This is where there is a style of use of language that may be unique to Nick 
among all humans, or may be a tribal custom among the psychologists, but which 
the common man needs to be aware exists, so that he knows that the way 
Nick/psychologists use words will be directly opposed to the way the common man 
has always used them.

> If that question disappears for you under those circumstances, then I can 
> simply admit that a pleasure is just the behavioral transition that occurs 
> upon the achievement of set of circumstances, and escape the tautology by 
> defining  a goal as the organization of behavior that points to a set of 
> circumstances.  

So, in archery, the way the archer points the bow (organization of behavior) is 
the “goal”, and the event of an arrow’s hitting a bullseye is somehow not a 
goal.  Nick didn’t happen to use the word “function” in the clip above; I have 
no idea what he would say a “function” is, but in the earlier posts, it was as 
bizarrely glossed to me as this glossing of goal, so I can’t even come up with 
a guess for how to imitate it.  

The plugging in of an address for the supermarket to the GPS while sitting in 
the car in the driveway (organization of behavior) is the goal, not the event 
of my arriving at the supermarket.

For me as a mechanic, the bullseye as a position for arrows is the goal 
(applied to an object), or the event of the arrow’s arriving there is a goal 
(applied to an outcome of a behavior) that serves as a selection criterion 
among directions in which a bow might be pointed.  My pointing the bow one way 
versus another is to me a function for attaining that goal.  The event of 
arriving at a supermarket is the goal that serves as a criterion for selection 
of which GPS location I plug in; the act of plugging in that address is then a 
function for attaining that goal.

I know that, in response to this, Nick will reply with a sequence of 
English-language words that I find even more unparseable than the ones above.  

The meditators do this too.  If I comment that, as a mechanic, I am interested 
in what would get people to be more restrained in the use of excesses of power 
when they find themselves in possession of such, to try to unwind the death 
spiral that is leading to the dissolution of the society, I know that the 
meditators will say “Poor child, lost in samsara, he doesn’t realize that all 
these things he refers to are just illusion.”  If I say to them that this is 
what I expect them to say, the meditators get annoyed at me because they think 
I am insulting them.  They say “when we say, over and over again, in the first 
pages of every piece of our literature, and again every three pages after that, 
that `all that is illusion’ “, we don’t mean that all that is illusion.  You 
strawman us.  Seriously?

I guess that’s how either discipline-specific or idiosyncratic speech habits 
work.  What is unexplainably self-evident to one person is mystifying to 
somebody else.

Eric 

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