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by Nick Benjaminsz
The Conditioned Reflex as a Means of Communication Man has received three great blows to his self-satisfied view of himself as the center of the universe. First, Copernicus displaced the earth from the literal center of all the suns, moons, planets and stars into the significant position of a small satellite of a medium-sized star on the outskirts of a relatively negligible galactic system. Next, Darwin showed that, far from being unique, man was, in fact, first cousin to the ape. Third and last, Pavlov succeeded in showing that much of the activity of the Homo sapiens can be accounted for in terms of simple association of a purely fortuitous kind between stimuli impinging on man’s sensory surfaces, and responses mediated by his skeletal, glandular and autonomic systems. In thus reducing man to the status of a machine... (click for full text pdf)
