About the Everyday experience category

This category is for free-form discussion of everyday experience in PCT terms. It is invitational to beginners and experts alike. It is a recommended path for learning PCT and understanding how the theoretical model explains experience.

The most accessible laboratory for investigating PCT is your own person. For some control phenomena you must expand this to interactions with one or more other people. When you do this yourself, it is your subjective experience. When others replicate what you have done and report the same experience, it is an objective result.

In Behavior: The control of perception (and elsewhere), Bill describes his phenomenological process for identifying the levels that he proposed. Some have investigated in the same way, and have reported experiences that correspond well to his. More formal tests have corroborated some levels and the fact of hierarchical control, but there is much to be learned and corroborated.

In part 2 of Powers et al. 1963, Bill Powers used a “portable demonstrator” methodology to enable readers to experience control at different levels directly. Other demonstrations have been presented at our conferences or posted on line. Try a search for “demonstration” in the CSGnet archive. (Open that in a new window if you want to keep reading here.) In Living Control Systems III, in Making sense of behavior, and in many other writings Bill and others have presented opportunities for you, the reader, to put PCT to the test.

This category is your opportunity to bring up more examples from your everyday experience, and discuss them with the rest of us.

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