p.63 Every behavior act, in so far as its continued going off is contingent
upon there proving to be such and such specific features in the environment, must be said in so far to postulate or cognize
those features.
p.64 Every behavior act, in going off and being what it is, expresses, implies, certain specific characters
in the environment... If these expected characters are not found, the act sooner or later ceases or modifies itself. Behavior
is driven by organic needs, and in going off it postulates that the environmental characters and relations are such that it
will prove an appropriate behavior for satisfying those needs. The going off of a particular act postulates a particular
complementary character in the environment... these acts show themselves ready for alteration, if things go wrong.
p.64 many of these cognizing and postulating behaviors are none the less quite obviously automatic and unconscious.
For a behavior to be postulative and cognitive, it is not necessary that it also be conscious.
p.64-65 wherever an organism at a given moment of stimulation shifts
then and there from being ready to respond in some relatively less differentiated way to being ready to respond in some relatively
more differentiated way, there is consciousness... The moment of this switch is the moment of consciousness.
p.65 What, now, is the mechanism of such switch-overs? ...organisms... are to be assumed capable
not only of actual behaviors but also of what may be called mere behavior adjustments... they in some manner bring
the animal into contact with the same stimulus results with which he would be brought in contact, if he should actually behave...
To make an adjustment to an act is to achieve a representation... of the probable stimulus results to be
expected from the act.
p.66 Assuming for the purposes of argument that you accept this doctrine, the next step will be to declare
that it is these behavior adjustments which produce or are consciousness. When a rat on some given
occasion switches over from a condition of nonreadiness to discriminate white and black to one of readiness to discriminate
them, and, as we have said, thereby becomes conscious of the difference between them, this switch-over and this consciousness
are mediated, we shall now declare, by behavior adjustment.
p.67 after this new differentiating behavior has once become established, consciousness and the behavior
adjustment can apparently drop out and yet the new discrimination behavior continue.
p.67 the switch-over (on any given occasion) from not being ready to treat the sign relationship of the
black and the white as different to being ready to treat them as different... a fused Gestalt would be produced in which the
presented stimulus, white or black, not only would be set over against its comparison color but also would be enlarged by
its to-be-expected food or nonfood result. Only on the basis of this total Gestalt would the behavior of entering or not entering
ensue.
p.68 This total Gestalt would contain the differentiation of white from black, of food from nonfood, and
of the sign relationship of white as leading to food from that of black as leading to nonfood. And on the occasions of its
first appearances there would be consciousness. On later occasions this grand total Gestalt would eventually occur by mere
associative extension, without the intervention of... consciousness.
