y the mental processes.
An opposite view is suggested by Locke, who declares extended reality as perceived by the senses to play a part in how human consciousness operates. The conscious mind cannot form impressions without an object on which to operate: "To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say that the mind is ignorant of it and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing" (1904, p. 13). What reason finds via encounter with material reality is cognition.
Knowledge or understanding, the highest expression of reason, affects behavior. One need not get bogged down in the philosophical debate over whether human experience is consciously willed or predestined to see that behavior is a property of experience in the world. Nagel takes the view that persons "cannot act from outside ourselves, nor create ourselves ex nihilo" (Nagel, 1997, pp. 126-7), even though the immediate experience of behavior may be intensely subjective. Nagel says that "the best we can hope for is to act in a way that permits some confidence that it would not prove unacceptable no matter how much more" information was available about the context for choice (Nagel, 1997, p. 128). The implication is that there is an irreducible tension between subjective experience and objective reality. Compare the reductionist idea of behavior offered by B.F. Skinner, godfather of behaviorism, who sees human beings behaving only as responders to stimuli. Behavior does not emanate from the subjective human organism but is a social, objective artifact, with mankind having "built a kind of social environment which induces him to behave in moral ways" (Skinner, 1971, p . 198). Properly--that is, scientifically analyzed, the inducements of the ambient environment can predict behavioral responses. Or, as one analyst of Skinner's work explains, the conditions in which behavior takes place must be completely understood before the behavi...