If there were a problem with the idea of brain as behavior it could be that behaviors are too numerous and subtle to be completely attributed to the brain. The concept of input/output boxes makes it easier to attribute behavior to the brain because infinitely smaller boxes and the way in which they're interconnected accounts for these subtleties as well as individual differences. This concept explains how a stimulus can lead to different responses either in different organisms or in a single organism in different contexts. Regardless, more needs to be known about what goes on inside these boxes: what affects the transmission or pathway of a stimulus, how the proximity of neurons allows for numerous points of interruption and changes in the pathway.

The concept of boxes implies that any processing occurs only once the stimulus has crossed the boundary of that box. This makes the model inadequate in explaining autonomous, internal stimuli of the brain, because at some level here the stimulus is not coming from outside a box. Behavior is not the brain which is not just the boxes. Behavior is the consequence of the interaction of boxes and their environment, whether the environment is other boxes or something such as hormones. Although reducing the brain to boxes helps us understand what goes on behind the scenes, reducing behavior to infinitely smaller entities loses "behavior" as the complex concept that it is. The idea can appear circular. The behavior is the brain which is boxes which constitute the brain that is behavior. What bothers me about the concept of boxes is that it puts an observable boundary on a concept which has no observable boundary.

Very interesting, both in the explanation of why boxes useful (though could use some specific examples) and in concerns about its limitations. Let's keep concerns in mind as course proceeds, and see whether/where issues of circularity and/or boundedness for "unboun