cabin www.contactatthecabin.com   Leave a review on iTunes and/or Stitcher: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/grimerica-outlawed http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/grimerica-outlawed   Sign up for our newsletter http://www.grimerica.ca/news   SPAM Graham = and send him your synchronicities, feedback, strange experiences and psychedelic trip reports!! graham@grimerica.com InstaGRAM https://www.instagram.com/the_grimerica_show_podcast/    Tweet Darren https://twitter.com/Grimerica   Connect through other platforms: https://www.reddit.com/r/grimerica/  https://gab.ai/Grimerica    Purchase swag, with partial proceeds donated to the show www.grimerica.ca/swag Send us a postcard or letter http://www.grimerica.ca/contact/ ART Napolean Duheme's site http://www.lostbreadcomic.com/  MUSIC Tru North Felix's Site sirfelix.bandcamp.com 

This is a long episode but it is well worth it and packed with a huge amount of resources and helpful and practical advice and information.  There's quite a few light bulb moments where Lou connects the dots such as a realisation that you can't apply Collaborative Proactive Solutions if you don't have a trusting relationship with the child first.  Christina Keeble is a complex and authentic neurodivergent educator.  She has a deep understanding from personal experience, parenting experience, teaching and psychology.  Not only does she share her perspective, she offers so much practical and helpful advice that can be applied in our families immediately.  Lou and Christina explore self-identity, authenticity, neurodiversity affirming practices over ABA, interoception and co-regulation and more...PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, RATE AND REVIEW!Please join the Square Peg Round Whole podcast Facebook private group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/536225331089755Please like the Facebook PUBLIC page: https://www.facebook.com/Square-Peg-Round-Whole-Public-PAGE-108284341497676Patreon membership:  Patreon members receive early release of episodes and assistance with advocacy efforts.  If you would like to support me to pay for this podcast production and help me realise my dream to work more in this field, please feel free to become a patreon member:  https://www.patreon.com/squarepegroundwholeInstagram: @squarepegroundwholepodcastTwitter: @PegWholeWebsite: www.squarepegroundwhole.com.auResources discussed during this episode:Christina's business website:https://christinakeeble.com/South Australian Dept of Education - Interoception information:https://www.education.sa.gov.au/schools-and-educators/curriculum-and-teaching/curriculum-programs/applying-interoception-skills-classroomAutism Goals website:https://autismgoals.com.au/Autism Goals Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/FamiliesandautismThe 5Cs that Christina mentioned in the episode:https://christinakeeble.com/free-downloads/The PEKE Centre website:https://www.pekecentre.com.au/The Autistic Realm Australia Facebook group:https://www.facebook.com/autisticrealmReframing Autism website:https://reframingautism.org.au/Dr Mona Delahooke website:https://monadelahooke.com/Dr Ross Greene website:https://drrossgreene.com/Dr Stuart Shanker and Self-reg website:https://self-reg.ca/Dr Stephen Porges and Polyvagal theory:https://integratedlistening.com/ssp-safe-sound-protocol/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=brand%20-%20nam%20-%20search%20-%20all%20devices&utm_term=stephen%20porges%20ssp&gclid=Cj0KCQiA15yNBhDTARIsAGnwe0VhZLBoVFWn9pSf-ofpfGTnBFKOuFia2_FezvijD_ZFr939jQYTtIwaAs7XEALw_wcB

The question of "Nurture vs Nature" to explain human behaviour has long interested psychologists and philosophers. Behaviourists believed the answer was definitely "Nurture"- everything about our behaviour can explained in terms of our environment. The most radical behaviourists believed that everything about human behaviour could be explained by studying rats in mazes. Today, however, behaviourism is a defunct research project. We discuss why behaviourism rose to dominate the field, and why its influence has faded. Send all questions to TPSpod420@gmail.com.

Jacquette  M. Timmons focuses on the human side of money. She works as a financial  behaviourist and is committed to getting you to see that you don't manage money - you manage your choices around money. In  addition to being an author and frequent  blogger, Jacquette is also the creator of The Comfort Circle™ - a dinner  series where she hosts discussions about money, business and life over  food and wine - and “Pricing Made Human™.” Whether PMH is presented as a masterclass, 1-day small group retreat, mastermind  or VIP Day, it is designed to help entrepreneurs and small business  owners tackle the question, "What should I charge for this?," from all  sides: the financial, the emotional, the personal, so they can price  more confidently, strategically, and in such a way that propels their  business and life forward. She is also the host of the podcast, "More  Than Money."When  she's not providing behavioral-based financial coaching, she's  traveling the country for speaking engagements on behalf of Fortune 100  companies, AM Law 200 firms, nationally known non-profits and  conferences (large & boutique) to talk about the intersection of  emotions and money. Jacquette  holds an MBA in finance from Fordham University's Graduate School of  Business and an undergrad in marketing from the Fashion Institute of  Technology. A combination she credits, in part, for being able to blend  her analytical mind and creative spirit in service to helping her  clients shift how they look at money; how they perceive its role in  their life; and how they give it direction.  In today's episode we focus on Jacquette's speciality: the human side of money, including the need for people to pay as much attention to their emotions, behavior and motivations as they do to the numbers. Together with Jenny and Hayley, Jacquette talks about the experience of money and holding a holistic conversation around it by addressing its power, transparency and intimacy.

Who the hell is…? brings you our new Biography Bites – compact biographies of the world's greatest thinkers.This episode tells the life story of B.F. Skinner, a highly influential American psychologist, behaviourist, social philosopher and inventor. A pioneer of modern behaviourism, Skinner founded a school of experimental research psychology and his work on behavioural conditioning altered the course of psychology and psychotherapy.Find out who Skinner really was, the circumstances of his early life that propelled him into the world of psychology, and what drove him to ask difficult questions and have the ambition to change the world.We hope you enjoy this episode and don't forget to look out for our other biography bites on the world's greatest thinkers!

On this week’s episode of The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins and Thomas Banks are joined by James Banks to discuss the value of reading Don Quixote and how to approach the book. They talk about translations and how to choose a translation of this particular work. James shares how he first read Miguel de Cervantes’ classic work and gives a little contextual background on him as an author. He also argues that Don Quixote is a romance in the tradition of Spenser and is more of a satire of modernity than of chivalry. Other ideas discussed are the comic duo, the Spanish Renaissance literature, the travel novel, and how to dive into reading Don Quixote. It’s not too late to register for our next Literary Life Online Conference, happening April 7-10, 2021 with special guest speaker Wes Callihan. Head over to HouseofHumaneLetters.com to sign up today! Listen to previous episodes with James Banks by going to The Literary Life podcast Episode 32 and Episode 33. Commonplace Quotes: Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all. attributed to Abraham Lincoln I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question. C. S. Lewis Say you’re an idiot. And say you’re a Congressman. But I repeat myself. Mark Twain I don’t like the word “allegorical.” I don’t like the word “symbolic.” The word I really like is “mythic,” and people always think that means “full of lies” when what it really means is full of a truth that cannot be told in any other way but a story. William Golding, BBC interview Clerihew by G. K. Chesterton The people of Spain think Cervantes Equal to half a dozen Dantes: An opinion resented most bitterly By the people of Italy. Book List: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis Lord of the Flies by William Golding Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens The Shadow of Cervantes by Wyndham Lewis Support The Literary Life: Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support! Connect with Us: You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/ Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy’s own Patreon page also! Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let’s get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Ian Tyndall, academic and researcher talks with Chris about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  They have a conversation  about the power of Acceptance and look at key aspects of the theory that can impact all of us. For therapists and non therapists alike, these ideas have real value.  A very interesting chat about the challenges of being human the power of acceptance. 

But first, what is behaviour? According to Cambridge Dictionary, it is the way that a person, an animal, a substance, etc., act in a particular situation or under particular conditions. And according with Oxford Dictionary is the way that somebody behaves, especially towards other people. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/podcast-with-a-student/message

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://kingdablog.com/2015/03/24/behaviourism-a-mental-health-risk/

This episode is also available as a blog post: http://kingdablog.com/2018/06/15/fuzzy-sets-intellectual-dark-web-new-atheism-logical-positivism-and-behaviourism/

What incentivises us to behave in a certain way and what acts as a deterrent? Through a myriad of experiments in his 1930s Harvard Laboratory, B.F Skinner centred his research on tackling this very question. By way of artful manipulations of the environment, Skinner observed and recorded his theory of Behaviourism - documenting how different variables impact behaviour formation and extinction. The stage in which the experiment took place - famously coined the Skinner box - told the worldfirst story of a rat psychologically hooked on food pellets. Fast forward nearly a century later, and the protagonist amidst a tale of behavioural experimentation is no longer a mere rodent. Carrying Skinner-esque devices in our pockets, the everyday user has become victim to all sorts of covert behavioural manipulation they are not privy to. Despite being heralded as tools with emancipatory potential, software products have graduated with the times - now augmenting old tricks to design new behaviours. As the custodians of a product's experience, our remit goes beyond merely alleviating user pain points and creating ‘delightful' experiences. We design behaviours. And with this, comes a newfound responsibility. In this talk, we will explore how products leverage tricks from behavioural psychology to keep users ‘hooked', and how we can use this knowledge to avoid designing with dark patterns and ultimately become better practitioners.

--{ "CONOLOGY on Parade with Masters Who Persuade. The Con Within CONology, Perfected by Psychology, Has the Targets Participate in Pre-arranged Fate Tempted by Fodder, Like Lambs to the Slaughter, Or Terrified of Dying, Give Power to the Lying Led into Circumstances where they Ought-Not-to-Be." © Alan Watt }-- Welcome to My World Where I Explain the Sciences Behind the System that Runs Everything - The Art of Conology - Mousetraps; Idea Based on Winning; Gambling Addiction - Persuaders, Behaviourism, Consumerism - Politics - Panic - Biowarfare - Aldous Huxley, People Accept Things That They Shouldn't - Taxpayer-Funded Insertion of Messages on Vaccination, Immunity, into Entertainment - The Culture Industry - The Spoken Word; Spell, Spelling; The Language of Colour - Jacques Ellul, Philosopher, Wrote about Propaganda; Standardize Thought; Initial Indoctrination - Using the Idea of Nation - Depopulation - Thomas Malthus - Thomas Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog - European Union - Marxism, Nation-State to Disappear - Free Trade - Conology, You Accept What is Given to You as Real - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, "Can We have Your Liver?" - You Must Participate in the Con; "We're All in it Together" - Winston Churchill - Germany after WWI - How Protestors are Used - World Economic Forum, The Great Reset - Millie Weaver Documentary, Intelligence Agencies - Defund the Police; Evolution of Military-Industrial Complex, Surveillance; Robots - Drugs, Intelligence, Special Forces, Black Budgets - Commonwealth Countries - France, Jacobinism, Socialism, Communism; Free Love, Abortion; French Movies, BBC Dramas; NHS - Evil Reincarnates, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi - Euthanasia - Gates, Fauci, No Other Treatments Except Those They have Shares In - Covid Terror Campaign - PNAC Congratulated Obama for Continuing War Agenda - Bringing in New System of Efficiency - Please Visit www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com to DONATE and ORDER - Your Decisions Matter for You and Your Very Soul - Corporations, CEOs, Holding Companies - Rockefeller Family; Council on Foreign Relations - China, a Model State for the World - Prophecy Series of Three Movies with Christopher Walken - Feudal System - You Give Your Power Away by Voting - A Complete War on the Male - You've Been Living Through Battle Strategies - You have to Stop Participating in Your Own Deception - Pierre Trudeau, Communism, Deception - European Parliament; Free Trade, Marxist Idea of Centralization of Power - You're Living Through an Eternal Battle Between Good and Evil - Lying to the Public, Behavioural Insights Teams - The Century of Change, Transition - Monitored Cradle to Grave - Creating Divisions - Weather Warfare; Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars - Malachi Martin, a Real Double Agent, Vatican II; William F. Buckley, Jr., CIA; M. Martin Brought Back the Idea of the Supernatural and the Preternatural; Martin's Book, Hostage to the Devil - Jung, Archetypal Symbology - Francis of Assisi - We're Living Through the Biggest Deception Now - Freemasonry - Humanism - Communism had to Destroy Religion, People Will Not Fight for a Secular Idea - Mao, Most Frightened by a Big Idea (Religion ) - Trotsky's Train with Priests Dangling on Ropes - God-Given Rights, Life is Precious - Julian Huxley, Knock Man Off His Pedestal - America was the First Great Experiment, Soviet System was the Second Great Experiment - Religion was the First Target of the French Revolution - Aldous Huxley's Brave New World - You're Supposed to Be an Individual; You're Either Free or You're Not Free - M. Martin, the Perfectly Possessed; Psychopathy versus Possession - Britain's SAGE, Brainwashing, Stepping Up Anxiety to Get Compliance - You Always Knew it Was Going to Come Down to the Choice You Have to Make - Evil has to Be Stood Up Against - 2007-2008 Financial Crash - Free Enterprise and Democracy has Served its Purpose - DONATE at www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com - Yale Study for U.S. Gov. “Persuasive Messages For COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake” - Psychopathy - Bioethics - ‘Morality pills' may Be the US's Best Shot at Ending Pandemic - The Levellers and The Diggers - China Expansion Of Digital Currency Testing - Australian Five- And Ten-Cent Coins To Disappear as Pandemic Ushers In 'Cashless Society' - Australia's Big Four Banks Remove Thousands of ATMs, Shut Down Hundreds of Branches - Doctors Banned from Prescribing potential COVID-19 Drug - Dr. Fauci Cheered Hydroxychloroquine Success Treating MERS Coronavirus in 2013, Today He's Skeptical - Was COVID-19 a Cover for Planned Financial Crisis? - A List Of Corporations Funding The ‘Defund The Police' Movement - "Reimagining" the Police - Germany Testing Universal Basic Income - Fed's "Direct Money Transfers" - Utopia, Dysfunction, Drugs - China's National-Security Law - Google Open letter to Australians about New Government Regulations - Celebrities Donate to Defund Police - Hollywood's Rich and Famous are Fleeing in Droves - British Series from 2013, Utopia - Predictive Programming - Movies, Soylent Green and Logan's Run - Canadian Biotech Company's Anti-Viral Clothing - Dr. Fauci, Aiming for Herd Immunity would Lead to ‘Enormous' Death Toll - The CDC Confesses to Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers - 2005 Article, Chloroquine is a Potent Inhibitor of SARS Coronavirus Infection and Spread - COVID-19 Engineered in China Lab, Effective Vaccine ‘Unlikely' - Gain-of-Function - AstraZeneca to be exempt from coronavirus vaccine liability claims - Australia, Class-Action Lawsuit about the Lockdown - US ‘Frontline' Doctors' Website Exposes Campaign by Tech Giants, Govt Agencies to Block COVID Med - Dutch Police - Belarus Protests - Bill Gates, Vaccines and 'Exponential Spread'. *Title and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Aug. 23, 2020 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)

On 20 June 2020, Battle of Ideas Charity hosted The Academy Online, a series of talks and book discussions exploring the theme Psychology and Democracy.This podcast features the introductory talk to a discussion on the 1948 novel ‘Walden Two’ by BF Skinner, an American psychologist, author, inventor and social philosopher. Skinner liked to describe his own philosophy as 'radical behaviorism' and the novel has gained renewed attention alongside interest in social psychology and behavioural science at a time of a pandemic, when many are keen to understand the factors that shape our decisions and the extent to which we can say we are we conscious agents who determine our own actions.The lecturer is Dr Helene Guldberg, a lecturer in psychology at the Open University and author of two books; ‘Reclaiming Childhood: freedom and play in an age of fear’ and ‘Just Another Ape?’.THE ACADEMY 2020: PSYCHOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY The Academy Online was a mixture of lectures and seminars offering an opportunity to place contemporary events in a historical and philosophical context. The full programme and some background reading can be found at theboi.co.uk/the-academy-online…logy-and-democracyTHE ACADEMY In the context of today’s instrumental approaches to knowledge, The Academy summer school is a modest attempt to demonstrate the value of scholarship, and of the worth of the university as a place of free enquiry dedicated to the pursuit of truth.DONATING TO THE BOI CHARITY The BOI charity is committed to continuing to host discussion and debates throughout this period when society is restricted by measures to tackle coronavirus. In order to realise events such as the Academy Online, none of our staff are furloughed and instead remain working. If you can, then please consider a donation, small or large. Visit: theboi.co.uk/donateIDEAS MATTER PODCAST Ideas Matter is a podcast that takes the most important issues of our times and explores the ideas and intellectual trends that have shaped where we are today.You can subscribe and listen to Ideas Matter on Apple Podcasts, Podbean, Spotify or SoundCloud. For full details of all episodes, visit the podcast page on our websiteKeep up-to-date with Ideas Matter and all the initiatives organised by the Battle of Ideas charity by following us on Twitter (@theboi_uk) and on Facebook (battleofideas).  

Professor Phil Newton is the Director of Learning and Teaching at Swansea University Medical School in the United Kingdom. In the third part of our learning theory discussion, Phil joins me to talk about behaviourism and its connections throughout all out curricula, with learning outcomes, Bloom’s taxonomy and feedback. And yes, we also talk about rats, dogs, pigeons, dolphin and Baby Albert.   You can follow Phil and Medical Education at Swansea using the Twitter handle: @MScMedEd.   Here are the papers we mentioned: Constructivism is not a Pedagogy A Pragmatic Master List of Action Verbs for Bloom's Taxonomy Is Teaching Simple Surgical Skills Using an Operant Learning Program More Effective Than Teaching by Demonstration?   Follow: @AnatEducPodcast Visit: anatomypodcast.co.uk for more information   This episode is sponsored by: The American Association for Anatomy. For information about upcoming events, membership details and much more, visit www.anatomy.org and @anatomyorg The International Association of Medical Science Education (IAMSE). For more information on meetings, membership options and funding, visit www.iamse.org and @iamse. Adam Rouilly. For information on their wide range of products to support all aspects of healthcare education, visit www.adam-rouilly.co.uk and @AdamRouilly.

Our coaching this week, takes place against the backdrop of the United Nations' International Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Fest in Spain, Happytalism, the Global Happiness Movement and the annual World Happiness Report as well as March being #HappinessMonth. This week, we jump into the first academic model we're using to build our own definition of happiness and success - PERMA - as well as the 10 steps we can take to advance the happiness, wellbeing and freedom of all life on earth by 2050 - "Happiness For All, Forever". PERMA is Positive Psychology's leading model for the Science of Happiness and is really the most popular one today and currently, the most influential in happiness conversations worldwide. We take a brief look into the field of Positve Psychology and where it fits as the "4th wave" after Psychoanalysis, Behaviourism and Humanism, with Sigmund Freud, BF Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. We introduce the change from the "Disease Model" of traditional psychology, using the Diagnostic + Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) to its "positive" counterpart, the Character Strengths + Virtues (CSV) manual. We adopt an understanding of Positive Psychology as the "the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multiple levels that include the biological, personal, relational, institutional, cultural, and global dimensions of life". Then, we look into the detail of PERMA: what each construct means - Positive Emotion + Engagement + Relationship + Meaning + Accomplishment. Our coaching uses PERMA as a way for you to assess your own happiness and success against the 5 top constructs of Well-Being Theory. As an assessment tool of your current happiness definition, we can see, what you've been prioritizing over the long term and what you're doing every day when living your life. With our first coaching tool, we learn how to use daily Positive Questions to start building a positive perspective, a positive orientation to our lives. Julia shares her own personal Positive Question she uses every day in her self-coaching practice. Then, we also explore what to do if this PERMA assessment wakes up your Inner Critic and all you see are the deficiencies in your current happiness. Julia's coaching tool and earlier 3 episodes on Self-Smizing help us here. In our coaching with PERMA, we discover there are no wrong answers, nothing has gone wrong here! " May you be Happy, May you be Free - there is no better time to coach together!" All free Coaching Tools - https://happiness-matters.coach/free/ Subscribe to Julia's blog Learn more at http://www.happiness-matters.coach or start coaching with us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/HappinessMattersCoach/  

Are we born or made? The question of nature versus nurture is an old one but advancements in genetics and twin studies have given us new insight into this age old question. Genes are part of who we are but it is our environment which not only shapes our behaviour, but also determines how genes behave and whether they even turn on or off. We explore the state of the art understanding of how genes and environment together influence who we are and who we might become. Show notesSir Francis GaltonHistory of eugenicsBlueprint: How DNA makes us who we areThe top replicated findings from behaviour geneticsNature vs. nurture in psychologyWhat is CRISPR?https://www.facebook.com/thehereandnowpodcast/ https://twitter.com/herenowpodcast emailthehereandnow@gmail.com  Royalty Free Music from https://audiohub.com Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/thehereandnowpodcast)

[This is the text of a lecture that I delivered at Tilburg University on the 24th of September 2019. It was delivered as part of the 25th Anniversary celebrations for TILT (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society). My friend and colleague Sven Nyholm was the discussant for the evening. The lecture is based on my longer academic article ‘Welcoming Robots into the Moral Circle: A Defence of Ethical Behaviourism’ but was written from scratch and presents some key arguments in a snappier and clearer form. I also include a follow up section responding to criticisms from the audience on the evening of the lecture. My thanks to all those involved in organizing the event (Aviva de Groot, Merel Noorman and Silvia de Conca in particular). You can download an audio version of this lecture, minus the reflections and follow ups, here or listen to it above]1. IntroductionMy lecture this evening will be about the conditions under which we should welcome robots into our moral communities. Whenever I talk about this, I am struck by how much my academic career has come to depend upon my misspent youth for its inspiration. Like many others, I was obsessed with science fiction as a child, and in particular with the representation of robots in science fiction. I had two favourite, fictional, robots. The first was R2D2 from the original Star Wars trilogy. The second was Commander Data from Star Trek: the Next Generation. I liked R2D2 because of his* personality - courageous, playful, disdainful of authority - and I liked Data because the writers of Star Trek used him as a vehicle for exploring some important philosophical questions about emotion, humour, and what it means to be human.In fact, I have to confess that Data has had an outsized influence on my philosophical imagination and has featured in several of my academic papers. Part of the reason for this was practical. When I grew up in Ireland we didn’t have many options to choose from when it came to TV. We had to make do with what was available and, as luck would have it, Star Trek: TNG was on every day when I came home from school. As a result, I must have watched each episode of its 7-season run multiple times.One episode in particular has always stayed with me. It was called ‘Measure of a Man’. In it, a scientist from the Federation visits the Enterprise because he wants to take Data back to his lab to study him. Data, you see, is a sophisticated human-like android, created by a lone scientific genius, under somewhat dubious conditions. The Federation scientist wants to take Data apart and see how he works with a view to building others like him. Data, unsurprisingly, objects. He argues that he is not just a machine or piece of property that can be traded and disassembled to suit the whims of human beings. He has his own, independent moral standing. He deserves to be treated with dignity.But how does Data prove his case? A trial ensues and evidence is given on both sides. The prosecution argue that Data is clearly just a piece of property. He was created not born. He doesn’t think or see the world like a normal human being (or, indeed, other alien species). He even has an ‘off switch’. Data counters by giving evidence of the rich relationships he has formed with his fellow crew members and eliciting testimony from others regarding his behaviour and the interactions they have with him. Ultimately, he wins the case. The court accepts that he has moral standing.Now, we can certainly lament the impact that science fiction has on the philosophical debate about robots. As David Gunkel observes in his 2018 book Robot Rights:“[S]cience fiction already — and well in advance of actual engineering practice — has established expectations for what a robot is or can be. Even before engineers have sought to develop working prototypes, writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined what robots do or can do, what configurations they might take, and what problems they could produce for human individuals and communities.”  (Gunkel 2018, 16)He continues, noting that this is a “potential liability” because:“science fiction, it is argued, often produces unrealistic expectations for and irrational fears about robots that are not grounded in or informed by actual science.” (Gunkel 2018, 18)I certainly heed this warning. But, nevertheless, I think the approach taken by the TNG writers in the episode ‘Measure of a Man’ is fundamentally correct. Even if we cannot currently create a being like Data, and even if the speculation is well in advance of the science, they still give us the correct guide to resolving the philosophical question of when to welcome robots into our moral community. Or so, at least, I shall argue in the remainder of this lecture.2. Tribalism and Conflict in Robot EthicsBefore I get into my own argument, let me say something about the current lay of the land when it comes to this issue. Some of you might be familiar with the famous study by the social psychologist Muzafer Sherif. It was done in the early 1950s at a summer camp in Robber’s Cave, Oklahoma. Suffice to say, it is one of those studies that wouldn’t get ethics approval nowadays. Sherif and his colleagues were interested in tribalism and conflict. They wanted to see how easy it would be to get two groups of 11-year old boys to divide into separate tribes and go to war with one another. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. By arbitrarily separating the boys into two groups, giving them nominal group identity (the ‘Rattlers’ and the ‘Eagles’), and putting them into competition with each other, Sherif and his research assistants sowed the seeds for bitter and repeated conflict.The study has become a classic, repeatedly cited as evidence of how easy it is for humans to get trapped in intransigent group conflicts. I mention it here because, unfortunately, it seems to capture what has happened with the debate about the potential moral standing of robots. The disputants have settled into two tribes. There are those that are ‘anti’ the idea; and there are those that are ‘pro’ the idea. The members of these tribes sometimes get into heated arguments with one another, particularly on Twitter (which, admittedly, is a bit like a digital equivalent of Sherif’s summer camp).Those that are ‘anti’ the idea would include Noel Sharkey, Amanda Sharkey, Deborah Johnson, Aimee van Wynsberghe and the most recent lecturer in this series, Joanna Bryson. They cite a variety of reasons for their opposition. The Sharkeys, I suspect, think the whole debate is slightly ridiculous because current robots clearly lack the capacity for moral standing, and debating their moral standing distracts from the important issues in robot ethics - namely stopping the creation and use of robots that are harmful to human well-being. Deborah Johnson would argue that since robots can never experience pain or suffering they will never have moral standing. Van Wynsberghe and Bryson are maybe a little different and lean more heavily on the idea that even if it were possible to create robots with moral standing — a possibility that Bryson at least is willing to concede — it would be a very bad idea to do so because it would cause considerable moral and legal disruption.Those that are pro the idea would include Kate Darling, Mark Coeckelbergh, David Gunkel, Erica Neely, and Daniel Estrada. Again, they cite a variety of reasons for their views. Darling is probably the weakest on the pro side. She focuses on humans and thinks that even if robots themselves lack moral standing we should treat them as if they had moral standing because that would be better for us. Coeckelbergh and Gunkel are more provocative, arguing that in settling questions of moral standing we should focus less on the intrinsic capacities of robots and more on how we relate to them. If those relations are thick and meaningful, then perhaps we should accept that robots have moral standing. Erica Neely proceeds from a principle of moral precaution, arguing that even if we are unsure of the moral standing of robots we should err on the side of over-inclusivity rather than under-inclusivity when it comes to this issue: it is much worse to exclude a being with moral standing to include one without. Estrada is almost the polar opposite of Bryson, welcoming the moral and legal disruption that embracing robots would entail because it would loosen the stranglehold of humanism on our ethical code.To be clear, this is just a small sample of those who have expressed an opinion about this topic. There are many others that I just don’t have time to discuss. I should, however, say something here about this evening’s discussant, Sven and his views on the matter. I had the fortune of reading a manuscript of Sven’s forthcoming book Humans, Robots and Ethics. It is an excellent and entertaining contribution to the field of robot ethics and in it Sven shares his own views on the moral standing of robots. I’m sure he will explain them later on but, for the time being, I would tentatively place him somewhere near Kate Darling on this map: he thinks we should be open to the idea of treating robots as if they had moral standing, but not because of what the robots themselves are but because of what respecting them says about our attitudes to other humans.And what of myself? Where do I fit in all of this? People would probably classify me as belonging to the pro side. I have argued that we should be open to the idea that robots have moral standing. But I would much prefer to transcend this tribalistic approach to the issue. I am not advocate for the moral standing of robots. I think many of the concerns raised by those on the anti side are valid. Debating the moral standing of robots can seem, at times, ridiculous and a distraction from other important questions in robot ethics; and accepting them into our moral communities will, undoubtedly, lead to some legal and moral disruption (though I would add that not all disruption is a bad thing). That said, I do care about the principles we should use to decide questions of moral standing, and I think that those on the anti of the debate sometimes use bad arguments to support their views. This is why, in the remainder of this lecture, I will defend a particular approach to settling the question of the moral standing of robots. I do so in the hope that this can pave the way to a more fruitful and less tribalistic debate.In this sense, I am trying to return to what may be the true lesson of Sherif’s famous experiment on tribalism. In her fascinating book The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment, Gina Perry has revealed the hidden history behind Sherif’s work. It turns out that Sherif tried to conduct the exact same experiment as he did in Robber’s Cave one year before in Middle Grove, New York. It didn’t work out. No matter what the experimenters did to encourage conflict, the boys refused to get sucked into it. Why was this? One suggestion is that at Middle Grove, Sherif didn’t sort the boys into two arbitrary groups as soon as they arrived. They were given the chance to mingle and get to know one another before being segregated. This initial intermingling may have inoculated them from tribalism. Perhaps we can do the same thing with philosophical dialogue? I live in hope.3. In Defence of Ethical BehaviourismThe position I wish to defend is something I call ‘ethical behaviourism’. According to this view, the behavioural representations of another entity toward you are a sufficient ground for determining their moral status. Or, to put it slightly differently, how an entity looks and acts is enough to determine its moral status. If it looks and acts like a duck, then you should probably treat it like you treat any other duck.Ethical behaviourism works through comparisons. If you are unsure of the moral status of a particular entity — for present purposes this will be a robot but it should be noted that ethical behaviourism has broader implications — then you should compare its behaviours to that of another entity that is already agreed to have moral status — a human or an animal. If the robot is roughly performatively equivalent to that other entity, then it too has moral status. I say “roughly” since no two entities are ever perfectly equivalent. If you compared two adult human beings you would spot performative differences between them, but this wouldn’t mean that one of them lacks moral standing as a result. The equivalence test is an inexact one, not an exact one.There is nothing novel in ethical behaviourism. It is, in effect, just a moral variation of the famous Turing Test for machine intelligence. Where Turing argued that we should assess intelligence on the basis of behaviour, I am arguing that we should determine moral standing on the basis of behaviour. It is also not a view that is original to me. Others have defended similar views, even if they haven’t explicitly labelled it as such.Despite the lack of novelty, ethical behaviourism is easily misunderstood and frequently derided. So let me just clarify a couple of points. First, note that it is a practical and epistemic thesis about how we can settle questions of moral standing; it is not an abstract metaphysical thesis about what it is that grounds moral standing. So, for example, someone could argue that the capacity to feel pain is the metaphysical grounding for moral status and that this capacity depends on having a certain mental apparatus. The ethical behaviourist can agree with this. They will just argue that the best evidence we have for determining whether an entity has the capacity to feel pain is behavioural. Furthermore, ethical behaviourism is agnostic about the broader consequences of its comparative tests. To say that one entity should have the same moral standing as another entity does not mean both are entitled to a full set of legal and moral rights. That depends on other considerations. A goat could have moral standing, but that doesn’t mean it has the right to own property. This is important because when I am arguing that we should apply this approach to robots and I am not thereby endorsing a broader claim that we should grant robots legal rights or treat them like adult human beings. This depends on who or what the robots is being compared to.So what’s the argument for ethical behaviourism? I have offered different formulations of this but for this evening’s lecture I suggest that it consists of three key propositions or premises.(P1) The most popular criteria for moral status are dependent on mental states or capacities, e.g. theories focused on sentience, consciousness, having interests, agency, and personhood.(P2) The best evidence — and oftentimes the only practicable evidence — for the satisfaction of these criteria is behavioural.(P3) Alternative alleged grounds of moral status or criteria for determining moral status either fail to trump or dislodge the sufficiency of the behavioural evidence.Therefore, ethical behaviourism is correct: behaviour provides a sufficient basis for settling questions of moral status.I take it that the first premise of this argument is uncontroversial. Even if you think there are other grounds for moral status, I suspect you agree that an entity with sentience or consciousness (etc) has some kind of moral standing. The second premise is more controversial but is, I think, undeniable. It’s a trite observation but I will make it anyway: We don’t have direct access to one another’s minds. I cannot crawl inside your head and see if you really are experiencing pain or suffering. The only thing I have to go on is how you behave and react to the world. This is true, by the way, even if I can scan your brain and see whether the pain-perceiving part of it lights up. This is because the only basis we have for verifying the correlations between functional activity in the brain and mental states is behavioural. What I mean is that scientists ultimately verify those correlations by asking people in the brain scanners what they are feeling. So all premise (2) is saying is that if the most popular theories of moral status are to work in practice, it can only be because we use behavioural evidence to guide their application.That brings us to premise (3): that all other criteria fail to dislodge the importance of behavioural evidence. This is the most controversial one. Many people seem to passionately believe that there are other ways of determining moral status and indeed they argue that relying on behavioural evidence would be absurd. Consider these two recent Twitter comments on an article I wrote about ethical behaviourism and how it relates to animals and robots:First comment: “[This is] Errant #behaviorist #materialist nonsense…Robots are inanimate even if they imitate animal behavior. They don’t want or care about anything. But knock yourself out. Put your toaster in jail if it burns your toast.”Second comment: “If I give a hammer a friendly face so some people feel emotionally attached to it, it still remains a tool #AnthropomorphicFallacy”These are strong statements, but they are not unusual. I encounter this kind of criticism quite frequently. But why? Why are people so resistant to ethical behaviourism? Why do they think that there must be something more to how we determine moral status? Let’s consider some of the most popular objections.4. Objections and RepliesIn a recent paper, I suggested that there were seven (more, depending on how you count) major objections to ethical behaviourism. I won’t review all seven here, but I will consider four of the most popular ones. Each of these objections should be understood as an attempt to argue that behavioural evidence by itself cannot suffice for determining moral standing. Other evidence matters as well and can ‘defeat’ the behavioural evidence.(A) The Material Cause ObjectionThe first objection is that the ontology of an entity makes a difference to its moral standing. To adopt the Aristotelian language, we can say that the material cause of an entity (i.e. what it is made up of) matters more than behaviour when it comes to moral standing. So, for example, someone could argue that robots lack moral standing because they are not biological creatures. They are not made from the same ‘wet’ organic components as human beings or animals. Even if they are performatively equivalent to human beings or animals, this ontological difference scuppers any claim they might have to moral standing.I find this objection unpersuasive. It smacks to me of biological mysterianism. Why exactly does being made of particular organic material make such a crucial difference? Imagine if your spouse, the person you live with everyday, was suddenly revealed to be an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. Scientists conduct careful tests and determine that they are not a carbon-based lifeform. They are made from something different, perhaps silicon. Despite this, they still look and act in the same way as they always have (albeit now with some explaining to do). Would the fact that they are made of different stuff mean that they no longer warrant any moral standing in your eyes? Surely not. Surely the behavioural evidence suggesting that they still care about you and still have the mental capacities you used to associate with moral standing would trump the new evidence you have regarding their ontology. I know non-philosophers dislike thought experiments of this sort, finding them to be slightly ridiculous and far-fetched. Nevertheless, I do think they are vital in this context because they suggest that behaviour does all the heavy lifting when it comes to assessing moral standing. In other words, behaviour matters more than matter. This is also, incidentally, one reason why it is wrong to say that ethical behaviourism is a ‘materialist’ view: ethical behaviourism is actually agnostic regarding the ontological instantiation of the capacities that ground moral status; it is concerned only with the evidence that is sufficient for determining their presence.All that said, I am willing to make one major concession to the material cause objection. I will concede that ontology might provide an alternative, independent ground for determining the moral status of an entity. Thus, we might accept that an entity that is made from the right biological stuff has moral standing, even if they lack the behavioural sophistication we usually require for moral standing. So, for example someone in a permanent coma might have moral standing because of what they are made of, and not because of what they can do. Still, all this shows is that being made of the right stuff is an independent sufficient ground for moral standing, not that it is a necessary ground for moral standing. The latter is what would need to be proved to undermine ethical behaviourism.(B) The Efficient Cause ObjectionThe second objection is that how an entity comes into existence makes a difference to its moral standing. To continue the Aristotelian theme, we can say that the efficient cause of existence is more important than the unfolding reality. This is an objection that the philosopher Michael Hauskeller hints at in his work. Hauskeller doesn’t focus on moral standing per se, but does focus on when we can be confident that another entity cares for us or loves us. He concedes that behaviour seems like the most important thing when addressing this issue — what else could caring be apart from caring behaviour? — but then resiles from this by arguing that how the being came into existence can undercut the behavioural evidence. So, for example, a robot might act as if it cares about you, but when you learn that the robot was created and manufactured by a team of humans to act as if it cares for you, then you have reason to doubt the sincerity of its behaviour.It could be that what Hauskeller is getting at here is that behavioural evidence can often be deceptive and misleading. If so, I will deal with this concern in a moment. But it could also be that he thinks that the mere fact that a robot was programmed and manufactured, as opposed to being evolved and developed, makes a crucial difference to moral standing. If that is what he is claiming, then it is hard to see why we should take it seriously. Again, imagine if your spouse told you that they were not conceived and raised in the normal way. They were genetically engineered in a lab and then carefully trained and educated. Having learned this, would you take a new view of their moral standing? Surely not. Surely, once again, how they actually behave towards you — and not how they came into existence — would be what ultimately mattered. We didn’t deny the first in vitro baby moral standing simply because she came into existence in a different way from ordinary human beings. The same principle should apply to robots.Furthermore, if this is what Hauskeller is arguing, it would provide us with an unstable basis on which to make crucial judgments of moral standing. After all, the differences between humans and robots with respect to their efficient causes is starting to breakdown. Increasingly, robots are not being programmed and manufactured from the top-down to follow specific rules. They are instead given learning algorithms and then trained on different datasets with the process sometimes being explicitly modeled on evolution and childhood development. Similarly, humans are increasingly being designed and programmed from the top down, through artificial reproduction, embryo selection and, soon, genetic engineering. You may object to all this tinkering with the natural processes of human development and conception. But I think you would be hard pressed to deny a human that came into existence as a result of these process the moral standing you ordinarily give to other human beings.(C) The Final Cause ObjectionThe third objection is that the purposes an entity serves and how it is expected to fulfil those purposes makes a difference to its moral standing. This is an objection that Joanna Bryson favours in her work. In several papers, she has argued that because robots will be designed to fulfil certain purposes on our behalf (i.e. they will be designed to serve us) and because they will be owned and controlled by us in the process, they should not have moral standing. Now, to be fair, Bryson is more open to the possibility of robot moral standing than most. She has said, on several occasions, that it is possible to create robots that have moral standing. She just thinks that that this should not happen, in part because they will be owned and controlled by us, and because they will be (and perhaps should be) designed to serve our ends.I don’t think there is anything in this that dislodges or upsets ethical behaviourism. For one thing, I find it hard to believe that the fact that an entity has been designed to fulfil a certain purpose should make a crucial difference to its moral standing. Suppose, in the future, human parents can genetically engineer their offspring to fulfil certain specific ends. For example, they can select genes that will guarantee (with the right training regime) that their child will be a successful athlete (this is actually not that dissimilar to what some parents try to do nowadays). Suppose they succeed. Would this fact alone undermine the child’s claim to moral standing? Surely not, and surely the same standard should apply to a robot. If it is performatively equivalent to another entity with moral standing, then the mere fact that it has been designed to fulfil a specific purpose should not affect its moral standing.Related to this, it is hard to see why the fact that we might own and control robots should make a critical difference to their moral standing. If anything, this inverts the proper order of moral justification. The fact that a robot looks and acts like another entity that we believe to have moral standing should cause us to question our approach to ownership and control, not vice versa. We once thought it was okay for humans to own and control other humans. We were wrong to think this because it ignored the moral standing of those other humans.That said, there are nuances here. Many people think that animals have some moral standing (i.e. that we need to respect their welfare and well-being) but that it is not wrong to own them or attempt to control them. The same approach might apply to robots if they are being compared to animals. This is the crucial point about ethical behaviourism: the ethical consequences of accepting that a robot is performatively equivalent to another entity with moral standing depends, crucially, on who or what that other entity is.(D) The Deception ObjectionThe fourth objection is that ethical behaviourism cannot work because it is too easy to be deceived by behavioural cues. A robot might look and act like it is in pain, but this could just be a clever trick, used by its manufacturer, to foster false sympathy. This is, probably, the most important criticism of ethical behaviourism. It is what I think lurks behind the claim that ethical behaviourism is absurd and must be resisted.It is well-known that humans have a tendency toward hasty anthropomorphism. That is, we tend to ascribe human-like qualities to features of our environment without proper justification. We anthropomorphise the weather, our computers, the trees and the plants, and so forth. It is easy to ‘hack’ this tendency toward hasty anthropomorphism. As social roboticists know, putting a pair of eyes on a robot can completely change how a human interacts with it, even if the robot cannot see anything. People worry, consequently, that ethical behaviourism is easily exploited by nefarious technology companies.I sympathise with the fear that motivates this objection. It is definitely true that behaviour can be misleading or deceptive. We are often misled by the behaviour of our fellow humans. To quote Shakespeare, someone can ‘smile and smile and be a villain’. But what is the significance of this fact when it comes to assessing moral status? To me, the significance is that it means we should be very careful when assessing the behavioural evidence that is used to support a claim about moral status. We shouldn’t extrapolate too quickly from one behaviour. If a robot looks and acts like it is in pain (say) that might provide some warrant for thinking it has moral status, but we should examine its behavioural repertoire in more detail. It might emerge that other behaviours are inconsistent with the hypothesis that it feels pain or suffering.The point here, however, is that we are always using other behavioural evidence to determine whether the initial behavioural evidence was deceptive or misleading. We are not relying on some other kind of information. Thus, for example, I think it would be a mistake to conclude that a robot cannot feel pain, even though it performs as if it does, because the manufacturer of the robot tells us that it was programmed to do this, or because some computer engineer can point to some lines of code that are responsible for the pain performance. That evidence by itself — in the absence of other countervailing behavioural evidence — cannot undermine the behavioural evidence suggesting that the robot does feel pain. Think about it like this: imagine if a biologist came to you and told you that evolution had programmed the pain response into humans in order to elicit sympathy from fellow humans. What’s more, imagine if a neuroscientist came to you and and told you she could point to the exact circuit in the brain that is responsible for the human pain performance (and maybe even intervene in and disrupt it). What they say may well be true, but it wouldn’t mean that the behavioural evidence suggesting that your fellow humans are in pain can be ignored.This last point is really the crucial bit. This is what is most distinctive about the perspective of ethical behaviourism. The tendency to misunderstand it, ignore it, or skirt around it, is why I think many people on the ‘anti’ side of the debate make bad arguments.5. Implications and ConclusionsThat’s all I will say in defence of ethical behaviourism this evening. Let me conclude by addressing some of its implications and heading off some potential misunderstandings.First, let me re-emphasise that ethical behaviourism is about the principles we should apply when assessing the moral standing of robots. In defending it, I am not claiming that robots currently have moral standing or, indeed, that they will ever have moral standing. I think this is possible, indeed probable, but I could be wrong. The devil is going to be in the detail of the behavioural tests we apply (just as it is with the Turing test for intelligence).Second, there is nothing in ethical behaviourism that suggests that we ought to create robots that cross the performative threshold to moral standing. It could be, as people like Bryson and Van Wysnberghe argue, that this is a very bad idea: that it will be too disruptive of existing moral and legal norms. What ethical behaviourism does suggest, however, is that there is an ethical weight to the decision to create human-like and animal-like robots that may be underappreciated by robot manufacturers.Third, acknowledging the potential risks, there are also potential benefits to creating robots that cross the performative threshold. Ethical behaviourism can help to reveal a value to relationships with robots that is otherwise hidden. If I am right, then robots can be genuine objects of moral affection, friendship and love, under the right conditions. In other words, just as there are ethical risks to creating human-like and animal-like robots, there are also ethical rewards and these tend to be ignored, ridiculed or sidelined in the current debate.Fourth, and related to this previous point, the performative threshold that robots have to cross in order to unlock the different kinds of value might vary quite a bit. The performative threshold needed to attain basic moral standing might be quite low; the performative threshold needed to say that a robot can be a friend or a partner might be substantially higher. A robot might have to do relatively little to convince us that it should be treated with moral consideration, but it might have to do a lot to convince us that it is our friend.These are topics that I have explored in greater detail in some of my papers, but they are also topics that Sven has explored at considerable length. Indeed, several chapters of his forthcoming book are dedicated to them. So, on that note, it is probably time for me to shut up and hand over to him and see what he has to say about all of this.Reflections and Follow Ups After I delivered the above lecture, my colleague and friend Sven Nyholm gave a response and there were some questions and challenges from the audience. I cannot remember every question that was raised, but I thought I would respond to a few that I can remember.1. The Randomisation CounterexampleOne audience member (it was Nathan Wildman) presented an interesting counterexample to my claim that other kinds of evidence don’t defeat or undermine the behavioural evidence for moral status. He argued that we could cook-up a possible scenario in which our knowledge of the origins of certain behaviours did cause us to question whether it was sufficient for moral status.He gave the example of a chatbot that was programmed using a randomisation technique. The chatbot would generate text at random (perhaps based on some source dataset). Most of the time the text is gobbledygook but on maybe one occasion it just happens to have a perfectly intelligible conversation with you. In other words, whatever is churned out by the randomisation algorithm happens to perfectly coincide with what would be intelligible in that context (like picking up a meaningful book in Borges’s Library of Babel). This might initially cause you to think it has some significant moral status, but if the computer programmer came along and told you about the randomisation process underlying the programming you would surely change your opinion. So, on this occasion, it looks like information about the causal origins of the behaviour, makes a difference to moral status.Response: This is a clever counterexample but I think it overlooks two critical points. First, it overlooks the point I make about avoiding hasty anthropomorphisation towards the end of my lecture. I think we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from just one interaction with a robot. We should conduct a more thorough investigation of the robot’s (or in this case the chatbot’s) behaviours. If the intelligible conversation was just a one-off, then we will quickly be disabused of our belief that it has moral status. But if it turns out that the intelligible conversation was not a one-off, then I don’t think the evidence regarding the randomisation process would have any such effect. The computer programmer could shout and scream as much as he/she likes about the randomisation algorithm, but I don’t think this would suffice to undermine the consistent behavioural evidence. This links to a second, and perhaps deeper metaphysical point I would like to make: we don’t really know what the true material instantiation of the mind is (if it is indeed material). We think the brain and its functional activity is pretty important, but we will probably never have a fully satisfactory theory of the relationship between matter and mind. This is the core of the hard problem of consciousness. Given this, it doesn’t seem wise or appropriate to discount the moral status of this hypothetical robot just because it is built on a randomisation algorithm. Indeed, if such a robot existed, it might give us reason to think that randomisation was one of the ways in which a mind could be functionally instantiated in the real world.I should say that this response ignores the role of moral precaution in assessing moral standing. If you add a principle of moral precaution to the mix, then it may be wrong to favour a more thorough behavioural test. This is something I discuss a bit in my article on ethical behaviourism.2. The Argument confuses how we know X is valuable with what makes X actually valuableOne point that Sven stressed in his response, and which he makes elsewhere too, is that my argument elides or confuses two separate things: (i) how we know whether something is of value and (ii) what it is that makes it valuable. Another way of putting it: I provide a decision-procedure for deciding who or what has moral status but I don’t thereby specify what it is that makes them have moral status. It could be that the capacity to feel pain is what makes someone have moral standing and that we know someone feels pain through their behaviour, but this doesn’t mean that they have moral standing because of their behaviour.Response: This is probably a fair point. I may on occasion elide these two things. But my feeling is that this is a ‘feature’ rather than a ‘bug’ in my account. I’m concerned with how we practically assess and apply principles of moral standing in the real world, and not so much with what it is that metaphysically undergirds moral standing.3. Proxies for Behaviour versus Proxies for MindAnother comment (and I apologise for not remembering who gave it) is that on my theory behaviour is important but only because it is a proxy for something else, namely some set of mental states or capacities. This is similar to the point Sven is making in his criticism. If that’s right, then I am wrong to assume that behaviour is the only (or indeed the most important) proxy for mental states. Other kinds of evidence serve as proxies for mental states. The example was given of legal trials where the prosecution is trying to prove what the mental status of the defendant was at the time of an offence. They don’t just rely on behavioural evidence. They also rely on other kinds of forensic evidence to establish this.Response: I don’t think this is true and this gets to a deep feature of my theory. To take the criminal trial example, I don’t think it is true to say that we use other kinds of evidence as proxies for mental states. I think we use them as proxies for behaviour which we then use as proxies for mental states. In other words, the actual order of inference goes:Other evidence → behaviour → mental stateAnd not:Other evidence → mental stateThis is the point I was getting at in my talk when I spoke about how we make inferences from functional brain activity to mental state. I believe what happens when we draw a link between brain activity and mental state, what we are really doing is this:Brain state → behaviour → mental stateAnd notBrain state → mental state.Now, it is, of course, true to say that sometimes scientists think we can make this second kind of inference. For example, purveyors of brain based lie detection tests (and, indeed, other kinds of lie detection test) try to draw a direct line of inference from a brain state to a mental state, but I would argue that this is only because they have previously verified their testing protocol by following the “brain state → behaviour → mental state” route and confirming that it is reliable across multiple tests. This gives them the confidence to drop the middle step on some occasions, but ultimately this is all warranted (if it is, in fact, warranted – brain-based lie detection is controversial) because the scientists first took the behavioural step. To undermine my view, you would have to show that it is possible to cut out the behavioural step in this inference pattern. I don’t think this can be done, but perhaps I can be proved wrong.This is perhaps the most metaphysical aspect of my view.4. Default Settings and PracticalitiesAnother point that came up in conversation with Sven, Merel Noorman and Silvia de Conca, had to do with the default assumptions we are likely to have when dealing with robots and how this impacts on the practicalities of robots being accepting into the moral circle. In other words, even if I am right in some abstract, philosophical sense, will anyone actually follow the behavioural test I advocate? Won’t there be a lot of resistance to it in reality?Now, as I mentioned in my lecture, I am not an activist for robot rights or anything of the sort. I am interested in the general principles we should apply when settling questions of moral status; not with whether a particular being, such as a robot, has acquired moral status. That said, implicit views about the practicalities of applying the ethical behaviourist test may play an important role in some of the arguments I am making.One example of this has to do with the ‘default’ assumption we have when interpreting the behaviour of humans/animals vis-à-vis robots. We tend to approach humans and animals with an attitude of good faith, i.e. we assume their each of their outward behaviours is a sincere representation of their inner state of mind. It’s only if we receive contrary evidence that we will start to doubt the sincerity of the behaviour.But what default assumption do we have when confronting robots? It seems plausible to suggest that most people will approach them with an attitude of bad faith. They will assume that their behaviours are representative of nothing at all and will need a lot of evidence to convince them that they should be granted some weight. This suggests that (a) not all behavioural evidence is counted equally and (b) it might be very difficult, in practice, for robots to be accepted into the moral circle. #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Response: I don’t see this as a criticism of ethical behaviourism but, rather, a warning to anyone who wishes to promote it. In other words, I accept that people will resist ethical behaviourism and may treat robots with greater suspicion than human or animal agents. One of the key points of this lecture and the longer academic article I wrote about the topic was to address this suspicion and skepticism. Nevertheless, the fact that there may be these practical difficulties does not mean that ethical behaviourism is incorrect. In this respect, it is worth noting that Turing was acutely aware of this problem when he originally formulated his 'Imitation Game' test. The reason why the test was purely text-based in its original form was to prevent human-centric biases affecting its operation.5. Ethical Mechanicism vs Ethical Behaviourism After I posted this article, Natesh Ganesh posted a critique of my handling of the deception objection on Twitter. He made two interesting points. First, he argued that the thought experiment I used to dismiss the deception objection was misleading and circular. If a scientist revealed the mechanisms underlying my own pain performances I would have no reason to doubt that the pain was genuine since I already know that someone with my kind of neural circuitry can experience pain. If they revealed the mechanisms underlying a robot’s pain performances things would be different because I do not yet have a reason to think that a being with that kind of mechanism can experience genuine pain. As a result, the thought experiment is circular because only somebody who already accepted ethical behaviourism would be so dismissive of the mechanistic evidence. Here’s how Natesh expresses the point:“the analogy in the last part [the response to the deception objection] seems flawed. Showing me the mechanisms of pain in entities (like humans) who we share similar mechanisms with & agree have moral standing is different from showing me the mechanisms of entities (like robots) whose moral standing we are trying to determine. Denying experience of pain in the 1st simply because I now know the circuitry would imply denying your own pain & hence moral standing. But accepting/ denying the 2nd if its a piece of code implicitly depends on whether you already accept/deny ethical behaviorism. It is just circular to appeal to that example as evidence.”He then follows up with a second point (implicit in what was just said) about the importance of mechanical similarities between entities when it comes to assessing moral standing:“I for one am more likely to [believe] a robot can experience pain if it shows the behavior & the manufacturer opened it up & showed me the circuitry and if that was similar to my own (different material perhaps) I am more likely to accept the robot experiences pain. In this case once again I needed machinery on top of behavior.”What I would say here, is that Natesh, although not completely dismissive of the importance of behaviour to assessing moral standing, is a fan of ethical mechanicism, and not ethical behaviourism. He thinks you must have mechanical similarity (equivalence?) before you can conclude that two entities share moral standing.Response: On the charge of circularity, I don’t think this is quite fair. The thought experiment I propose when responding to the deception objection is, like all thought experiments, intended to be an intuition pump. The goal is to imagine a situation in which you could describe and intervene in the mechanical underpinning of a pain performance with great precision (be it a human pain performance or otherwise) and ask whether the mere fact that you could describe the mechanism in detail or intervene in it would be make a difference to the entity’s moral standing. My intuitions suggest it wouldn’t make a difference, irrespective of the details of the mechanism (this is the point I make, above, in relation to the example given by Nathan Wildman about the robot whose behaviour is the result of a random-number generator programme). Perhaps other people’s intuitions are pumped in a different direction. That can happen but it doesn’t mean the thought experiment is circular.What about the importance of mechanisms in addition to behaviour? This is something I address in more detail in the academic paper. I have two thoughts about it. First, I could just bite the bullet and agree that the underlying mechanisms must be similar too. This would just add an additional similarity test to the assessment of moral status. There would then be similar questions as to how similar the mechanisms must be. Is it enough if they are, roughly, functionally similar or must they have the exact same sub-components and processes? If the former, then it still seems possible in principle for roboticists to create a functionally similar underlying mechanism and this could then ground moral standing for robots.Second, despite this, I would still push back against the claim that similar underlying mechanisms are necessary. This strikes me as being just a conservative prejudgment rather than a good reason for denying moral status to behaviourally equivalent entities. Why are we so confident that only entities with our neurological mechanisms (or something very similar) can experience pain (or instantiate the other mental properties relevant to moral standing)? Or, to put it less controversially, why should we be so confident that mechanical similarity undercuts behavioural similarity? If there is an entity that looks and acts like it is in pain (or has interests, a sense of personhood, agency etc), and all the behavioural tests confirm this, then why deny it moral standing because of some mechanical differences?Part of the resistance here could be that people are confusing two different claims:Claim 1: it is impossible (physically, metaphysically) for an entity that lacks sufficient mechanical similarity (with humans/animals) to have the behavioural sophistication we associate with experiencing pain, having agency etc.Claim 2: an entity that has the behavioural sophistication we associate with experiencing pain, having agency (etc) but then lacks mechanical similarity to other entities with such behavioural sophistication, should be denied moral standing because they lack mechanical similarity.Ethical behaviourism denies claim 2, but it does not, necessarily, deny claim 1. It could be the case that mechanical similarity is essential for behavioural similarity. This is something that can only be determined after conducting the requisite behavioural tests. The point, as always throughout my defence of the position, is that the behavioural evidence should be our guide. This doesn’t mean that other kinds of evidence are irrelevant but simply that they do not carry as much weight. My sense is that people who favour ethical mechanicism have a very strong intuition in favour of claim 1, which they then carry over into support for claim 2. This carry over is not justified as the two claims are not logically equivalent.Subscribe to the newsletter

Watson, Skiner, et al Music 'Elvis Lives' by Skinner

Rewards! What is not to love about enticing or treating your child to something they love in return for their cooperation or participation? How could that be negative? We live in a time where there is huge cultural approval for stickers and charts, so what happens if you choose an alternative approach and why would you want to?

--{ "Scientific Socialism: Obey, Take Your Drugs, Sex will Calm All Anxiety, Behaviourism and Neuroscience Run Planned Society - Part 2" © Alan Watt }-- Everything Today is Incredibly Politicized - Cult of the Personality - Everyone is a Corporation These Days - Gillette, Toxic Masculinity - Adam Curtis, The Angrier People Get, the More They Click Away - Gillette, Cheapening Blades so People had to Buy More - Light bulbs - Planned Obsolescence - Family-Run Businesses - Corporate Raiders - Old Morality that Kept Cultures Intact - Book, The Corporate Man - Milton Friedman, Greed is Good - Advertising that is All About You - Narcissism - Movie, Idiocracy; Doctors Point at Pictures; They are Not Interested in Family Histories - No Point Complaining to Agencies and Companies - Societies of Winners and Losers - Military uses Anthropologists to Study Cultures - Teacher's Tool Kits - Peter Hitchens, Loss of Past and Values - Margaret Thatcher - Gorbachev spoke about the Perceived End of Communism - China, Conformity - Thomas Jefferson said When the Same Agenda Continues Regardless of the Party in Power, then Know You are Living Under Tyranny - Tony Blair - The Deindustrialization of the UK - People don't Ask the Right Questions - We're Not at War, It's a Policing Action - Perception Management - George Orwell's 1984, Who is the Enemy Today? - Middle East Oil - Russia - Propaganda - History Must be Taught the Way it was Pre-Planned to be Taught - Milner Group, RIIA - Carroll Quigley's books, The Anglo-American Establishment; Tragedy and Hope - Quigley talks about the Group Grabbing Resources in Africa - Socialism in Britain - The Youth are Always Catered to with Sex and Hedonism - Quigley wrote about Networking Circles - CFR, U.N., World Bank, BIS, IMF; Debt Creation - Austerity - Earth Worship, Sacrifice for Planet Earth - Aldous Huxley - Lord Bertrand Russell, Socialism - Libraries Weeding Book Collections on a Massive Scale - Orwell's Memory Hole - Most People have No Reason to Question Anything - Hold on to Your Mind. *Title and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Jan. 20, 2019 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)

--{ "Scientific Socialism: Obey, Take Your Drugs, Sex will Calm All Anxiety, Behaviourism and Neuroscience Run Planned Society." © Alan Watt }-- Meaning of Happy Holidays - Commercialization - Rants from the Movie 'Network' on Corporations Running the System - The Toga-Wearing Utopia we were Shown in Movies - Lord Milner, British Empire - The International Elite at the Top use whatever Area Suits them Best at the Time - City of London, New York, Centers of Finance - An Elite Group Way Above what We Think of as Nations - Carroll Quigley said in the 1960s that Leaders of All Parties Chosen - Non-Governmental Organizations, Charities, Social Programs, Library Events - Debt and Compound Interest - Denzel Washington movie - Time is on My Side - Scientific Socialism is the Key - Secular Humanism - Inflation, Rising Costs, Devalued Currencies - Creation of Apathy - Rationing which Continued long after WWII in Britain - Unemployment in the 1970s - Britain's High Suicide Rate in the 1970s - Introduction of Drug Cartels - Freedom is a Lot More than Sex - Civility - Bureaucracy - The Psychopathic Era - Microsoft - Public Servants Live like Kings - Cecil Rhodes Left Most of his Money to the Rothschilds - Spy (Intelligence) Agencies - Any Problems that Come Out of Sex will be Dealt with for You Free of Charge - Pornography - Weaponized Entertainment - The Sexualization of Everything - Normalizing Pedophilia - Contamination, Getting into Degrees of Right and Wrong - Music Festival in Australia - FOMO, Fear of Missing Out - Clusters of Cancer in the U.S.A. and Australia - Toxic Secret, 3M and Pollution with Toxic PFAS - Chemicals - Leader of Russian Orthodox Church says Antichrist will Control us Through Phones - Five Eyes Intelligence Agencies - Tavistock - Corruption Now Rampant throughout the System - Gasoline Theft in Mexico - Sydney Measles Alert - Bolton says No Withdrawal from Syria Yet - Pacific Trade Deal Spurs Canadian Farm Sales to Japan as U.S. Watches - UK Floats the Idea of a Meat Tax - 48,000 Brits Dead after Worst Winter in 42 Years - Problems with Mail Delivery - Mental Health Issues with Youth - Sense of Purpose has been Destroyed. *Title and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Jan. 13, 2019 (Exempting Music and Literary Quotes)

Not what's on your mind, it's what's on your behaviour you heretic. Music 'Elvis Lives' by Skinner

Well well, the grand finale. We've seen in the previous episode how laboratory studies have shown that extrinsic rewards lead to reduced motivation and lower-quality work, as well as a priori arguments for why it's a bad idea to incentivise behaviours with rewards. For those of you who are still unconvinced, I'm losing hope a bit since I've spent a total of about 3 hours so far over two episodes (last episode and episode 2) talking about why rewards are a really bad idea. Here goes my last chance at convincing you, and your last chance to see the light.   With one more chance, what will I talk about? I imagine that those people still saying "yeah, but..." might be most convinced by research based on real-life situations, rather than on laboratory studies. Well, as luck would have it, this is exactly what Alfie Kohn covers next in his book. Picture a group of company directors from various industries talking to one another about their observations that incentive plans have caused damage to their organisations. Picture teachers, "incentivised" by controlling external accountability measures, becoming more authoritarian to the kids in their classrooms in turn - and children learning less as a result (research* has shown this, no kidding). Picture children becoming less cooperative and generous as they are given rewards for good behaviour.   For those of you who are convinced by now (hopefully most of you!), you might still be saying something like "I can see the importance of these findings, but what realistic alternatives are there to using punishments and rewards?" Thankfully, Alfie Kohn spends Part 3 of the book tackling just this issue. I don't want to spoil it for you too much, but let's just say, it can be done.   Even if just one teacher reduces or eliminates the use of contingent sweets or stickers, class rankings, inappropriate praise, or grades as a result of having listened to these past two episodes, then they will have been worth producing. Aiming a bit higher, wouldn't it be great if we could turn our society, and our world, into one that realises the value and the potential of intrinsic motivation, and the dangers of extrinsic motivators?   Enjoy the episode.   * "Controlling Teacher Strategies: Undermining Children's Self-Determination and Performance" by Cheryl Flint, Ann K. Boggiano, and Marty Barrett; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990.

Why should somebody who is interested in education be interested in behaviourism? Because it's had a huge impact on educational theory and practice over the past more than 100 years. When I started reading books on education, the I was astounded at the frequency with which behaviourist arguments were put forward to support ideas. I felt like I could hardly budge without bumping into another reference to it. And it's no surprise - behaviourist educationalists include figures such as Edward Thorndike, sometimes referred to as "the father of educational psychology". The first book I read about educational psychology said that there were three chief paradigms of teaching, one of which was "behavioural". Understanding behaviourism helped me to better understand what these books were talking about, and to know when they didn't know what they were talking about. Because it says some pretty crazy stuff, which is nonetheless hard to refute. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the behaviourist who made the greatest contribution to the field, had some pretty scary ideas. He denied the existence of choice, will, or freedom. He considered dignity to be an empty and worthless idea. (Hence the title of one of his books, Beyond Freedom and Dignity.) He thought that people could be perfectly controlled with the right external conditioning, and he even hoped that the future would be this way, as expounded in his apparently utopian novel Walden Two. The non-existence or at least unimportance of internal states (thoughts, emotions) is at the very core of the philosophy of behaviourism. Outraged yet? And yet the theory has a lot of evidence going for it. Because, a lot of the time, it works. Behaviourist principles have proven very effective in a range of situations and applications. Their greatest successes have been in animal training, but they've also been effective in various human domains, including making games and gambling machines more addictive. (Hooray?) There have also been some applications in sports coaching (more on this in another of Karen Pryor's books, Reaching the Animal Mind). Don't Shoot the Dog! serves as an introduction to behaviourism. Karen Pryor takes us through both the basic theory and applications in behaviour modification. She uses a combination of examples from both animal and human subjects in everyday situations. Want your dog to stop barking all night? Need your roommate to start doing the laundry for once? Can't wait to teach your cat to give you a high-five? Karen Pryor tackles all these tricky situations and more. Behaviourism claims to be a complete model of learning and behaviour - a very ambitious claim indeed. How does it do on this score? Without giving the game away too much, let's just say that the results are mixed. In some situations, behaviourist approaches and ideas work incredibly well. In certain cases, however, particularly to do with motivation, it is clear that it hasn't got all the answers. The fact that it's partially true and partially false makes it all the more intriguing - why does it sometimes work, but sometimes not? This is a question that will take a lot longer than one episode to answer, but it is worth thinking on. Even if you're not behaviourism's biggest fan, or you don't think you'll be using it much, it is an important thing to have a grasp of to provide context for other theories and ideas. It's like Newtonian physics, which does a good job prior to the arrival of other theories (relativity theory and quantum mechanics), and we can then ask why Newtonian physics works so well in most situations even though it's "wrong" as it has been superseded by other theories. Enjoy the episode.

Common sense tells us that in order to get someone to do something, or to get them to do it better (faster, more thoroughly, more carefully), you might offer them a reward - or if the offer is already there, increase its size. All kinds of clever-sounding people hold this view - principally economists and management consultants, but more or less anyone else too, as it seems to be so basic and so widespread an idea as to not merit further inspection. Daniel Pink's book Drive introduces us to the research that seems to turn much of this "common sense" on its head. It turns out the rewards such as financial incentives usually make people perform worse. It's not limited to financial incentives (although Pink focuses on these), and not even limited to people - the initial example given is of how giving contingent food rewards to monkeys makes them worse at learning how to open latches than literally just leaving the monkeys alone. In place of the carrots-and-sticks theory, Pink introduces us to a new theory, which is about 40 years old and yet still isn't all that well known. According to MAP theory (not the only name), the most important components of motivation are mastery, autonomy, and purpose. The author explains to us in more detail quite what each of these mean, but in short, people are motivated to do things when they can apply their existing expertise and develop it further; choose what they get to do, when, how, and with whom; and do something that they think is important, and/or connects them to other people. One of the reasons that it's taken so long for the ideas to catch on is the prevalence not only of the "rational agent model" of economics, but also of the psychological field of behaviourism. Behaviourism, along with psychoanalysis (a very different and mostly incompatible worldview), was the leading theory in psychology in the first half of the 20th century, and remains influential today. It turns out that behaviourists aren't completely wrong that rewards can motivate behaviour, but it also turns out that rats pushing buttons isn't the same as humans doing creative work. Separating out when using rewards is a good idea and when it isn't is an important question, and one that Daniel Pink also addresses. Behaviourism is a huge topic in its own right, and we will have to tackle it in a separate episode (or three). For now, though, Daniel Pink's book gives us a fascinating and, to be honest, heartening new way of looking at human motivation and behaviour. Enjoy the episode.  

Episode 4 discusses the application of behavioural principles in the classroom. It also focuses on recent research in behaviourism.

--{ Sanity is Evading Upgrading: "Daily Conditioning Makes it Hard to Think, Scientific Propaganda Makes Own-Thought Sink, Behaviourism and Neuroscience Rule Today, Very Few Think Critically, Have Much to Say, Standardized Behaviour, Beliefs, Opinions Via Entertainment, Or News for the Minions, A One-Hour Documentary can Reverse Your View, Using Techniques of Persuasion Known to Few, Utilizing Guilt, Envy, Selective Fact Sways And Standardizes Opinion says Edward Bernays" © Alan Watt }-- RIIA-CFR and Members - Mental Health Treatment Funding for Members of Parliament - Standardized News - A Different System in the U.S. - Multiculturalism - Cultural Change through Entertainment - Militarization of Police - Creation of "Stars" - H.G. Wells - Elites' View of the Human Herd - Debasement of the Elderly - Police Opened Fire on Wrong Van ("Mistaken Identity") in Dorner Case - Judge Dredd - Cap on Cost of Care Will Cost Pensioners their Homes - IBM and Smart Cities - US Military in Africa - Posting Action Man Toy on Facebook Gets Man Stormtroopered - Medical Treatment according to Age and Importance - Cashless Society - British and American Flags and Color Coding - Egyptian Pharaohs, Cleopatra and Ptolemy - Freemasonry. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Feb. 14, 2013 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

--{ Machiavelli, Behaviourism and Neuro-Science Are Chemically Castrating Your Defiance: "An Age in Chaos, From Long-Term Planning, Is in Your Face, with History Damning, Last Hundred Year Plan is Completed, Debauch Generations, Old Norms Defeated, Our Minds and Behaviour Now in Phase With Test-Rats, All Crammed in a Cage, Scientists and Experts Fine-Tune Behaviour Under Guise of Science Being Our Saviour, Democracy's Farce of "All Playing the Game," Depicting Shepherds and Sheep as Equally Same" © Alan Watt }-- Countries are Corporations, All Laws Revolve around Money - War on Farming - United Nations' Agenda, Divide and Conquer - "Philanthropic" Front Organizations - Brainwashing of Children through UNICEF and Schooling, Creation of Fanatical Believers - World Resource Takeover, including Water and Food - IMF Gains More Power and Control - Countries Put in Debt then Amalgamated - Myth of Gas and Oil Scarcity - The Purpose of Internet Pornography - Secret Institution of Banking and Bank of England - Mobile Devices to See Through Walls - Outbreaks of Polio after Oral Polio Vaccine- Cottonseed and Sterilization - Black Boxes, Remote Cut-offs in Cars - Con of Wind Farms and Electric Privatization - Toxicity of Glyphosate Herbicide - Totalitarianism - Roaring '20s and Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll - Moral Relativity, Hedonistic, Narcissistic Society. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - April 20, 2012 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

--{ How Easily They Play Us, In This Age of Planned Chaos: "Crisis and Terror Levels, All this Consternation, We're in Training and Adapting to Behaviour Modification, Keeping You Safe, The Oldest Play Used by Psychopaths, There's a Big Club They Belong To, Brandy & Belly-Laughs, So Easy to Re-Shape the World, Direct the Way it's Going, Using Terror and Austerity On a Public Never Knowing, The Big Club Owns the Banks, In Control of Media, A Sci-Fi Weapons Arsenal, Tax-Funded via Academia, There's Total War on Your Body, A War on Your Mind, Courtesy of the Psycho Club, The Richest Inbred Kind" © Alan Watt }-- Psychopathic System - US to Pay for Strauss-Khan's Golden Parachute - IMF, Takeovers of Nations - Nuclear Plants to be Phased Out - Skinner, Behaviourism, Altering People's Behaviour by Altering Anything in their Environment - Radio and TV Serials - Use of Fear, Surveillance to Change Behaviour - Buildup of Police State, Authoritarian Gov., Public Terrorized - Machine Gun Cops in Britain - Politicians' Profits from Inside Knowledge - Predator Drones over US and Canada - DARPA's Nano-Based Surveillance (Paid by Your Tax Money) - Predictive Programming Movies - Toxic Pesticides from GM Crops and GM Food Toxins found in Unborn Babies - Portable EMP Weaponry - Political Correctness, PC Parents - Culture Given from the Top-Down - The World You are Allowing to Come into Being. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - May 25, 2011 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

--{ In System Feudal, "Progress" is Brutal, Ensuring Minority Reign over Majority: "Children Strapped to Tables, Afraid to Cough, Neck, Tubes Inserted by the God Pavlov, The Dominant Minority Put All Reliance Of People Control in the Hands of Science, In Old Days from Brain Probes, People Would Run, Now with TV and Computer We Think it's Fun, Electric Waves Monitor Brain Patterns in Game, Then Send in Signals to Erase Life's Pain, A Well-Ordered Society, No Choice but Compliance, An End to Free-Will, Courtesy, Neuroscience" © Alan Watt }-- System of Money and Artificial Cities (Beehive) - Virtual World (Cartoon) Fantasy, Uniformity, the Hollywood Look - Rosicrucianism/Freemasonry, Movement of Reason and Rationality - Scientific Methods of Controlling Populations - Horrors of Psychiatry, Behaviourism and Neuroscience - Desensitization of Students, Brain Dissection etc. - Experiments of Soviet Union, Dog and Human - "Thinking Cap" to Suppress/Stimulate Brain Activity - DARPA, Computer-Brain Interface to "Help" You - UK, Doctors Paid to Find Mental Illness - Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" Revisited, Pavlov, Torture, Inducement of Hysteria and Breakdown, Reconditioning - The Abused Love the Abuser, Come to Love Their Servitude - Creation of Terrorists - Scientific Indoctrination of Children, Input from Parents Null and Void - Education to Produce the Perfect Citizen for the State. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Feb. 10, 2011 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

--{ Whose Brain is it Anyhow? "The Big Brother, Big Society's Now the Saviour, Using Specialists to Change Our Behaviour, Gone are the Days They'd Appeal for Compliance, In Skinnerian Techniques They've Reliance, To Modify the People at Work, at Leisure, Herd Adaptability Using Peer Pressure, When Certain Topics Arise Making You Uneasy Your Default Position Will Make You Queasy Should You Attempt to Give Your Opinion Which Would Rattle the Delicacy of Herd Minion, The Politically Correct Agenda is Thrust as a Must, Governments in Science Have Put all Their Trust" © Alan Watt }-- Governments using Behaviourism on the Public, Guidance into the "Right" Direction - Ideas Marketed to You. Malthusian Population Control - Rothschild Family Interest in Disease-Carrying Fleas - Crop Contamination by GMO - Arkansas, Blackbird and Fish Deaths. Weather Modification, Rain Creation in Desert. Total Information Network - Payments by Smartphone - Training into Biometric Scans at School - Value Added Tax Hikes - Public Adaptation. Climate "Experts" Still Faking Temperatures to Show "Global Warming". Police Stop-and-Search Powers for "Terrorists". (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Jan. 3, 2011 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

--{ The Dominant Minority: "In Every Age There's a Dominant Minority, Working Their Will Over the Great Majority, Owning the Banking and All Academia, Re-Writing the Past in Each Encyclopaedia, Using Rule by "Reason" via Scientific Sort, Using Theories for Aims, Rebuffing Retort, Indoctrinating Children Under "Education", "We've to Be Austere Due to Hyper-Inflation", Both Marx and Lenin said the Nation-State Would First Rise Against Others, Wars of Hate, Revolutions, Most Social, would Win the Day, Then the Nation-States would "Wither Away", Behaviourism, Science would Be Relentless, Creating Human Compliance, Interdependence, The Dominant Minority would Rule Humanity, Part Socialist, Part Private, Over Induced Insanity" © Alan Watt }-- Behaviourism used on Public - Rapid Depopulation - Takeover of World Food Supply - Food as a Weapon - Untouchable Monsanto, GMO and Terminator Gene Seed - Cancer and Birth Defects from Herbicides/Roundup. New York City "Greenhouse Gas" Inventory and "Carbon" Reduction - Rising Temperatures and Sea Levels Nonsense. Julian Huxley - Galton Institute (British Eugenics Society), Darwin Lectures, Survival of "Superior" Types and Elimination of "Inferior" - Dialectic of Left and Right (Funded from Same Sources). Admission of Turkey into EU - Actors in Theater of War - Emergence of New International Order based on "Harmony". Manipulation of Human Behaviour by Technological Means - Zbigniew Brzezinski - HAARP Worldwide - No Reaction from Placid Populations - Controlled Society Dominated by Elite Group - "Continuous Education", Updates - Geopolitical Chessboard. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Nov. 9, 2010 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

--{ Age of Control Freak makes Century Bleak: Fat-Cat Soviet Thinkers Are Academia's Stinkers: "Freedom Down Centuries has Valleys and Peaks, The Twenty-first Century's for Control Freaks, And They're Training the Herd, Human Cattle, To Obey Every Dictate without a Battle, In Electronic Haze, the Herd Hardly Blink, Dumbed-Down, Domesticated, Won't Raise a Stink, Most Ego-Syntonic, Avoid Pain, Seek Pleasure, Have DTs from Cessation of Electronic Leisure, Now the U.N. Agenda's so Loudly Uttered, You'd Think Jobless and Those Who've Suffered Would Stand as One and Cry "Far Enough!" Meeting Every New Dictat with Angry Rebuff, Sending this World Soviet Back Down to Hell, Only Then When They're Gone will World be Well" © Alan Watt }-- Perpetual Childhood in Socialism - Arrested Mental Development - Real History Passed on from Elders with Wisdom - Youth Culture Created - Introduction of Television, Greatest Psychological Tool - Predictive Programming through Fiction - "Coronation Street" series. Era of Control-Freakism - Philosophers - Binding UN Treaties - Purpose of Intelligence Agencies - Employers as Tax Collectors - New System is Form of Feudalism - Tribute Paid to Her Majesty's Revenue Collection - Everyone Works for Government - Canada, Gov.-Run Liquor Stores Demand ID - PST, GST / Value Added Tax (Supposed Luxury Tax) - Soaring Price of Food. Behaviourism, People Trained like Animals - "Green" Trash Police in U.S. - Communist United Nations (set up by Bankers), Demands Higher Water Prices - Methods to Control the Mass Man - Planks of Marxism - Frankfurt School and Macy Group, Creation of American Culture. (See http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com for article links.) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Sept. 10, 2010 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

Convincing Public to Depopulate - David Attenborough, Optimum Population Trust - Darwinian Eugenics. MJTF. Mock Disaster Scenarios - Pharmaceutical-Military-Industrial Complex - 2006 WHO Meeting, Starting Mandatory Inoculations - Dr. Salk, Cancer-Causing Simian-40 Virus in Polio Shot - Reducing Life Expectancy (Death Control). Elites' View of Themselves as Separate Species - Life Extension for Elite Only - Generations of Interbreeding, Darwin-Wedgwood-Huxley Line. Chemtrails since 1998 - Open Skies Treaty - Edward Teller, HAARP, Standing Wave Technology. Impregnating Air with Metallic Particles (Atmosphere as Conductor) - Maine USA Test. Protection for Elite, Air Filtration, Portable Chelation, Medical Treatment - 3 Levels of Science - Mr. Rockefeller, Queen Mother. CFR / RIIA, "Illumined" Ones - Medici Family, Intergenerational Bankers, War Financiers - Sparta - Aristotle - Rothschild's Carbon Tax Scheme - Julian Huxley - H.G. Wells, "Shape of Things to Come". Personal Experiences in Life - Mainstream Religion, World Council of Churches - Royal Society, Newton, Bacon - "Nobility" Gene - Science as New Priesthood. Cabala, John Dee, Calling Down Entities (Demons) - New Age, Channeling, Becoming a "God". Destruction of Old Society, Morality Out the Window, Govt. in Charge - Adaptation to Changes - Skinner, Behaviourism. Predictions of "Killer" Outbreak, Viral Mutation - Antibodies, Vaccination for Babies (No Immune System) - Deaths FROM Smallpox Vaccine - Malnourished Poor, Killed by Common Diseases - Buildup of Natural Immunity - Squalene in Flu Shot. National Health Service (Factory Medicine), Canada, Britain - Access to MINIMAL Healthcare - UN World Health Organization agenda - Priority for Sex Changes, Waiting List for Cancers and GPs - World Standardization - Eugenicist Tommy Douglas - Permission to Breed, Compulsory Sterilization. Collective Punishment, Laws Mandated Over Everyone - Incremental Loss of Freedoms - Totalitarianism, Agencies fighting for Authority - World Empire - Govt. Immigration Policy to Pay Off National Debt, Cries of "Too Many People" - New World Order, Post-Democratic - Arthur Koestler, Lobotomy of Individuality Part of Brain.

Eugenics - H.G. Wells, Adolph Hitler - Elite, Aristocracy - Psychopathic Types. Real Estate, Tenants and Owners - RIIA, CFR, Income and Property Tax - Amalgamation of Americas, Waco Signing - Parallel Government, Collectivism, Democracy - War on Terror, Legal Declarations. Voting (Stops Revolutions) - Carroll Quigley - Soviet (Rule by Councils) System, NGOs, Law Legislation - U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Overthrow of Tyrannical Government. Searches, ID Cards, Chips, Stealth Approach, "For Your Safety" - Gender War - Africa - Separation of Parents and Children - Emasculation of Male, Elevation of Female. B.F. Skinner, Behaviourism, Alteration of Environment - Television, Media, Entertainment - Occult Control - Noble Orders, Roman Equestrian Order - Language, Symbolism - London, Real Power, Royalty. Patriot Radio Business, Sponsors, Advertising Income - Competing Companies - Salesmen. Rothschilds, Gold Industry, Setting of Monetary Value - Barter. Survival Mechanisms - Those Who Cannot Understand, Casualties.

Waking Up - The Trap - Aliens, Paranormal - Fake Reality. Adolf Hitler, Ancient Tyrants, Powerful Families - Institutions, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations. Cecil Rhodes, Boer War, Raids - British East India Company - Anglo-American Establishment. Queen Elizabeth I. Court, Open Agenda, Standards of Living - Ancient Rome, Minoans, Harappans - Brytish Empire, Commonwealth, Parliament. Outer Space, Channelers, New Age Movement - Madame Blavatsky, Anne Besant, Alice Bailey, Theosophy, Mysticism - Discrediting Intelligence. Westminster Abbey: Tesserated (Checkerboard) Floor, Tombs, Obelisks in "Christian" Church. North American Integration, Unification - Montreal, Napoleonic Code. Egypt, Eye of Ra - Stalin - Big Brother. Skinner, Behaviourism, Alteration of Environment - Genetic Enhancement - "Inferior Types", "Junk Genes". Self-help Groups, Books - Scientific Crutches, Assurance, Insurance. MI5, MI6, Creation of Modern Mythology for Public - Aleister Crowley, OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) - H.G. Wells. "New World Order", Hinduism - American Eugenics Society, "Perfect Specimens", Rockefeller, I.G. Farben. National and International Socialism - Trotsky, Perpetual Revolution. (Articles: "Roaches follow their robo-leader" and "Scientists prep mind reading device" by Mark Baard, parallelnormal.com.) *Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Nov. 15, 2007 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)