[Martin Taylor 2013.08.12.19.28]
[John Kirkland 20130813]
I had asked [Martin Taylor 2013.08.12.17.48] : "Are the actions in such cases intentional -- in other words, do they occur because some controlled perception differs from its reference value?"
Nice question Martin, which brings me to another of my little conundrums: the extent to which any system control, and perception too for that matter, is intentional.
I don't think perception can be intentional at all. The deployment of sensor (turning the head, looking round a corner, cupping the ear) is likely to be controlled and therefore intentional, but what comes in through those sensors is whatever is available. "Intentional" is defined in the second half of the quoted question: [Intentional actions] occur because some controlled perception differs from its reference value.
I'm not sure what you mean by "system control", but some of your post reminds me of a time many years ago on CSGnet, when we were being very careful about keeping straight the viewpoint from which we were talking -- analyst's, control unit's, control system's, and I forget how many others. Mixing viewpoints in a message without being clear that you are doing so can lead to confusion, and possibly what you call "double-speak". Maybe some of that is happening here, or maybe the issue is something else. Since I really didn't understant what you meant in several places, it's hard for me to know.
Awareness may be an artifact, it just happens in certain conditions but is not foundational.
Yes. Awareness or conscious perception is a topic that has arisen on CSGnet from time to time when other amusements seem to pall. There are lots of correlative ideas as to the circumstances under which perceptions become conscious, but no suggestions as to mechanism. Maybe we are aware when control is difficult or failing, or when we are letting go of controlling one perception in order to be able to control another. Maybe it happens when we get to the "logical" levels of Bill's hierarchy. Maybe ...., maybe .... Different people have suggested different possibilities, but they are all largely just talking points, and all are peripheral to PCT, in which the existence of a controlled variable has no necessary connection to consciousness.
Oliver Sacks once remarked we don't have a disease, the disease has us. I quite like this reversal of conventional thinking: it helps put us in our biological place.
Neither has either. If you think of "disease" in terms of the causative agent rather than the process that is their result, we and they are each part of the environment of the other. The fact that we have a place in all sorts of ecological webs is just that -- a fact that relies only on the assumption that what we perceive has some relation to a "real world" that we presume to exist. When you talk about bacteria, we couldn't live without the trillions of them that live on or in us. I find it easier to think of "myself" as including all those bacteria (an order of magnitude more numerous than my genetic cells) and their interactions with my other components. Only occasionally do those interactions go wrong and let us experience what we experience as "disease".
Similarly, perhaps, we don't control anything (that's another illusion); rather, control systems control us (at least so far as our perceptions may become associated with intentions, aka intelligence)
There are about three things in that partial sentence that I don't understand. Is my problem with the introduction of the concept "we", presumably meaning some kind of conscious self-awareness that is outside the scope of science (so far)? Each control unit does control something -- the value of its perceptual variable, and that has to be true whether you are a believer in strict HPCT or only in the loosest concept of PCT. How can control be an illusion, if systems do control? Or are you denying the possible existence of a "real world" out there, and saying that everything you perceive is self-generated? Where does "intelligence" come into this? How do our components control "us"? A very mysterious partial sentence -- but I like mysteries. They lead to religions and fascinating rituals.
which in simulations may be interpreted as self-evident control. Hence the idea of perception is a convenience, a way-station within a process. Do cells 'perceive'? No, and yes.
How did "simulations" get in there?
Think of the definition of a "perception" in HPCT. Oversimplified, it is a variable that is at least in part a function of present and/or past values of other variables outside the boundary of the system under consideration (that boundary need not be the skin of an organism). A controlled perception is any such variable that exists within a feedback loop of which another element acts on the environment outside the boundary. Does a cell perceive? Inside just about any cell are many perceptions, a lot of which are controlled. The answer to your question depends on whether you, yourself, consider that fact to mean that the cell perceives. Or are you limiting "perception" to be something of which a conscious organism is knowingly aware. If the latter, you are going into the realm of talk-shop-philosophy rather than science.
What brought me to this point is the different ways the word 'control' appears to be deployed. In some instances it references a system (it is a control system; affect and be affected) and in others it represents an inclusion of personal agency (the person is apparently doing some controlling, eureka there's volition).
I'm not sure what you mean, control being a very specific mechanical construct; but I hazard a guess that you may be talking about levels of perception in the PCT model. A control unit controls one scalar variable -- its controlled perception. A control system is a connected set of one or more control units, maybe millions or trillions of them, which controls one scalar variable per control unit in the control system. The totality of control systems within an organism control what, tautologically, the organism controls. "Volition" at any level could be used to talk about the reference values coming in to the control units at that level, or it could be used to talk about the outputs from that level that provide reference values for the level below. "Personal agency" presumably refers to the entire set of control units, at the top of which (in HPCT) is a set of fixed reference levels, the values of which have been found either within the individual lifetime or over evolutionary time to keep the intrinsic (important for life and reproduction) variables within safe limits. Are those the kinds of meanings you intend those words to convey?
If you think about the mechanism in the theory, and don't overlay it with concepts that belong in a different domain, these sorts of issues (for me, anyway), go away. I can still puzzle about the mystery of consciousness and the sense of self-hood (just where am "I"? Behind my eyes? In my toes -- I don't think so? At my fingertips? It seems to have something to do with what sensors I'm most aware of at the moment. But it has nothing to do with PCT.
I'm gradually coming to understand these double-speak aspects of PCT.
I know of double-speak aspects in most psychological theories, but I haven't found any in PCT, nor have you explained sufficiently for me to understand wherein you have detected them.
Martin