Can Skinner Solve The Problem Of Consciousness?

Abstract

We use both B. F. Skinner’s explicit notion of consciousness as descriptive self knowledge and the extensions found implicitly in his work on consciousness as self knowledge through contact and behavior from the point of view of the behaving organism to assess whether these formulations are capable of offer an answer to what has become known as the “hard problem of consciousness”. In this sense, we ask: How consciousness emerges from physical stuff? For an effective appropriation of the concept of consciousness it is necessary to trace the entire conceptual and practical network, which involves sensorially responding, knowing, tacting, describing and the notions of listener, audience, verbal community, self-control and self. The conclusion is reached that behavior from the point of view of the behaving organism can only be isolated or abstracted in the form that is called phenomenal consciousness through the development of abstract self-tacts of private events and is therefore a social product. This means that so-called sensory data are, at some level, constructions of language. The biological aspect of the so-called phenomenal consciousness is nothing more than the ability of an organism to respond to stimuli, which is confused with the very origin of life and does not have great relevance for the development of a behavioral or psychological science. After all, from a Skinnerian point of view, consciousness is a function and not an entity, that is, it cannot be found in the brain, but in the socially discriminated functional relationship of the human body to itself. The conceptual and practical clarification of the notion of consciousness equips the scientist to radically investigate a set of phenomena of human life still tied to the modernist paradigm, such as awareness, intention and deceit. In this way, the hard problem of consciousness, as far as psychological science is concerned, is considered to have been softened.