[Avery Andrews 950915]
(Rick Marken (950831.1330))
>>[ADA] There's at least one important feature that all the PCT apps that have been
>>discussed have in common, which I don't think has gotten quite as much
>>attention as it deserves. This is that they presuppose that people's higher
>>level goals are basically the same
>
>[RM] I think this is only the case if everyone is controlling for the same higher
>level perceptual variables. For example, if everyone is controlling for a
>perception that is the same function, f() of the same lower level variables,
>s1,s2,...sN (p = f(s1,s2...sN)) then there will be conflict if everyone has a
>different goal for that perception (a different reference setting, p*
>for
>p). Conflict can only be avoided if everyone has the same goal for the
>perception.
>...
There's an important subtlety which both my posting and rick's reply
overlooked, which is an ambiguity what it is for two different people
to `want the same thing'. Suppose I want for me to eat, and also
that you want for me to eat, so that we both have reference levels
of TRUE (or 1) for the proposition that ADA3 eats. No conflict.
On the other what if ADA3 and RM both want `to eat'. This will
not be a problem if there is enough food to go aroumd, but will be
if there isn't. In this second situation, there is a sense in which
ADA3 and RM want different things, but another important sense
in which they want the same thing (`indexed' by the wanter, one might
say in philosophical jargon). Rick seemed to assume sense 1,
but I was actually thinking in terms of sense 2, wants from the
perspective of the wanter, not a third party.
But then there's another problem. High level perceptions are
produced by a reorganizable hierarchy from lower level ones. So
how could two different such reorganizable systems, having different
histories and different genetic makeups, come up with high level
perceptual functons that are in any sense the same? This is
certainly a bad problem for what I said, but there are some
motivation for thinking that something like its true.
E.g. people seem to like to be with their friends, to have harmonious
social relationships, to make progress on things, all of which seem to
be references levels that are both high-level and recurrent in the
population. And it does still seem to me that Ed Ford's app
depends on the children having these reference percepts.
So it seems to me that either the platitudes in the paragraph above are
false, or there must be some solution to the problem of how different
people can have the same (in sense 2) high-level reference percpts.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au