[From Bill Powers (961010.1100 MDT)]
Martin Taylor 961008 13:35 --
What one control system does is control. What two do, interacting in the
same world, is not, though what each of them does is indeed control. The
interactions among control system has a dynamic that almost surely involves
attractor basins. There are different ways in which the control systems
can reach stable situations (not if they are linear, but in general there
are). Each such way is an "orbit" leading to the attractor of the relevant
basin.
On reflection, I'll buy that. It's a lot better than saying that there are
social control systems. The metaphor of an attractor basin (based on the
behavior of a marble in a literal basin, or bowl) simply refers to the
approach of a multidimensional system to a stable state. In most real cases,
there is no "attractor" and there is no "basin," but the behavior is _as if_
such things existed.
When individual human beings interact, the interaction (if stable)
approaches a state in which each system, given its loop gain, is
experiencing as little error as possible. The "path" (another -- visual --
metaphor drawn from graphical plots) by which the final state is approached
depends on the dynamics of each individual system. There is no external rule
stating that any particular path must be followed, nor that any paricular
combination of individuals will interact in a stable way, a way that
approaches equilibrium. People who don't get along with each other can fly
violently together or violently apart. A combination of individual
independent control systems can interact in any conceivable way, and that
way depends only on the internal characteristics of the systems and their
linkages through the environment.
So if anyone wants to talk about the dynamics of social systems, the
language of attractors and basins is a perfectly good one -- as long as we
understand that an attractor is not a reference signal, and a basin is not a
control process. And as long as we understand that this is only a metaphor.
Best,
Bill P.