Action and Behavior

CSGnet Archive CSG2013
1

[From Lloyd Klinedinst (2013.06.30.0027)]

I submit something I wrote the day after the June 8 meeting and memorial service for Bill Powers. I add this prefatory note. We should be able to reconstruct or replicate PCT anytime anyplace. This will happen and work accurately only when the exact specifications of the theoretical science on which it is based are used.

What prompts me to share this on CSGnet is the regular occurrence of what I consider inaccurate and careless misuse of the terms: *behavior* and *action.* They are distinguished, in my mind, based on Bill's more careful definitions (blurred enough times by his own disregard for them in his emails and writings) AND especially by PCT diagrams and equations. See my footnote 3. Would that we observe the same precision in verbal language as in our number language. I also suggest we include as part of our BCP course a careful editing and update of the Glossary, as well as the development of a 'PCT Style Sheet'. As I say in my last sentence: "If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent 'PCT Style Sheet' to include a required distinction between *behavior* as the control of perception and *action* as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior." In other words *behavior* is the entire phenomenon of control. *Action* is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism. (Actually when the control loops are internal to the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it by the special additional term, *Action*. Of course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)

An agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which mathematically express PCT.

One result of this precision in our languaging could be to distinguish clearly what we can observe and identify (though each action is never completely identical to the next) as *action* and what will remain the ineluctable ultimate inscrutability of a complete identification of *behavior*.

Using the mid-range of our customary perceptual abilities we do, however, infer from innumerable repeated actions of organisms general patterns of behavior. And through these stages and developmental ages of behavioral patterns we identify growth, personality types, learning styles, each other, and on and on.

RECONSTRUCTING PCT

After last night’s reading of Bill’s introduction to a projected book, PCT at 60, (if anyone has a digital version of it, please post!) I was curious to track down the tongue-defying name of the Greek who engineered one of the earliest negative feedback devices.

I googled: first control system greek egyptian water clock - 1st two hits: Wikipedia, then [pctweb.org](http://pctweb.org)

So Bill’s work comes right to the top of references in Google’s mind to ‘steer’ people toward(s) …how’s that for cybernetics of an information age variety? (Of course, Google had been tracking me for some time now.)

I am grateful to have located information about the wily Greek and as a bonus, the real payoff, an essay by Bill entitled "The tank that filled itself" at [http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf](http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf)

Drawing on and deftly mixing metaphors from plant biology, genetic hybridization, reproduction, geology, and using information from the fields of biology, physiology, engineering, cybernetics - in the first two paragraphs of "The tank that filled itself" essay, Bill traces his origination of PCT and the genealogical history from which he drew its composite elements, burrowing deeply back to "a Greek inventor named Ktesibios, a student of Archimedes, a contemporary of Euclid, and possibly head of the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt before the great library was burned." As Bill adds: "Ktesibios was interested in water clocks."<sup>1</sup>

After his two introductory paragraphs, in the next section 'The road not taken: the first recorded negative feedback control system' Bill describes the path he traced and resumed, alluding to Robert Frost in indicating it was indeed a 'road not taken' by the majority of scientists. Enjoying 'a little poetic license' Bill creates a descriptive story and moral of how this water clock worked. And the cognitive lesson at the end: "We can say that the actions were the means by which either the slave or the machine controlled a perception of water level based on the actual water level." Voilà: the negative feedback loop!

In the rest of the paragraph Bill details the phases of this negative feedback loop embodied in the Ktesibios regulator.

Next section, 'The road that was taken'! Bill outlines the paths of behaviorism and cognitive science in the 20th century til today. His concluding diagrams<sup>2</sup> and sentences indeed find behaviorists and cognitive scientists guilty of inadequate observation and reasoning and flunk them on their educational failure to have studied or remembered their Greco-Roman roots.

Bill delivers his audience-tailored message in the penultimate section, 'What if the first road had been taken?'. Considering all three theories of human behavior, how differently a therapist would function in relationship to the client!<sup>3</sup>

Bill ends his essay with 'Conclusions'. He reiterates: "The water level control system is not complex or hard to understand." We might have know that nature holds true to an elegant simplicity. He then pinpoints the conflict to all who encounter PCT: "There is no way simply to add PCT to the older theories: a choice is necessary." He then describes in clear lay terms the differences - which PCTers know are the differences between linear and circular causality. In his last paragraph he restates the conflict between PCT and its representation of our ancient traditions of knowledge about how things work and the 'modern' sciences which developed in ignorance of this ancient wisdom. He invites all to be 'willing' to enter a probably 'long process' of leaving 'a lifetime of learning' to learn anew through the theory of PCT.

In reading this essay by Bill in the light of our deliberations yesterday and our best sense of his intentions for PCT at 60 I suggest we use this essay as well as a guideline for the forthcoming publication.

Some last afterthoughts.

	1 I cannot read  this essay without noting some similarity to the 'The Little Engine that Could'. Bill engineered his creation of PCT against the opinion of most other 'large engines'. I leave it to your imaginations to draw other parallels.

	2 I am not sure when this essay was written, but as we mused at last night's discussion, historians of PCT will one day note its development and 'publication'. In fact, I'm rather sure some among you who read this will promptly send me its proper and correct references.

	3 I finally recall another of last evening's discussion topics, continuing Bill's work in PCT, in the light of one of the characteristics of living systems: reproduction. And I remember, accurately I hope, Henry Yin's about cultivating a number of graduate students who would be 'little Bills' researching a whole range of PCT theses.

So much for my contribution just now to reconstructing Bill.
···

Footnotes

1 A cursory look at Wikipedia (some will shrink or shirk at this, but it is often a useful first sounding for further examination of a topic) suggests an even more global network of developmental relations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock The article also allows us to call this wily Greek by a less tongue-tying alphabetization, Tesibius -though you can call him Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius.

2 I think these diagrams might be what Allie held up last night to share her understanding of PCT.

3 One personal peeve with Bill and many who write about PCT. In the third paragraph of the section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’, Bill gets past the first half of the paragraph dramatically well, in my opinion, as he considers the conditional: “But what if Fig. 1 is accepted?” But then, not dealing with the scientific precision he is so expert at, he uses words carelessly and, again in my judgement, inaccurately when he says,

“Behavior is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of behaving. The behavior that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

In my understanding of PCT, I would reword this passage to be more precisely verbally expressive of the diagram:

“Action is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of acting. The action that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

I eagerly await confirmation or correction of this footnote. If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include this required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.

I submit this instead of going through the previous emails of the ‘Marken’s foreword to LCS’ thread, marking each of my perceived misuses of action and behavior.

Thanks for reading me out, if you got this far.

Lloyd

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
10 Dover Lane
Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001
HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232

Lloyd Mobile: (314)-609-5571
email: lloydk@klinedinst.com

website: http://www.klinedinst.com

2

[From Fred Nickols (2013.06.30.0536 EDT)]

Lloyd:

The paper was presented by Bill at the Manchester CSG conference in July 2010 and it is copyrighted 2010. He kindly gave me permission to post it to the section in my web site where I grapple with PCT and its practical applications. You can find it at the following link:

http://www.nickols.us/TankThatFilledItself.pdf

Fred Nickols

···

From: lloydk@klinedinst.com [mailto:lloydk@KLINEDINST.COM]
Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2013 1:31 AM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Subject: Action and Behavior

[From Lloyd Klinedinst (2013.06.30.0027)]

I submit something I wrote the day after the June 8 meeting and memorial service for Bill Powers. I add this prefatory note. We should be able to reconstruct or replicate PCT anytime anyplace. This will happen and work accurately only when the exact specifications of the theoretical science on which it is based are used.

    What prompts me to share this on CSGnet is the regular occurrence of what I consider inaccurate and careless misuse of the terms: *behavior* and *action.* They are distinguished, in my mind, based on Bill's more careful definitions (blurred enough times by his own disregard for them in his emails and writings) AND especially by PCT diagrams and equations. See my footnote 3. Would that we observe the same precision in verbal language as in our number language. I also suggest we include as part of our BCP course a careful editing and update of the Glossary, as well as the development of a 'PCT Style Sheet'. As I say in my last sentence: "If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent 'PCT Style Sheet' to include a required distinction between *behavior* as the control of perception and *action* as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior." In other words *behavior* is the entire phenomenon of control. *Action* is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism. (Actually when the control loops are internal to the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it by the special additional term, *Action*. Of course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)

    An agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which mathematically express PCT.

    One result of this precision in our languaging could be to distinguish clearly what we can observe and identify (though each action is never completely identical to the next) as *action* and what will remain the ineluctable ultimate inscrutability of a complete identification of *behavior*.

    Using the mid-range of our customary perceptual abilities we do, however, infer from innumerable repeated actions of organisms general patterns of behavior. And through these stages and developmental ages of behavioral patterns we identify growth, personality types, learning styles, each other, and on and on.

RECONSTRUCTING PCT

After last night’s reading of Bill’s introduction to a projected book, PCT at 60, (if anyone has a digital version of it, please post!) I was curious to track down the tongue-defying name of the Greek who engineered one of the earliest negative feedback devices.

    I googled: first control system greek egyptian water clock - 1st two hits: Wikipedia, then [pctweb.org](http://pctweb.org)

So Bill’s work comes right to the top of references in Google’s mind to ‘steer’ people toward(s) …how’s that for cybernetics of an information age variety? (Of course, Google had been tracking me for some time now.)

    I am grateful to have located information about the wily Greek and as a bonus, the real payoff, an essay by Bill entitled "The tank that filled itself" at [http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf](http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf)

    Drawing on and deftly mixing metaphors from plant biology, genetic hybridization, reproduction, geology, and using information from the fields of biology, physiology, engineering, cybernetics - in the first two paragraphs of "The tank that filled itself" essay, Bill traces his origination of PCT and the genealogical history from which he drew its composite elements, burrowing deeply back to "a Greek inventor named Ktesibios, a student of Archimedes, a contemporary of Euclid, and possibly head of the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt before the great library was burned." As Bill adds: "Ktesibios was interested in water clocks."<sup>1</sup>

    After his two introductory paragraphs, in the next section 'The road not taken: the first recorded negative feedback control system' Bill describes the path he traced and resumed, alluding to Robert Frost in indicating it was indeed a 'road not taken' by the majority of scientists. Enjoying 'a little poetic license' Bill creates a descriptive story and moral of how this water clock worked. And the cognitive lesson at the end: "We can say that the actions were the means by which either the slave or the machine controlled a perception of water level based on the actual water level." Voilà: the negative feedback loop!

    In the rest of the paragraph Bill details the phases of this negative feedback loop embodied in the Ktesibios regulator.

    Next section, 'The road that was taken'! Bill outlines the paths of behaviorism and cognitive science in the 20th century til today. His concluding diagrams<sup>2</sup> and sentences indeed find behaviorists and cognitive scientists guilty of inadequate observation and reasoning and flunk them on their educational failure to have studied or remembered their Greco-Roman roots.

    Bill delivers his audience-tailored message in the penultimate section, 'What if the first road had been taken?'. Considering all three theories of human behavior, how differently a therapist would function in relationship to the client!<sup>3</sup>

    Bill ends his essay with 'Conclusions'. He reiterates: "The water level control system is not complex or hard to understand." We might have know that nature holds true to an elegant simplicity. He then pinpoints the conflict to all who encounter PCT: "There is no way simply to add PCT to the older theories: a choice is necessary." He then describes in clear lay terms the differences - which PCTers know are the differences between linear and circular causality. In his last paragraph he restates the conflict between PCT and its representation of our ancient traditions of knowledge about how things work and the 'modern' sciences which developed in ignorance of this ancient wisdom. He invites all to be 'willing' to enter a probably 'long process' of leaving 'a lifetime of learning' to learn anew through the theory of PCT.

    In reading this essay by Bill in the light of our deliberations yesterday and our best sense of his intentions for PCT at 60 I suggest we use this essay as well as a guideline for the forthcoming publication.

    Some last afterthoughts.

              1 I cannot read  this essay without noting some similarity to the 'The Little Engine that Could'. Bill engineered his creation of PCT against the opinion of most other 'large engines'. I leave it to your imaginations to draw other parallels.

              2 I am not sure when this essay was written, but as we mused at last night's discussion, historians of PCT will one day note its development and 'publication'. In fact, I'm rather sure some among you who read this will promptly send me its proper and correct references.

              3 I finally recall another of last evening's discussion topics, continuing Bill's work in PCT, in the light of one of the characteristics of living systems: reproduction. And I remember, accurately I hope, Henry Yin's about cultivating a number of graduate students who would be 'little Bills' researching a whole range of PCT theses.

    So much for my contribution just now to reconstructing Bill.

Footnotes

1 A cursory look at Wikipedia (some will shrink or shirk at this, but it is often a useful first sounding for further examination of a topic) suggests an even more global network of developmental relations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock The article also allows us to call this wily Greek by a less tongue-tying alphabetization, Tesibius -though you can call him Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius.

2 I think these diagrams might be what Allie held up last night to share her understanding of PCT.

3 One personal peeve with Bill and many who write about PCT. In the third paragraph of the section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’, Bill gets past the first half of the paragraph dramatically well, in my opinion, as he considers the conditional: “But what if Fig. 1 is accepted?” But then, not dealing with the scientific precision he is so expert at, he uses words carelessly and, again in my judgement, inaccurately when he says,

“Behavior is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of behaving. The behavior that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

In my understanding of PCT, I would reword this passage to be more precisely verbally expressive of the diagram:

“Action is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of acting. The action that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

I eagerly await confirmation or correction of this footnote. If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include this required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.

I submit this instead of going through the previous emails of the ‘Marken’s foreword to LCS’ thread, marking each of my perceived misuses of action and behavior.

Thanks for reading me out, if you got this far.

Lloyd

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
10 Dover Lane
Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001
HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232

Lloyd Mobile: (314)-609-5571
email: lloydk@klinedinst.com

website: http://www.klinedinst.com

3

[Martin Taylor 2013.06.30.08.19]

···

Lloyd,

  Thanks for a thought-provoking proposition, with which I largely

agree, but I’m not sure how workable are all your suggestions.
Here are a couple of issues that are bound to arise if we try to
adhere strictly to your guidelines.

  1. [LK] "If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent 'PCT Style

Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior
as the control of perception and action as one phase of
the negative feedback loop we call behavior."
[MT} So far, so good. Behaviour refers to variations in all the
variables of the entire loop, whereas “action” refers to the
influence of the output of the loop on the immediate external
environment – uh-oh, the immediate external environment of just
what, exactly? The elementary control unit at any level of the
hierarchy outputs to the reference inputs of many lower-level
elementary control units. Are they its “immediate external
environment”? To me, that would be the natural interpretation, but
you say it is not: “Action is just that one part, phase,
element of the control loop observable outside the organism.” But
where is the boundary of the organism? What is ‘Action’ when our
technology allows precise observation of variables at ever more
detailed level within the skin bag? What is ‘Action’ when the
complex hierarchical control system is a robot, an ant swarm, or a
complex of micro-robots?

  2. [LK] "(Actually when the control loops are internal to the

organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only
when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it
by the special additional term, Action . Of course, the
internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or
glandular actions or activities.)"

  [MT] If we accept a naive interpretation of "internal" and

“external”, HPCT suggests that all effects on the external
environment are the combined results of the behaviour of many
elementary control units, though (usually) of only one control
system (I consider the possibility that cases of multiple
personality might be counter-examples). When we think only of a
single elementary control unit, we can define its “Action” as you
suggest, but it is identical to its “Output Quantity”. If we
consider a control system more complex than a single elementary
unit, the observable quantities in the environment are due to the
combined Output Quantities of several loops.

  3. [LK] "      An

agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the
control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well
as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which
mathematically express PCT."

  [MT] I agree with the first part of this, but the use of the word

“linear” is not proper in the second part. No physically
realizable control system, even a single elementary control unit,
can be linear except over a small range of values. At the least,
there is always a limit to the range of perceptible variation or
of available output magnitude. In biological systems, almost all
the functions are likely to be non-linear. Linear analysis can be
a useful guide to the small-signal behaviour of a real system, but
a guide is all it can ever be. Perceptual functions are often not
far from logarithmic, for example; as Bill pointed out in one of
his last interchanges with Rick and me, most engineered control
systems, and probably most natural ones, have a tolerance zone –
a range of error around zero that the control system treats as
actually being zero error. That is a significant non-linearity
that not only reduces the tremor of an elementary control loop,
but is also likely to ease the interactions among potentially
competing control loops.

  ----------

  These are minor quibbles about a thesis with which I basically

agree and which I support. We have to be careful in the use of
language. The word “disturbance”, for example, has been used in a
variety of incompatible ways. Sometimes those ways have been used
in the Philosopher’s trick of shifting the meaning within the
frame of a single argument in order to make some invalid point.
“Reorganization” has been used with a range of different meanings.
Perhaps there should be different terms for some of these
distinctions, because it isn’t always clear from the context.
Although the general idea of “reorganization” may be clear, much
about the concept remains to be worked out. How, for example, does
reorganization interact with the ever-shifting selection of
perceptions being and not being actively controlled?

  I have my own favourite common careless use of language: "PCT" and

“HPCT”. PCT includes HPCT, and HPCT includes Bill’s particular
hierarchy (which we might call PHPCT for Powers’ HPCT), but there
are PCT structures that are not HPCT, and HPCT structures that are
different from PHPCT. Even PHPCT is not a well-defined structure
when we get into detail. It is a very good idea to study B:CP and
see what the Bible says about PHPCT, but it is a better idea to go
on from that and keep trying to find out what Nature says about
PCT. The careless use of “PCT” to refer to PHPCT is quite common
on CSGnet, for good and proper reasons, but it should always be
clear that this usage IS careless.

  As T.S.Eliot (I think) said "I have to use words when I talk with

you". Bill always argued that we can communicate clearly in math
and simulation, because there is no question about what they say,
but when we use words, the reader supplies the meaning, which may
not be what the writer intended. So I support your call for a
redefinition of PCT terminology, despite the qibbles above.

  Martin

      [From Lloyd Klinedinst

(2013.06.30.0027)]

    I submit something I

wrote the day after the June 8 meeting and memorial service for
Bill Powers. I add this prefatory note. We should be able to
reconstruct or replicate PCT anytime anyplace. This will happen
and work accurately only when the exact specifications of the
theoretical science on which it is based are used.

     What

prompts me to share this on CSGnet is the regular occurrence of
what I consider inaccurate and careless misuse of the terms: behavior
and action. They are distinguished, in my mind, based on
Bill’s more careful definitions (blurred enough times by his own
disregard for them in his emails and writings) AND especially by
PCT diagrams and equations. See my footnote 3. Would that we
observe the same precision in verbal language as in our number
language. I also suggest we include as part of our BCP course a
careful editing and update of the Glossary, as well as the
development of a ‘PCT Style Sheet’. As I say in my last
sentence: “If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT
Style Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior
as the control of perception and action as one phase of
the negative feedback loop we call behavior.” In other words behavior
is the entire phenomenon of control. Action is just that
one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside
the organism. (Actually when the control loops are internal to
the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity.
Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we
call it by the special additional term, Action . Of
course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural,
muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)

     An

agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the
control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as
well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations
which mathematically express PCT.

     One

result of this precision in our languaging could be to
distinguish clearly what we can observe and identify (though
each action is never completely identical to the next) as action
and what will remain the ineluctable ultimate inscrutability of
a complete identification of behavior.

     Using

the mid-range of our customary perceptual abilities we do,
however, infer from innumerable repeated actions of organisms
general patterns of behavior. And through these stages and
developmental ages of behavioral patterns we identify growth,
personality types, learning styles, each other, and on and on.

    RECONSTRUCTING

PCT

    After last night's

reading of Bill’s introduction to a projected book, PCT at 60 , (if
anyone has a digital version of it, please post!) I was curious
to track down the tongue-defying name of the Greek who
engineered one of the earliest negative feedback devices.

     I

googled: first control system greek egyptian water clock - 1st
two hits: Wikipedia, then pctweb.org

    So Bill's work comes

right to the top of references in Google’s mind to ‘steer’
people toward(s) …how’s that for cybernetics of an information
age variety? (Of course, Google had been tracking me for some
time now.)

     I am

grateful to have located information about the wily Greek and as
a bonus, the real payoff, an essay by Bill entitled “The tank
that filled itself” at http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf

     Drawing

on and deftly mixing metaphors from plant biology, genetic
hybridization, reproduction, geology, and using information from
the fields of biology, physiology, engineering, cybernetics - in
the first two paragraphs of “The tank that filled itself” essay,
Bill traces his origination of PCT and the genealogical history
from which he drew its composite elements, burrowing deeply back
to “a Greek inventor named Ktesibios, a student of Archimedes, a
contemporary of Euclid, and possibly head of the Museum of
Alexandria in Egypt before the great library was burned.” As
Bill adds: “Ktesibios was interested in water clocks.”1

     After

his two introductory paragraphs, in the next section ‘The road
not taken: the first recorded negative feedback control system’
Bill describes the path he traced and resumed, alluding to
Robert Frost in indicating it was indeed a ‘road not taken’ by
the majority of scientists. Enjoying ‘a little poetic license’
Bill creates a descriptive story and moral of how this water
clock worked. And the cognitive lesson at the end: “We can say
that the actions were the means by which either the slave or the
machine controlled a perception of water level based on the
actual water level.” Voilà: the negative feedback loop!

     In the

rest of the paragraph Bill details the phases of this negative
feedback loop embodied in the Ktesibios regulator.

     Next

section, ‘The road that was taken’! Bill outlines the paths of
behaviorism and cognitive science in the 20th century til today.
His concluding diagrams2 and sentences indeed find
behaviorists and cognitive scientists guilty of inadequate
observation and reasoning and flunk them on their educational
failure to have studied or remembered their Greco-Roman roots.

     Bill

delivers his audience-tailored message in the penultimate
section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’. Considering
all three theories of human behavior, how differently a
therapist would function in relationship to the client!3

     Bill

ends his essay with ‘Conclusions’. He reiterates: “The water
level control system is not complex or hard to understand.” We
might have know that nature holds true to an elegant simplicity.
He then pinpoints the conflict to all who encounter PCT: “There
is no way simply to add PCT to the older theories: a choice is
necessary.” He then describes in clear lay terms the differences

  • which PCTers know are the differences between linear and
    circular causality. In his last paragraph he restates the
    conflict between PCT and its representation of our ancient
    traditions of knowledge about how things work and the ‘modern’
    sciences which developed in ignorance of this ancient wisdom. He
    invites all to be ‘willing’ to enter a probably ‘long process’
    of leaving ‘a lifetime of learning’ to learn anew through the
    theory of PCT.
     In

reading this essay by Bill in the light of our deliberations
yesterday and our best sense of his intentions for PCT at 60 I suggest
we use this essay as well as a guideline for the forthcoming
publication.

     Some

last afterthoughts.

     1 I

cannot read this essay without noting some similarity to the
‘The Little Engine that Could’. Bill engineered his creation of
PCT against the opinion of most other ‘large engines’. I leave
it to your imaginations to draw other parallels.

     2 I am

not sure when this essay was written, but as we mused at last
night’s discussion, historians of PCT will one day note its
development and ‘publication’. In fact, I’m rather sure some
among you who read this will promptly send me its proper and
correct references.

     3 I

finally recall another of last evening’s discussion topics,
continuing Bill’s work in PCT, in the light of one of the
characteristics of living systems: reproduction. And I remember,
accurately I hope, Henry Yin’s about cultivating a number of
graduate students who would be ‘little Bills’ researching a
whole range of PCT theses.

     So

much for my contribution just now to reconstructing Bill.

Footnotes

    1 A cursory look at

Wikipedia (some will shrink or shirk at this, but it is often a
useful first sounding for further examination of a topic)
suggests an even more global network of developmental relations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock
The article also allows us to call this wily Greek by a less
tongue-tying alphabetization, Tesibius -though you can call him
Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius.

    2 I think these

diagrams might be what Allie held up last night to share her
understanding of PCT.

    3 One personal peeve

with Bill and many who write about PCT. In the third paragraph
of the section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’, Bill
gets past the first half of the paragraph dramatically well, in
my opinion, as he considers the conditional: “But what if Fig. 1
is accepted?” But then, not dealing with the scientific
precision he is so expert at, he uses words carelessly and,
again in my judgement, inaccurately when he says,

    "Behavior is, for the behaving system,

relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really
concerned about the perceptual consequences of behaving. The
behavior that controls those consequences is itself of interest
mainly when it affects other people."

    In my understanding of

PCT, I would reword this passage to be more precisely verbally
expressive of the diagram:

“Action is, for the behaving system,
relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really
concerned about the perceptual consequences of acting .
The action that controls those consequences is itself of
interest mainly when it affects other people.”

    I eagerly await

confirmation or correction of this footnote. If I am correct, I
would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include this
required distinction between behavior as the control of
perception and action as one phase of the negative
feedback loop we call behavior.

    I submit this instead

of going through the previous emails of the ‘Marken’s foreword to LCS’ thread,
marking each of my perceived misuses of action and behavior.

    Thanks for reading me

out, if you got this far.

Lloyd

        Dr.

Lloyd Klinedinst

         10 Dover Lane

         Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001

        HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232

        Lloyd

Mobile: (314)-609-5571

        email: lloydk@klinedinst.com

website: http://www.klinedinst.com

4

[Ted Cloak 2013.06.30.1130 MST]

Let me try:

Behavior is the Control of Perception (duh).

A behavior is what a control system does.

A control system (CS) is “the unit of behavioral organization” (Powers 1973, p. 221: “Figure 15.3. Final form of the unit of behavioral organization.”). A CS consists of a memory storage function, an input function, a comparator, and an output function, and the connections among them and leading to/from other CSes.

An action is what an output function does or effectuates. A gross action (after what animal behaviorists call “gross behavior”) is an action of an intact animal visible externally.

When a hierarchy of CSes is being discussed, an individual CS may be referred to as a control module of that hierarchy.

When I was constructing my Power Point Presentation, “PCT and the Evolution of Culture”, I discovered that if I introduced a CS controlling for, say, the perception “nail driven”, I had to have it address a CS controlling for “driving nail” as the next lower module in the hierarchy.

HTH

Ted

[Martin Taylor 2013.06.30.08.19]

Lloyd,
Thanks for a thought-provoking proposition, with which I largely agree, but I’m not sure how workable are all your suggestions. Here are a couple of issues that are bound to arise if we try to adhere strictly to your guidelines.

  1. [LK] “If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.”
    [MT} So far, so good. Behaviour refers to variations in all the variables of the entire loop, whereas “action” refers to the influence of the output of the loop on the immediate external environment – uh-oh, the immediate external environment of just what, exactly? The elementary control unit at any level of the hierarchy outputs to the reference inputs of many lower-level elementary control units. Are they its “immediate external environment”? To me, that would be the natural interpretation, but you say it is not: “Action is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism.” But where is the boundary of the organism? What is ‘Action’ when our technology allows precise observation of variables at ever more detailed level within the skin bag? What is ‘Action’ when the complex hierarchical control system is a robot, an ant swarm, or a complex of micro-robots?

  2. [LK] “(Actually when the control loops are internal to the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it by the special additional term, Action. Of course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)”
    [MT] If we accept a naive interpretation of “internal” and “external”, HPCT suggests that all effects on the external environment are the combined results of the behaviour of many elementary control units, though (usually) of only one control system (I consider the possibility that cases of multiple personality might be counter-examples). When we think only of a single elementary control unit, we can define its “Action” as you suggest, but it is identical to its “Output Quantity”. If we consider a control system more complex than a single elementary unit, the observable quantities in the environment are due to the combined Output Quantities of several loops.

  3. [LK] “An agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which mathematically express PCT.”
    [MT] I agree with the first part of this, but the use of the word “linear” is not proper in the second part. No physically realizable control system, even a single elementary control unit, can be linear except over a small range of values. At the least, there is always a limit to the range of perceptible variation or of available output magnitude. In biological systems, almost all the functions are likely to be non-linear. Linear analysis can be a useful guide to the small-signal behaviour of a real system, but a guide is all it can ever be. Perceptual functions are often not far from logarithmic, for example; as Bill pointed out in one of his last interchanges with Rick and me, most engineered control systems, and probably most natural ones, have a tolerance zone – a range of error around zero that the control system treats as actually being zero error. That is a significant non-linearity that not only reduces the tremor of an elementary control loop, but is also likely to ease the interactions among potentially competing control loops.

···

These are minor quibbles about a thesis with which I basically agree and which I support. We have to be careful in the use of language. The word “disturbance”, for example, has been used in a variety of incompatible ways. Sometimes those ways have been used in the Philosopher’s trick of shifting the meaning within the frame of a single argument in order to make some invalid point. “Reorganization” has been used with a range of different meanings. Perhaps there should be different terms for some of these distinctions, because it isn’t always clear from the context. Although the general idea of “reorganization” may be clear, much about the concept remains to be worked out. How, for example, does reorganization interact with the ever-shifting selection of perceptions being and not being actively controlled?

I have my own favourite common careless use of language: “PCT” and “HPCT”. PCT includes HPCT, and HPCT includes Bill’s particular hierarchy (which we might call PHPCT for Powers’ HPCT), but there are PCT structures that are not HPCT, and HPCT structures that are different from PHPCT. Even PHPCT is not a well-defined structure when we get into detail. It is a very good idea to study B:CP and see what the Bible says about PHPCT, but it is a better idea to go on from that and keep trying to find out what Nature says about PCT. The careless use of “PCT” to refer to PHPCT is quite common on CSGnet, for good and proper reasons, but it should always be clear that this usage IS careless.

As T.S.Eliot (I think) said “I have to use words when I talk with you”. Bill always argued that we can communicate clearly in math and simulation, because there is no question about what they say, but when we use words, the reader supplies the meaning, which may not be what the writer intended. So I support your call for a redefinition of PCT terminology, despite the qibbles above.

Martin

[From Lloyd Klinedinst (2013.06.30.0027)]

I submit something I wrote the day after the June 8 meeting and memorial service for Bill Powers. I add this prefatory note. We should be able to reconstruct or replicate PCT anytime anyplace. This will happen and work accurately only when the exact specifications of the theoretical science on which it is based are used.

What prompts me to share this on CSGnet is the regular occurrence of what I consider inaccurate and careless misuse of the terms: behavior and action. They are distinguished, in my mind, based on Bill’s more careful definitions (blurred enough times by his own disregard for them in his emails and writings) AND especially by PCT diagrams and equations. See my footnote 3. Would that we observe the same precision in verbal language as in our number language. I also suggest we include as part of our BCP course a careful editing and update of the Glossary, as well as the development of a ‘PCT Style Sheet’. As I say in my last sentence: “If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.” In other words behavior is the entire phenomenon of control. Action is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism. (Actually when the control loops are internal to the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it by the special additional term, Action. Of course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)

An agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which mathematically express PCT.

One result of this precision in our languaging could be to distinguish clearly what we can observe and identify (though each action is never completely identical to the next) as action and what will remain the ineluctable ultimate inscrutability of a complete identification of behavior.

Using the mid-range of our customary perceptual abilities we do, however, infer from innumerable repeated actions of organisms general patterns of behavior. And through these stages and developmental ages of behavioral patterns we identify growth, personality types, learning styles, each other, and on and on.

RECONSTRUCTING PCT

After last night’s reading of Bill’s introduction to a projected book, PCT at 60, (if anyone has a digital version of it, please post!) I was curious to track down the tongue-defying name of the Greek who engineered one of the earliest negative feedback devices.

I googled: first control system greek egyptian water clock - 1st two hits: Wikipedia, then pctweb.org

So Bill’s work comes right to the top of references in Google’s mind to ‘steer’ people toward(s) …how’s that for cybernetics of an information age variety? (Of course, Google had been tracking me for some time now.)

I am grateful to have located information about the wily Greek and as a bonus, the real payoff, an essay by Bill entitled “The tank that filled itself” at http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf

Drawing on and deftly mixing metaphors from plant biology, genetic hybridization, reproduction, geology, and using information from the fields of biology, physiology, engineering, cybernetics - in the first two paragraphs of “The tank that filled itself” essay, Bill traces his origination of PCT and the genealogical history from which he drew its composite elements, burrowing deeply back to “a Greek inventor named Ktesibios, a student of Archimedes, a contemporary of Euclid, and possibly head of the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt before the great library was burned.” As Bill adds: “Ktesibios was interested in water clocks.”1

After his two introductory paragraphs, in the next section ‘The road not taken: the first recorded negative feedback control system’ Bill describes the path he traced and resumed, alluding to Robert Frost in indicating it was indeed a ‘road not taken’ by the majority of scientists. Enjoying ‘a little poetic license’ Bill creates a descriptive story and moral of how this water clock worked. And the cognitive lesson at the end: “We can say that the actions were the means by which either the slave or the machine controlled a perception of water level based on the actual water level.” Voilà: the negative feedback loop!

In the rest of the paragraph Bill details the phases of this negative feedback loop embodied in the Ktesibios regulator.

Next section, ‘The road that was taken’! Bill outlines the paths of behaviorism and cognitive science in the 20th century til today. His concluding diagrams2 and sentences indeed find behaviorists and cognitive scientists guilty of inadequate observation and reasoning and flunk them on their educational failure to have studied or remembered their Greco-Roman roots.

Bill delivers his audience-tailored message in the penultimate section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’. Considering all three theories of human behavior, how differently a therapist would function in relationship to the client!3

Bill ends his essay with ‘Conclusions’. He reiterates: “The water level control system is not complex or hard to understand.” We might have know that nature holds true to an elegant simplicity. He then pinpoints the conflict to all who encounter PCT: “There is no way simply to add PCT to the older theories: a choice is necessary.” He then describes in clear lay terms the differences - which PCTers know are the differences between linear and circular causality. In his last paragraph he restates the conflict between PCT and its representation of our ancient traditions of knowledge about how things work and the ‘modern’ sciences which developed in ignorance of this ancient wisdom. He invites all to be ‘willing’ to enter a probably ‘long process’ of leaving ‘a lifetime of learning’ to learn anew through the theory of PCT.

In reading this essay by Bill in the light of our deliberations yesterday and our best sense of his intentions for PCT at 60 I suggest we use this essay as well as a guideline for the forthcoming publication.

Some last afterthoughts.

1 I cannot read this essay without noting some similarity to the ‘The Little Engine that Could’. Bill engineered his creation of PCT against the opinion of most other ‘large engines’. I leave it to your imaginations to draw other parallels.

2 I am not sure when this essay was written, but as we mused at last night’s discussion, historians of PCT will one day note its development and ‘publication’. In fact, I’m rather sure some among you who read this will promptly send me its proper and correct references.

3 I finally recall another of last evening’s discussion topics, continuing Bill’s work in PCT, in the light of one of the characteristics of living systems: reproduction. And I remember, accurately I hope, Henry Yin’s about cultivating a number of graduate students who would be ‘little Bills’ researching a whole range of PCT theses.

So much for my contribution just now to reconstructing Bill.

Footnotes

1 A cursory look at Wikipedia (some will shrink or shirk at this, but it is often a useful first sounding for further examination of a topic) suggests an even more global network of developmental relations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock The article also allows us to call this wily Greek by a less tongue-tying alphabetization, Tesibius -though you can call him Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius.

2 I think these diagrams might be what Allie held up last night to share her understanding of PCT.

3 One personal peeve with Bill and many who write about PCT. In the third paragraph of the section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’, Bill gets past the first half of the paragraph dramatically well, in my opinion, as he considers the conditional: “But what if Fig. 1 is accepted?” But then, not dealing with the scientific precision he is so expert at, he uses words carelessly and, again in my judgement, inaccurately when he says,

“Behavior is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of behaving. The behavior that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

In my understanding of PCT, I would reword this passage to be more precisely verbally expressive of the diagram:

“Action is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of acting. The action that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

I eagerly await confirmation or correction of this footnote. If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include this required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.

I submit this instead of going through the previous emails of the ‘Marken’s foreword to LCS’ thread, marking each of my perceived misuses of action and behavior.

Thanks for reading me out, if you got this far.

Lloyd

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
10 Dover Lane
Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001
HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232

Lloyd Mobile: (314)-609-5571
email: lloydk@klinedinst.com

website: http://www.klinedinst.com

5

[From Rick Marken (2013.06.30.1200)]

Fred Nickols (2013.06.30.0536 EDT)
The paper was presented by Bill at the Manchester CSG conference in July
2010 and it is copyrighted 2010. He kindly gave me permission to post it to
the section in my web site where I grapple with PCT and its practical
applications. You can find it at the following link:

http://www.nickols.us/TankThatFilledItself.pdf
Thanks for posting this Fred. One of the things that struck me while reading this is that a lot of the confusion about distinguishing between the terms “behavior”, “action” and “results” comes from the fact that conventional psychology doesn’t make this distinction. In conventional psychology, “behavior” is simply “what organisms do”. So there is an implicit conflation of what we control theorists refer to as “behavior”, “action” and “results”. This can be seen in Bill’s discussion of the S-R and cognitive models on p. 6, right below Figures 2 and 3. Here’s what Bill says about those models:
“These models are quite similar, differing mainly in their ideology. In both of them, behavior
is the terminus of an input-output process”.
Bill is clearly discussing this from the perspective of a conventional psychologist who would understand “behavior” to mean “output” – what we see organisms doing, such as “pushing levers” or “making chess moves”. Psychologists don’t look at behavior in terms of actions and results because they don’t see that behavior is a process of control. And they don’t see it this way because they are not Bill Powers.
As I said in another post, I think that what may be Bill’s main contribution to understanding behavior is the recognition that behavior is control – the production of consistent results by varying actions appropriately to compensate for varying circumstances – in fact, not in theory. [I discuss this point in my paper Marken, R. S. (1988) The Nature of Behavior: Control as Fact and Theory. *Behavioral Science*, 33, 196- 206, which is reprinted in my book Mind Readings.] And that has created a problem for PCT because PCT is an explanation of a phenomenon – control – that conventional psychologists don’t even recognize. When we say that PCT explains “behavior”, a conventional psychologist assumes that this means that PCT explains how organisms produce the outputs that are seen as behavior; in fact, of course, PCT explains how organisms control.

So I don’t think this is something that can be cleared up by deleting behavior from our vocabulary or by trying to confine tits meaning to something less broad thing, like action. I think we all have a pretty good idea of the phenomenon that the word “behavior” points to; it’s the stuff that we see organisms doing. As control theorists we just have to remember to communicate about behavior – these “doings” – using words that refer to the observable aspects of the process of control – words like “action”, “result”, “disturbance”. Then I think we should be able to discuss, without too much confusion, how control theory – PCT – explains behavior, by first recognizing that behavior is a process of control.

Best regards

Rick

···

–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

6

[From Lloyd Klinedinst (2013.06.30.1445)]
Ls reply to Fred
Thanks much for the reference and the website. I knew someone would help me on this.
Lloyd

[From Fred Nickols (2013.06.30.0536 EDT)]

Lloyd:

The paper was presented by Bill at the Manchester CSG conference in July 2010 and it is copyrighted 2010. He kindly gave me permission to post it to the section in my web site where I grapple with PCT and its practical applications. You can find it at the following link:

<http://www.nickols.us/TankThatFilledItself.pdf&gt;http://www.nickols.us/TankThatFilledItself.pdf

Fred Nickols

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
10 Dover Lane
Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001
HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232
Lloyd Mobile: (314)-609-5571
email: <mailto:lloydk@klinedinst.com>lloydk@klinedinst.com
website: <http://www.klinedinst.com/&gt;http://www.klinedinst.com

···

On Jun 30, 2013, at 4:43 AM, Fred Nickols <<mailto:fred@NICKOLS.US>fred@NICKOLS.US> wrote:

7

[From Lloyd Klinedinst (2013.06.30.1446)]

Ls reply to Martin

Thanks for your quibbles. I appreciate them as fine tuning suggestions for describing verbally PCT , engaging in the cooperative control of defining and describing BCP. I hope none considered my sharing a main peeve as being peevish. I highly respect the work that is done on CSGnet to clarify and further PCT.

Your Item #1, which questions my action ‘definition’.

“Action is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism.” But where is the boundary of the organism? What is ‘Action’ when our technology allows precise observation of variables at ever more detailed level within the skin bag? What is ‘Action’ when the complex hierarchical control system is a robot, an ant swarm, or a complex of micro-robots?

I would have done better to start with Output Quantity followed by its special case, Action, occurring at the boundary of the organism-environment, when it comes out of ‘the skins bag’ for air, as it were. So your #2 item indeed expresses what I mean to say.

As for the single robot, I think the same as a human, though currently less complex a control system. For the ant swarm and group of mircro-robots, my take is that it is the sum of collective control of each ant’s perception, but resulting in emergent ‘behavior’ beyond any single ant’s imagination. Same for a group of mircro-robots. What do you think?

Regarding your #3 item, it’s beyond the asymptotes of my knowledge and experience. I stand to learn. The simple equations I have worked with from some early workshop in PCT are: e = r - p and cv = a + d. Then I know something like an equation needs to occur for cv to become iq and then get further transformed through the Input function to become a p and get recycled. I look forward to CSGers confirming and correcting these simple equations I have been working with. This is why I would value PCT-standardized progressively simple to complex sets of equations to express mathematically the scientific core of PCT.

I also appreciate your last three paragraphs sharing some of your own hobby horses*

Thanks, Martin. I look forward to your and others’ comments.

Lloyd

  • In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy he plays with John Locke’s theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the “association of ideas” that come to us from our five senses. Sterne is by turns respectful and satirical of Locke’s theories, using the association of ideas to construct characters’ “hobby-horses”, or whimsical obsessions, that both order and disorder their lives in different ways.

[Martin Taylor 2013.06.30.08.19]

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
10 Dover Lane
Villa Ridge, MO 63089-2001
HomeVoice: (636) 451-3232

Lloyd Mobile: (314)-609-5571
email: lloydk@klinedinst.com

website: http://www.klinedinst.com

···

Lloyd,

  Thanks for a thought-provoking proposition, with which I largely

agree, but I’m not sure how workable are all your suggestions.
Here are a couple of issues that are bound to arise if we try to
adhere strictly to your guidelines.

  1. [LK] "If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent 'PCT Style

Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior
as the control of perception and action as one phase of
the negative feedback loop we call behavior."
[MT} So far, so good. Behaviour refers to variations in all the
variables of the entire loop, whereas “action” refers to the
influence of the output of the loop on the immediate external
environment – uh-oh, the immediate external environment of just
what, exactly? The elementary control unit at any level of the
hierarchy outputs to the reference inputs of many lower-level
elementary control units. Are they its “immediate external
environment”? To me, that would be the natural interpretation, but
you say it is not: “Action is just that one part, phase,
element of the control loop observable outside the organism.” But
where is the boundary of the organism? What is ‘Action’ when our
technology allows precise observation of variables at ever more
detailed level within the skin bag? What is ‘Action’ when the
complex hierarchical control system is a robot, an ant swarm, or a
complex of micro-robots?

  2. [LK] "(Actually when the control loops are internal to the

organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only
when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it
by the special additional term, Action . Of course, the
internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or
glandular actions or activities.)"

  [MT] If we accept a naive interpretation of "internal" and

“external”, HPCT suggests that all effects on the external
environment are the combined results of the behaviour of many
elementary control units, though (usually) of only one control
system (I consider the possibility that cases of multiple
personality might be counter-examples). When we think only of a
single elementary control unit, we can define its “Action” as you
suggest, but it is identical to its “Output Quantity”. If we
consider a control system more complex than a single elementary
unit, the observable quantities in the environment are due to the
combined Output Quantities of several loops.

  3. [LK] "      An

agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the
control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well
as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which
mathematically express PCT."

  [MT] I agree with the first part of this, but the use of the word

“linear” is not proper in the second part. No physically
realizable control system, even a single elementary control unit,
can be linear except over a small range of values. At the least,
there is always a limit to the range of perceptible variation or
of available output magnitude. In biological systems, almost all
the functions are likely to be non-linear. Linear analysis can be
a useful guide to the small-signal behaviour of a real system, but
a guide is all it can ever be. Perceptual functions are often not
far from logarithmic, for example; as Bill pointed out in one of
his last interchanges with Rick and me, most engineered control
systems, and probably most natural ones, have a tolerance zone –
a range of error around zero that the control system treats as
actually being zero error. That is a significant non-linearity
that not only reduces the tremor of an elementary control loop,
but is also likely to ease the interactions among potentially
competing control loops.

  ----------

  These are minor quibbles about a thesis with which I basically

agree and which I support. We have to be careful in the use of
language. The word “disturbance”, for example, has been used in a
variety of incompatible ways. Sometimes those ways have been used
in the Philosopher’s trick of shifting the meaning within the
frame of a single argument in order to make some invalid point.
“Reorganization” has been used with a range of different meanings.
Perhaps there should be different terms for some of these
distinctions, because it isn’t always clear from the context.
Although the general idea of “reorganization” may be clear, much
about the concept remains to be worked out. How, for example, does
reorganization interact with the ever-shifting selection of
perceptions being and not being actively controlled?

  I have my own favourite common careless use of language: "PCT" and

“HPCT”. PCT includes HPCT, and HPCT includes Bill’s particular
hierarchy (which we might call PHPCT for Powers’ HPCT), but there
are PCT structures that are not HPCT, and HPCT structures that are
different from PHPCT. Even PHPCT is not a well-defined structure
when we get into detail. It is a very good idea to study B:CP and
see what the Bible says about PHPCT, but it is a better idea to go
on from that and keep trying to find out what Nature says about
PCT. The careless use of “PCT” to refer to PHPCT is quite common
on CSGnet, for good and proper reasons, but it should always be
clear that this usage IS careless.

  As T.S.Eliot (I think) said "I have to use words when I talk with

you". Bill always argued that we can communicate clearly in math
and simulation, because there is no question about what they say,
but when we use words, the reader supplies the meaning, which may
not be what the writer intended. So I support your call for a
redefinition of PCT terminology, despite the qibbles above.

  Martin
8

[Ted Cloak 2013.06.30.1430 MST]

Warren Mansell posted the first part of the Power Point Presentation “PCT and the Evolution of Culture” (PCT&EC) on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE3EHvrpU7g , and I just discovered that “bilkable” posted the whole thing in late 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAVeF8G1FcY. The quality of the latter upload isn’t the best, but it will suffice if you don’t want to take the time to download PCT&EC via tedcloak.com.

Ted

[Ted Cloak 2013.06.30.1130 MST]

Let me try:

Behavior is the Control of Perception (duh).

A behavior is what a control system does.

A control system (CS) is “the unit of behavioral organization” (Powers 1973, p. 221: “Figure 15.3. Final form of the unit of behavioral organization.”). A CS consists of a memory storage function, an input function, a comparator, and an output function, and the connections among them and leading to/from other CSes.

An action is what an output function does or effectuates. A gross action (after what animal behaviorists call “gross behavior”) is an action of an intact animal visible externally.

When a hierarchy of CSes is being discussed, an individual CS may be referred to as a control module of that hierarchy.

When I was constructing my Power Point Presentation, “PCT and the Evolution of Culture”, I discovered that if I introduced a CS controlling for, say, the perception “nail driven”, I had to have it address a CS controlling for “driving nail” as the next lower module in the hierarchy.

HTH

Ted

[Martin Taylor 2013.06.30.08.19]

Lloyd,
Thanks for a thought-provoking proposition, with which I largely agree, but I’m not sure how workable are all your suggestions. Here are a couple of issues that are bound to arise if we try to adhere strictly to your guidelines.

  1. [LK] “If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.”
    [MT} So far, so good. Behaviour refers to variations in all the variables of the entire loop, whereas “action” refers to the influence of the output of the loop on the immediate external environment – uh-oh, the immediate external environment of just what, exactly? The elementary control unit at any level of the hierarchy outputs to the reference inputs of many lower-level elementary control units. Are they its “immediate external environment”? To me, that would be the natural interpretation, but you say it is not: “Action is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism.” But where is the boundary of the organism? What is ‘Action’ when our technology allows precise observation of variables at ever more detailed level within the skin bag? What is ‘Action’ when the complex hierarchical control system is a robot, an ant swarm, or a complex of micro-robots?

  2. [LK] “(Actually when the control loops are internal to the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it by the special additional term, Action. Of course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)”
    [MT] If we accept a naive interpretation of “internal” and “external”, HPCT suggests that all effects on the external environment are the combined results of the behaviour of many elementary control units, though (usually) of only one control system (I consider the possibility that cases of multiple personality might be counter-examples). When we think only of a single elementary control unit, we can define its “Action” as you suggest, but it is identical to its “Output Quantity”. If we consider a control system more complex than a single elementary unit, the observable quantities in the environment are due to the combined Output Quantities of several loops.

  3. [LK] “An agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which mathematically express PCT.”
    [MT] I agree with the first part of this, but the use of the word “linear” is not proper in the second part. No physically realizable control system, even a single elementary control unit, can be linear except over a small range of values. At the least, there is always a limit to the range of perceptible variation or of available output magnitude. In biological systems, almost all the functions are likely to be non-linear. Linear analysis can be a useful guide to the small-signal behaviour of a real system, but a guide is all it can ever be. Perceptual functions are often not far from logarithmic, for example; as Bill pointed out in one of his last interchanges with Rick and me, most engineered control systems, and probably most natural ones, have a tolerance zone – a range of error around zero that the control system treats as actually being zero error. That is a significant non-linearity that not only reduces the tremor of an elementary control loop, but is also likely to ease the interactions among potentially competing control loops.

···

These are minor quibbles about a thesis with which I basically agree and which I support. We have to be careful in the use of language. The word “disturbance”, for example, has been used in a variety of incompatible ways. Sometimes those ways have been used in the Philosopher’s trick of shifting the meaning within the frame of a single argument in order to make some invalid point. “Reorganization” has been used with a range of different meanings. Perhaps there should be different terms for some of these distinctions, because it isn’t always clear from the context. Although the general idea of “reorganization” may be clear, much about the concept remains to be worked out. How, for example, does reorganization interact with the ever-shifting selection of perceptions being and not being actively controlled?

I have my own favourite common careless use of language: “PCT” and “HPCT”. PCT includes HPCT, and HPCT includes Bill’s particular hierarchy (which we might call PHPCT for Powers’ HPCT), but there are PCT structures that are not HPCT, and HPCT structures that are different from PHPCT. Even PHPCT is not a well-defined structure when we get into detail. It is a very good idea to study B:CP and see what the Bible says about PHPCT, but it is a better idea to go on from that and keep trying to find out what Nature says about PCT. The careless use of “PCT” to refer to PHPCT is quite common on CSGnet, for good and proper reasons, but it should always be clear that this usage IS careless.

As T.S.Eliot (I think) said “I have to use words when I talk with you”. Bill always argued that we can communicate clearly in math and simulation, because there is no question about what they say, but when we use words, the reader supplies the meaning, which may not be what the writer intended. So I support your call for a redefinition of PCT terminology, despite the quibbles above.

Martin

[From Lloyd Klinedinst (2013.06.30.0027)]

I submit something I wrote the day after the June 8 meeting and memorial service for Bill Powers. I add this prefatory note. We should be able to reconstruct or replicate PCT anytime anyplace. This will happen and work accurately only when the exact specifications of the theoretical science on which it is based are used.

What prompts me to share this on CSGnet is the regular occurrence of what I consider inaccurate and careless misuse of the terms: behavior and action. They are distinguished, in my mind, based on Bill’s more careful definitions (blurred enough times by his own disregard for them in his emails and writings) AND especially by PCT diagrams and equations. See my footnote 3. Would that we observe the same precision in verbal language as in our number language. I also suggest we include as part of our BCP course a careful editing and update of the Glossary, as well as the development of a ‘PCT Style Sheet’. As I say in my last sentence: “If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include a required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.” In other words behavior is the entire phenomenon of control. Action is just that one part, phase, element of the control loop observable outside the organism. (Actually when the control loops are internal to the organism, we might add a more exact term, Output Quantity. Only when the Output Quantity is outside the organism would we call it by the special additional term, Action. Of course, the internal Output Quantities could be called neural, muscular, or glandular actions or activities.)

An agreement to use a common diagram of the basic unit of PCT, the control loop or negative feedback loop, would be helpful - as well as a common expression of the simultaneous linear equations which mathematically express PCT.

One result of this precision in our languaging could be to distinguish clearly what we can observe and identify (though each action is never completely identical to the next) as action and what will remain the ineluctable ultimate inscrutability of a complete identification of behavior.

Using the mid-range of our customary perceptual abilities we do, however, infer from innumerable repeated actions of organisms general patterns of behavior. And through these stages and developmental ages of behavioral patterns we identify growth, personality types, learning styles, each other, and on and on.

RECONSTRUCTING PCT

After last night’s reading of Bill’s introduction to a projected book, PCT at 60, (if anyone has a digital version of it, please post!) I was curious to track down the tongue-defying name of the Greek who engineered one of the earliest negative feedback devices.

I googled: first control system greek egyptian water clock - 1st two hits: Wikipedia, then pctweb.org

So Bill’s work comes right to the top of references in Google’s mind to ‘steer’ people toward(s) …how’s that for cybernetics of an information age variety? (Of course, Google had been tracking me for some time now.)

I am grateful to have located information about the wily Greek and as a bonus, the real payoff, an essay by Bill entitled “The tank that filled itself” at http://www.pctweb.org/TFI.pdf

Drawing on and deftly mixing metaphors from plant biology, genetic hybridization, reproduction, geology, and using information from the fields of biology, physiology, engineering, cybernetics - in the first two paragraphs of “The tank that filled itself” essay, Bill traces his origination of PCT and the genealogical history from which he drew its composite elements, burrowing deeply back to “a Greek inventor named Ktesibios, a student of Archimedes, a contemporary of Euclid, and possibly head of the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt before the great library was burned.” As Bill adds: “Ktesibios was interested in water clocks.”1

After his two introductory paragraphs, in the next section ‘The road not taken: the first recorded negative feedback control system’ Bill describes the path he traced and resumed, alluding to Robert Frost in indicating it was indeed a ‘road not taken’ by the majority of scientists. Enjoying ‘a little poetic license’ Bill creates a descriptive story and moral of how this water clock worked. And the cognitive lesson at the end: “We can say that the actions were the means by which either the slave or the machine controlled a perception of water level based on the actual water level.” Voilà: the negative feedback loop!

In the rest of the paragraph Bill details the phases of this negative feedback loop embodied in the Ktesibios regulator.

Next section, ‘The road that was taken’! Bill outlines the paths of behaviorism and cognitive science in the 20th century til today. His concluding diagrams2 and sentences indeed find behaviorists and cognitive scientists guilty of inadequate observation and reasoning and flunk them on their educational failure to have studied or remembered their Greco-Roman roots.

Bill delivers his audience-tailored message in the penultimate section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’. Considering all three theories of human behavior, how differently a therapist would function in relationship to the client!3

Bill ends his essay with ‘Conclusions’. He reiterates: “The water level control system is not complex or hard to understand.” We might have know that nature holds true to an elegant simplicity. He then pinpoints the conflict to all who encounter PCT: “There is no way simply to add PCT to the older theories: a choice is necessary.” He then describes in clear lay terms the differences - which PCTers know are the differences between linear and circular causality. In his last paragraph he restates the conflict between PCT and its representation of our ancient traditions of knowledge about how things work and the ‘modern’ sciences which developed in ignorance of this ancient wisdom. He invites all to be ‘willing’ to enter a probably ‘long process’ of leaving ‘a lifetime of learning’ to learn anew through the theory of PCT.

In reading this essay by Bill in the light of our deliberations yesterday and our best sense of his intentions for PCT at 60 I suggest we use this essay as well as a guideline for the forthcoming publication.

Some last afterthoughts.

1 I cannot read this essay without noting some similarity to the ‘The Little Engine that Could’. Bill engineered his creation of PCT against the opinion of most other ‘large engines’. I leave it to your imaginations to draw other parallels.

2 I am not sure when this essay was written, but as we mused at last night’s discussion, historians of PCT will one day note its development and ‘publication’. In fact, I’m rather sure some among you who read this will promptly send me its proper and correct references.

3 I finally recall another of last evening’s discussion topics, continuing Bill’s work in PCT, in the light of one of the characteristics of living systems: reproduction. And I remember, accurately I hope, Henry Yin’s about cultivating a number of graduate students who would be ‘little Bills’ researching a whole range of PCT theses.

So much for my contribution just now to reconstructing Bill.

Footnotes

1 A cursory look at Wikipedia (some will shrink or shirk at this, but it is often a useful first sounding for further examination of a topic) suggests an even more global network of developmental relations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_clock The article also allows us to call this wily Greek by a less tongue-tying alphabetization, Tesibius -though you can call him Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius.

2 I think these diagrams might be what Allie held up last night to share her understanding of PCT.

3 One personal peeve with Bill and many who write about PCT. In the third paragraph of the section, ‘What if the first road had been taken?’, Bill gets past the first half of the paragraph dramatically well, in my opinion, as he considers the conditional: “But what if Fig. 1 is accepted?” But then, not dealing with the scientific precision he is so expert at, he uses words carelessly and, again in my judgement, inaccurately when he says,

“Behavior is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of behaving. The behavior that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

In my understanding of PCT, I would reword this passage to be more precisely verbally expressive of the diagram:

“Action is, for the behaving system, relatively uninteresting and unimportant. A person is really concerned about the perceptual consequences of acting. The action that controls those consequences is itself of interest mainly when it affects other people.”

I eagerly await confirmation or correction of this footnote. If I am correct, I would like the nonexistent ‘PCT Style Sheet’ to include this required distinction between behavior as the control of perception and action as one phase of the negative feedback loop we call behavior.

I submit this instead of going through the previous emails of the ‘Marken’s foreword to LCS’ thread, marking each of my perceived misuses of action and behavior.

Thanks for reading me out, if you got this far.

Lloyd

Dr. Lloyd Klinedinst
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