[John Kirkland 2013 10 25]
My apologies for the delay, I am attempting some catch-up as other events had taken priority.
I decided to go back and re-read chapters 7 - 11 as there were a few loose ends needing tying. I have to admit there are still some of these loose ends (misunderstandings) remaining and seek clarification from journeying colleagues. Comments and suggestions welcomed.
Chapter 7 Intensity
This chapter introduces transducers, how a range of different systems can, with guidance, pick up whatever is ‘out there’ and convert this selected energy into electrical signals.
These picked up signals are brought into a dynamic holding bay that’s like an in-between zone bridging out-to-in and in-to-out, a transfer area where the common currency is intensity-from-effort. As noted on p 96, ‘… the dimension of experience along which all sensations can vary, and along which all sensations are alike. They represent only intensity, the sense of how much of any intensity is present…all stimuli feel alike.’
This pick up is not directed by what’s out there (erroneously, just as the earth appears flat and the sun seems to rise in the East) but from control, perceptual reference signals. Hence the organism initiates interactions and seeks to engage.
This level represents a complex set of interdependent navigational systems attuned by evolution to detect sought out variations of
pressure, light, sound, vibrations, deep touch, surface touch, balance,
taste, olfactory and so on thus enabling members of a species to replicate and all that goes along with reproduction happening in a particular habitat and niche (survival, reproduction, care for young etc.)
Here’s where I’m getting stuck. To what extent is ‘initiates’ a conscious activity? I’ve more to comment on this matter below, in the next chapter. Now, is this initiation related to function and is thus part of the system’s design, the way it is for living organisms? Could it be considered as deliberate (the organism is aware and helps itself), is it purposeful (in that it plays a role in the closed loop), is it intentional? Or are all these adjectives synonyms? It seems if too much psychology is injected into explaining these go-get seeking activities, say as being volitional and conscious etc., this gets in the way of modelling physical and directly perceived reality.
And another thing, what about exposure to a sudden unexpected explosion accompanied by intense light, sound and possibly radiation and shrapnel, or a seeping toxic gas or suffocating smoke? These overload the organism and cannot be handled safely. In PCT parlance are these events detected extremely fast (by detected I mean picked up) and there is immediate shut-down, termination of any subsequent perceptual control?
Chapter 8 Sensation
Following on from the above, one
of the concepts I’ve been wrestling with is PCT’s interpretation of ‘control’. The struggle has been to de-couple control from volitional agency as often occurs in common usage, for instance, “I’m in control here”, “We have this situation is under control (aka contained)”, “She’s
out of control”.
I’m sure distinguishing psychological awareness from management/perceptual control is well traversed territory. For instance many central systems (such as respiratory, circulatory, nervous, etc.) are under semi-automatic control, they are regulated independently of thinking about them: control exists without implicating volition and cognition. Because we are able to influence intensity through effort this sort of apparent decision making, of doing-from-thinking, may contribute to the control-agency-volition illusion. I suspect
my confusion has arisen from accepting the freedom-control-awareness triangle, where each concept is taken for granted as being related another. That is, control is aligned with being in charge, awareness is an attribute of freedom and each is linked to cognition, making this a tight go-together bundle. I am quite willing to accept control exists independently of volition/awareness/freedom. Engineers may wonder why the mistake of bundling these concepts even arose because they start out by tinkering around with mechanical control systems (thermostats for example) and never had to wrench control from the other baggage I’m lugging around. Once this distinction is established, when control becomes part of a living system, then I’m willing to accept that to live is to be controlled. But unless the psycho-socio-political contamination is filtered control may be unnecessarily limiting. I wonder if an escape from this confusion may be with ‘function’, where anything other than specific and tailored system control is meaningless.
From what I can work out control is a central tenet of PCT. It is perception’s agency, initiated via a reference signal and impacting upon perception via behaviour. Thus perceptual control is behaviour. At lower levels it has little to do with choice, it just happens. That’s life’s genesis. If we wish to parade awareness as a virtue of existence, fine. But such lofty thoughts are a side effect of interpreting and justifying control’s hold on perception. It’s unnecessary when making the case. I hasten to add there is likely to be a
rubicon, a point beyond which there is a sense of awareness. This shift is possibly part of the continuing story and may emerge in a later chapter.
Sensations manage the navigational equipment’s (intensity) readings as consistent and replicable integrated weighted magnitude vectors. They may not be verbalised easily.
Is
this where a sense of X emanates, the invariance of a spine chill, vertigo, fear, vague stirrings of unexpressed feelings, aesthetics, soft, hard, smooth, rough, and so on and so forth?
As a possible study: if a collection of adjectives was offered to a person participating in wine tasting, which ones would be selected first? It would probably depend upon which combination of intensity vectors was being examined at the time, whether colour, initial flavour, after effect taste was the focus of attention (the deliberate seeking guided by a reference signal).
Look at that, I stepped right into volition’s trap once again (awareness, deliberate, agency). OK, for me anyway, I needed to remake and reformulate the meaning of control by taking it back to its roots at level 1, stripping off its volition-related associates. I’ll call this a clean start. Of course volition is a perception too. And it is controlled in exactly the same way as are any of the lower levels. It appears that with PCT one has to integrate top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. Again, perhaps attention to function one way out of this mess.
As an aside, when grappling with gaining an understanding of PCT it is as if this is a completely different culture and one needs to be born again. At the entry level, what’s enough to get by? Would the list include control, signal pick up and transmission, hierarchy, closed loop, error, reference, homeostasis, disturbance, gain, working model,…If one was to rank order critical PCT concepts how would these be stacked up, which ones come first? Myself, I tend to start with finding islands of meaning, like jig-saw pieces, and gradually enlarge their edges until the big picture emerges. With understanding PCT it’s more like pulling out strands of slippery, cooked spaghetti using chopsticks and trying to find a pattern, any pattern.
In summary, we make sense and it cannot be made for us as a hand-me-down, we do try to control the situation (whether intentionally or not), and most of this process just happens because that’s how living organisms’ design evolved. There are incidental secondary spin-offs such as awareness and volition. I’m simply trying to put us (humans) in their natural place. It’s easy to get big-headed about politicalising control, as in education for instance.
Chapter 9 Configurations
There’s almost a sleight of hand here and it’s to do with comprehending movement. So far with the lower levels Bill’s introduced a dynamic’ continuously living’ organism capable of investigating its environment. By way of analogy, a car engine ticks over at around 1k rpm and can get as high as 8k rpm when it’s at speed, petal to the metal. The closed-loops Bill’s mentioning are likely to be much faster. How does one freeze-frame a living organism? That is, stopping it in its tracks so as to pull it apart and probe its internal workings? Or, of representing it in 2D on a drawing board? I suspect part of the answer is ‘designing and testing working models’, the Fletcher’s trolley of PCT.
Each level of the hierarchy introduces another of nature’s ways for economising. For configuration there’s recognising what’s the same about difference and what’s different about the same. Due to the exponential complexity arising from bundling multiple sensations nature’s escape is to design a higher order of integrity, as configurations. Invariance means perception of wholes as well as holes summarised as objects, whatever the mode of sensory pickup activiated. There are auditory objects (phonemes) just as there are visual ones (chairs). A configuration is an efficient summary and it may be achieved through many different routes (many means to the one object, aka invariance).
The irrelevance of time is evident when Bill mentions the simultaneity of combinations. Though stereoscopic visual perception is acknowledged as combining edge and orientation and 3degree separations (distance between eyes) enabling depth to be detected, there is no reference to zooming or looming, of the shifts as one configuration morphs to another. See pg 126 para 4: “…they cannot represent more than the present-time collection of sense objects that exists right now…” They are a-historical, pivotal, immediate. And they are quite natural.
Summary quip from Gestalt: the configurational whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Is this the appropriate place to examine illusions like the impossibility of reconciling simultaneously two conflicting aspects of the same whole – the two faces/vase, the old and young woman’s head profile – as well as those objects having small emendations, like the Muller-Lyer and so on?
I particularly liked the idea of tremor being a sign of instability. One way to untangle a Parkinson-freeze is for another to announce what’s coming and lead to this by counting down aloud slowly from 5, or take an affected person’s hands and pump them up and down alternately, or hold their hands and walk backwards in front of them. More recently walking sticks/canes with laser beams shooting out each side to create a virtual line have been developed. From a PCT approach, what’s going on? For instance, are configurations being replaced/substituted by more manageable sensations?
As an aside: years ago I was pondering how to generate and present visual figures which were novel and which could have systematic variations. I was thinking of differences between, for instance, exact matches (identical figures), near exact, reversed (mirrored), and so on with increasingly complex configurations. We wrote a small programme to produce bar-codes (we used both the British post code and the more familiar vertical stripes of two widths). My wife used to joke I was the only person who visually inspected bar-codes at the supermarket and bookstores. Long story short, we generated lots of different patterns (which took ages) and asked people to identify which of several options was most/least like the target. We hadn’t quite got this working well since some of the strings were too long and people had to more or less count/match elements. I may try this again but with shorter strings that can be seen at a glance, as configurations. What I mean is the configurations didn’t form. In part this research is like those kinesthetic studies where people are asked to run their fingers across different corrugated surfaces. I recall the same happens with vertical printed lines too where different spacings give a sense of corrugations which can be seen immediately.
In one of our many colour studies we designed two tile display patterns for displaying on monitors. One consisted of a page of cubes and the other of lozengers. On each trial three colours were presented, one on each surface. We had already worked out suitable colours from other studies, which were variations of the D15. When two colours blended/fused then what appears is the odd-one-out stands out as a distinct line. This was a rather nice way of validating other results. Come to think of it perhaps we ought to make an app for a portable device. In other studies we found it matters not a jot which monitors are used, calibration isn’t necessary.
Chapter 10 Transitions
Now there is movement to consider, there’s a shift from that to this, or this to that; lower order perceptions take on a new identify. It seems ordinal, as in ‘this is different from that’ but it’s unknown by how much exactly. And the features of each contributing perception have dissolved into a new whole as in optimal flicker fusion frequency (too fast and it’s a blur, too slow and the composite perception – whether intensity, sensation or configuration – will stutter without resolution as a transition).
This puzzled me as I thought it hard to consider a transition independently of a sequence. If one thing follows another then surely there is a beginning and an end, a sequence no less. Part of the resolution of this puzzle is on pg 130: “A continuing string of configurations is sufficient to provide the experience of movements, changes in shape, approach or recession, spinning, velocity, and many other types of change that define transitions from one state of the third-order world to another.” As in common usage, a transition is in between as a stepping stone from configurations to sequences.
When interviewed about his latest book Shaun Tan, the brilliant Australian author/illustrator, commented that his works are fragmented as he has trouble with a narrative. Instead of a tale being told in the conventional sequence (start, middle, end) he’s designed these ‘stories’ so there is implicit movement (depicting active verbs, the ----ing activities) though without sequence. Now, that’s clever.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/shaun-tan27s-rules-of-summer/5004314
I believe this is often how things are for kids, they step in and step out of situations seamlessly without start or finish. Those situations which have no accompanying narrative are considered by adults as being magical. Kids don’t mind this at all. Some of their answers are transitions: “Because”. End of conversation. And they find it hard to have to justify making entry and exit salutations (no hello or goodbye, except from accompanying adults insisting on manners) they merge and flow as if always in a transition.
As Bill notes, transitions are about rates of change. It’s as if one has stepped into the middle of something seamless and endless, observing the graceful execution of movement. Time without end, or beginning. It’s as if Newton One has been dusted off: objects continuing in their state of rest or of uniform motion unless… It’s the level of organisation needed for activity, intra-order transitioning.
I too am baffled by what Bill’s baffled by on pg 131, how time is invoked when walking through space. There’s a hint he’s not prepared to accept a time-space consortium but cannot untangle these vectors in his TARDIS.
With the introduction of time there’s the exciting prospect of having available a common benchmark for assaying inter-order levels of control. The proposed hierarchy of levels are distinguished and separated by speed, the lower ones are faster. Otherwise, logically, the entire system would fly apart. Then to have additional empirical support of this proposition from Rick’s recent research articles, nice.
Where do game-shows fit in to the hierarchical scheme? That is, the place for a contestant’s apparently sudden presentation of an answer which comes out of nowhere.
Chapter 12 Sequences
When Bill writes in his summary (pg 146) “…proposing that the fifth level of organization… consists of systems for detecting and controlling the sequence in which lower-order quantities occur…” is this like executive functioning? It seems to be about making appropriate choices through exercising relevant and available options.
The proposition is that control is evident when there is both a means of sensing the current status of a sequence as well as producing a signal that the particular sequence is in progress (p 139). The perceptual signal emitted is not the sequence but stands for (represents) the sequence. Both absence and presence need to be signalled so as to bring about initiation, maintenance and ending a sequence.
Strings are sensitive to being rearranged as it’s the particular order of elements which comprise and define a sequence.
It’s suggested every sensory modality can be implicated in perception and control of sequences. As sensations: sequenced pitches → melody; as configurations: sequenced pitches → chord; as transitions: rising and falling sequenced motions → ball bouncing;
An elementary sequence is an event. These have names (presumably present participles, again) lending plausibility to their existence as distinct entities.
When sequences are disrupted, broken, stalled, arrested, or otherwise out of phase there is a diagnostic clue about system instability. Presumably a skilled clinician would be able to utilise this observation and introduce appropriate remedial treatments aimed at producing more stable perceptual control.
The perceptual real estate here, with sequences, is locomotion, locomotion, locomotion.
···
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:
[ From Rick Marken (2013.10.01.1720)]
Here is a summary of CH. 12, the brains model. It’s based on posts from Richard Pfau and Rupert Young.
I’m afraid I’m kind of losing the thread on this sice I am busy with many other tasks/ responsibilities. I hope David will post some suggestions regarding what to look for int he next chapter (Ch. 13 Higher Levels). There is a heck of a lot in that chapter so I suggested devoting two weeks to it. My main suggestion for reading that chapter is to think about these higher level perceptions in terms of what an observer would see as the behaviors being performed when someone is controlling these higher level perceptions. What, for example, does control of a program, principle or system concept “look like”. Or think about it from your own point of view; when are you controlling a program, principle or system concept.
Once we finish Ch. 13 on Higher levels we move into some new areas – particularly Learning, Memory and Emotion. So the end of Ch. 13 seems like a nice breaking point; I think what I would like to do is put all the material we have so far, mainly the summaries, into one document and see what we’ve got. Then maybe we should so a midterm evaluation and get some suggestions about how we might proceed form here.
Best regards
Rick
–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com