'Creatures of habit'

New Scientist has an article on some work done by MIT researchers who put 'black boxes' on people and record how people behave over the course of a typical day. They focus on how it shows people to be mechanical and habit-driven, but I think it can be looked at completely differently ...

... I think it is another indication that psychology and cognitive science are moving from trying to determine large aggregate 'laws' of human behavior to seeing how individuals actually behave, a development which I think will be very illuminating (and probably also unsettling). Science has heretofore focussed on 'shared', and therefore talked-about, concepts (which consist almost wholly of the kinds of thing that matter socially and in communication). That is, we only put words to the things that matter for our cooperation and social success. This has constrained the language we use, making it nearly useless for dealing with matters that are socially/communicatively/cooperatively irrelevance. This rise of the 'subjective' in science is probably the necessary first step in beginning to understand thorny issues like 'consciousness' (which at present can only be talked about using words developed for an entirely different
purpose).