Behavioural Crosswiring
The Concept – How it came about
The idea for Behavioural Crosswiring came whilst I was doing some research into the T.O.T.E model (Test, Operate, Test, Exit [George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram - Plans and the Structure of Behavior 1960 - ISBN 978-0937431009]) and more specifically the idea of nested TOTEs.
Whilst I began thinking about the structure of the TOTE model and how it applies to human behaviour, I called upon my experience as a computer programmer and began thinking about the TOTE loop in the same way I’d think about other iterative processes when writing computer programs. At first I began thinking about how a result from one TOTE could also be the initial Test for a second TOTE and thus an overlapping of TOTEs would be achieved.
A basic example of overlapping TOTEs in a behavioural context could be opening a door and walking through.
TOTE 1 (opening the door) can be structured as follows:
[is the door shut?] - yes - [reach out][grab the handle][turn the handle][pull the door open] - [is the door shut?] - no - exit.
TOTE 2 can be structured as follows:
[is the door open?] - yes - [walk through] - [Did I succeed in walking through?] - yes - exit.
This is a very basic example of two large chunk TOTEs yet you can already see the correlation between opening the door and walking through. The overlapping of these two TOTEs comes when you realise that human beings don’t simply forget the results from one TOTE before moving onto the next, they somehow remember that the door was just opened and operate according to that knowledge. This leads into the idea that the result from the first TOTE (or some result being returned other than the pure intention of the TOTE) can be stored in some universally accessible variable which can then be used in the second TOTE. This would looks as follows using our example above:
bool IsDoorOpen (create a Boolean (yes/no, on/off, true/false) variable to store the value of true/false as to whether the door is open)
TOTE 1 : [is the door shut] - yes - [reach out and open the door, set IsDoorOpen to true] - [Is the door closed?] - no - exit.
TOTE 2: [IsDoorOpen = true?] - yes - [walk through] - [I did succeed in walking through] - yes - exit.
Here you can see the overlap between the result of the first TOTE setting the variable IsDoorOpen to true, and the usage of that variable in the second TOTE as the initial Test. As I say, this is a very basic example and while other operations would also be running simultaneously, this gives us a clear way of identifying the possibility of TOTE overlap.
While I was thinking about this idea of using variables in order to overlap TOTEs, and as I was also thinking about the concept of nested TOTEs at the same time, I started to wonder whether some TOTEs also use variables in order to determine exit point. That is, setting some variable in the operation phase which is later used in the final Test to decide whether it’s time to exist the strategy or not.
This could work as follows:
bool isDoorOpen (create a Boolean variable to store the value of true/false as to whether the door is open)
TOTE 1: [is the door shut?] - yes - [reach out and open the door, set IsDoorOpen to true] - [isDoorOpen = false?] - no - exit.
The result here is that the second Test in the TOTE is dependant on the variable IsDoorOpen and the value that’s assigned too it. This means that the exiting of the strategy (or TOTE) is accomplished based on the result of some operation and the setting of the IsDoorOpen variable. What caught my interest here is the question “What’s setting the variable that’s later used to exit the strategy and can it be hacked by some other process”.
Cross Wiring TOTEs
The concept of cross wiring TOTEs came from the question above and the concept of nesting TOTEs. It struck me that if the final Test in the TOTE is dependant on some variable being set to some certain value (like true or false) then it must be possible to set that variable inside the operation phase by nesting in a new TOTE which also has access to the variable in question. A basic example of this can be see using the behavioural process of depression.
Basic TOTE for depression:
bool isFeelingAcheived (set a variable to determine whether the feeling(s) have been achieved)
TOTE: [isFeelingAcheived = false?] - yes - [while isFeelingAcheived = false; do something to create depression and set isFeelingAcheived to true] - [isFeelingAcheived = true?] - exit.
In order to crosswire this TOTE into something new we also need a new TOTE that achieves our desired result. As an example of this we can use something like joy (another nominalisation) to crosswire the original TOTE into exiting.
The basic idea is to nest the desired TOTE inside the operation phase of the original TOTE and have it short circuit the process by setting the variable used in the Test phase and thus exiting the strategy. Since the original TOTE is operating inside of a WHILE loop we should be able to exit the current loop and have the strategy re-check the WHILE condition which will now be set to a condition that allows the strategy to exit.
This would looks as follows:
TOTE: [isFeelingAcheived = false?] - yes - [while isFeelingAcheived = false; TOTE: ([isFeelingAcheived = false?] - yes - [while isFeelingAcheived = false; do something to create Joy, set isFeelingAcheived to true, end while]) if isFeelingAchieved = false do something to create depression and set isFeelingAcheived to true] - [isFeelingAcheived = true?] - exit.
This would then create a scenario that fulfils the criteria of the original TOTE loop however instead of the person completing the operation phase of the depression state, they’d instead complete the phase up-to the point of creating the joy state, fulfilling the criterion of the conditional WHILE loop and then exit the strategy.
The idea so far is still preliminary and much testing is still required. I have some ideas on the installation of this process both consciously and unconsciously and I’ll write those ideas up once more testing has been done.
I’d love to get your input and ideas on this so please leave a comment with ideas, experiences or simply just some ramblings 
