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"On the basis of quantum theory there was obtained a surprisingly good representation of an immense variety of facts which otherwise appeared entirely incomprehensible. But on one point, curiously enough, there was failure: it proved impossible to associate with these Schrodinger waves definite motions of the mass points - and that, after all, had been the original purpose of the whole construction. The difficulty appeared insurmountable until it was overcome by Born in a way as simple as it was unexpected. The de Broglie-Schrodinger wave fields were not to be interpreted as a mathematical description of how an event actually takes place in time and space, though, of course, they have reference to such an event. Rather they are a mathematical description of what we can actually know about the system. They serve only to make statistical statements and predictions of the results of all measurements which we can carry out upon the system. (Albert Einstein, 1940)
That's the only position that makes sense to me. Quantum mechanics -- like all of physics -- is about human perceptions, not Reality. I had a vague and uninformed premonition about this when I took undergraduate courses in physics. It made me uneasy; it was as if someone was expressing a point of view in great detail without realizing that it was something separate from what was being viewed and interpreted. They seemed to be saying that because we can't measure position or momentum without disturbing them, there is something uncertain about them when they're not being disturbed.
This is what PCT is going to bring to physics, ultimately. Maybe -- I hope this is actually possible. If we can take into account the properties of the levels of perception, when we finally figure out what they really are, we can try to factor them out of our observations of physical phenomena, so we can at last discover what we are seeing that is attributable to the world outside, and what is being added and filtered by the world inside. The whole argument about whether uncertainty is a feature of reality or of the observer shows that we have not yet found a way to do this.
BG: As I look out my window I see trees, a marsh, boats at a marina, and hills beyond. I don't perceive anything corresponding to the upper levels of the hierarchy as you describe it.
Tree, marsh, and boat are names of configurations. "Trees" and '"boats," however, are categories as they include very different configurations under the same name. "Beyond" is a relationship. Are the trees stationary, or bending back and forth as if in a wind? (transitions) Are they farther away than the boats, the same distance, or closer? (relationship) Are the boats in the marina all pointing in the same direction? (relationship)Is anything happening in this scene -- that is, does anyone park a car, does a cloud appear or dissolve, or does a boat come to a dock? (event) Do you ever think things like "If it looks any stormier in the next few minutes, I'm going to have to go home and shut the windows." You know, logical reasoning, plans.
I am not suggesting that your description lacks merit, just that it does not match my experience.
That's only because there are parts of your experience that you exempt from the label "perception", that you don't even think of as perceptions. You perceive a relationship between my levels and your experience that you call a "mismatch," but you say you don't perceive relationships. A specific mismatch is a relationship, the term "mismatch" is the name of a category of similar relationship perceptions. "The upper levels of your hierarchy" is a generalization, I would say a principle-level perception, and "your hierarchy" suggests a relationship between me and the hierarchy.
Maybe you're unaware of the experiences to which all these words are pointing, but that would surprise me. Most people, I think, experience more than the words; if asked, they can point to where they see the thing in question, and even give details about it (lower-order perceptions). At higher levels, they can point to examples of what they mean. I assume that when you referred to the trees, boats, and hills you could see out your window, you were either experiencing them in real time, or imagining/remembering them -- I assume that a boat is more than b-o-a-t to you.
The observed levels have nothing to do with PCT, which is an attempt to explain how such observations might be accounted for by a model of what we (carefully) imagine goes on inside the brain.
BG: I find that statement very strange. If the higher levels have nothing to do with PCT, why are we discussing them?
Because they are observations that require an explanation, not theories offered as explanations. PCT is a body of theories. That's what the T stands for.
Considering my inability to perceive them, it would be a lot simpler for me to ignore them.
When you say you can't perceive principles, for example, you're telling me that you don't know what the word principle means -- it's just a shape or a sound that you have learned to write or say in the appropriate sentences, without any meaning except perhaps, by substitution, other words. You're saying you don't know what the principle of least effort means, or the principle of tit for tat, or of conservation of energy. That is, you may admit to using those words, but they don't stand for anything but the words. If someone demonstrated the principle of returning good for evil (without using the words), you wouldn't recognize it. You're saying you can't find square roots using Newton's Method, or do long division, or find the average of a list of numbers, or tell when a person is being cautious.
I can believe you when you say you don't have vivid three-dimensional pictures in color and sound that you call principles. Those attributes are lower-level perceptions. But when you say that concepts like relationship or category or sequence or logic or principle aren't in your perceptions, I think the real problem is how you categorize your experiences, not any inability to experience things at what I call the higher levels.
If you want to understand my levels, you have to start by deciding that everything you experience, without exception, is a perception. Everything. When you think, that's a perception. When you are startled, that's a perception. When you doubt something, that's a perception. No exceptions. That's the only way to avoid setting some perceptions aside and thinking of them as "just the way things are," and thus missing their significance in the hierarchy entirely.
I understand that this is difficult. Why do you think it took me thirteen years to come up with only four more levels after the five in the 1960 paper, and ten years to add two more? I spent a lot of time on this and missed many things that were right under my nose. I'm probably still missing obvious things. But I haven't assumed that there's nothing there to find, as you appear to be proposing.
Fortunately, I'm now working with Henry Yin, a real neuroscientist, and there is a good chance we will actually find things inside brains that both account for what we observe in direct experience and correct the interpretations that are off the mark. I doubt that this task will be completed by only two of the hundreds of thousands of people who might also be looking into this matter, but maybe we can get the process started.
Bruce, every theory, including quantum mechanics and PCT, should be assumed wrong until proven right. We shouldn't accept any theory until we have run out of ways to prove that it can't be true. It's trying systematically, experimentally, to prove the theory wrong that teaches us what its strengths are, and weeds out the nonsense (and in some cases, as with phlogiston, the entire theory)
BG: Bill, I completely agree with that claim.
So we're not permanently separated by an impenetrable barrier. Our difficulties are largely semantic. This has most often been the case, ever since PCT was known as "feedback theory" and had five fuzzily-defined levels. As you found out in your work at the Smithsonian on how people learn scientific concepts, nobody comes to PCT without a theory of behavior already in place. To learn PCT is to unlearn everything incompatible with it. The unlearning is the hardest part; that's why people without a lot of training find little difficulty in understanding PCT: half the job is already done. It's hardest for highly trained people from other fields in the life sciences. Neuroscience, for example, is solidly stuck in S-R theory and Skinnerian behaviorism and they are spinning their wheels deeper and deeper into the mud as they extend this kind of interpretation to everything they find. This is a great pity because in neuroscience there are incredibly talented people doing experiments one would have thought are physically impossible to do. The wrong theoretical superstructure can ruin such an endeavor, leading it down one blind alley after another. I fervently hope that when neuroscience decides to see what is down our alley, it will not turn out to be another futile excursion.
Best,
Bill P.