[Martin Taylor 2018.03.09.12.28]
No, I won't correct you, but I hope that what I say may help you
determine whether correction is needed.
There are two words in “behavioral illusion”, both of which should
be considered in isolation as well as together. First, why “behavioural”? The obvious reason for this is that
“behaviour” is observed. There would be no illusion if that is all
that is implied. Hidden behind the observable property of
“behaviour” is the word “behaviourist”, referring to a way of
thinking about the interactions between the person (or other
organism, often a rat or a pigeon) and the observable world. The key
words there are “stimulus” and “response”. The a behaviourist, the
“behaviour” is the observable “response”. How does the form of the
response depend on the stimulus? Clearly the form is determined by
the internal processes of the organism that intervene between
“stimulus” and “response”.
PCT does not deny that there are processes within the organism that
intervene between “stimulus” and “response”, but argues that those
processes do not autonomously determine the form of the response.
According to PCT, that form is determined by the relationship
between output (a.k.a.“behaviour”) and the environmental variable
that corresponds to a controlled perception. Explicitly, the form of
the “response” is shaped by the external environment, and the
internal processes are tuned to conform, as they must if control is
to be good.
Now “illusion”. “Illusion” has no specific technical meaning in PCT,
so we use the everyday meaning, that an illusion occurs when we
perceive something to be true of the environment that differs from
real reality. This everyday meaning encounters a practical (or maybe
philosophical) difficulty. We can never know for sure what real
reality is, so how can we define an illusion as occurring when a
perception of an aspect of real reality differs from what it
purports to represent? The answer has to be that this is a bad
definition of “illusion” from a practical viewpoint, however much it
describes what we feel to be an illusion, perhaps one created by a
stage magician, perhaps something much more mundane such as the
appearance of a surface to be wet when it actually is covered with
black ice on which one slips and falls.
This latter example suggests a more practical way to discover
whether an illusion exists in a particular case. If something that
“should be” perceived as the same by two different methods is
actually perceived as different, an illusion is occurring. There are
three possibilities as to the nature of the illusion, one of the two
perceptions or the perceptual relationship of “should be the same”.
For example, I may have misperceived as wet what was ice, I may have
slipped although it was really only wet and was not ice, or I may
have been looking at one place and slipped on another.
The “should be the same” applies to being told what something is,
which is a possible method of perceiving it. Consider the famous
blue or white dress illusion:
This dress is actually a rich blue with black stripes, or so it
seemed when it was worn in sunlight by a presenter in a TV
documentary on perception, but when she moved into a differently lit
tent, it seemed to be white with gold stripes. The “should be the
same” in this case derives from the notion that the dress should
have not changed its material colour because she walked into the
tent. One or other of the dress colour schemes is an illusion, but
it is impossible to tell which, simply from the facts I described.
The way one can determine that the white-gold perception is the
illusion is prior experience with materials in sunlight as opposed
to places lit by light of different spectral qualities. There is
nothing absolute about it, but our perceptions are more consistent
with each other if we take the colour observed in sunlight to be the
“correct” one.
Think of the Ames Room illusion, which depends on two different sets
of consistencies that “should be” the same. All the corners in the
room are consistent with a perception of a rectangular room. A
person walking across the back of this room changes size during the
traverse. This latter is inconsistent with the perception of the
room as rectangular, so there is an illusion. Which perception is
illusory? Changing the viewpoint makes the visual angles of the room
corners inconsistent with a perception of the room as rectangular,
which resolves the illusion by showing that the problem initially
was with the perception of the room as rectangular.
In none of the illusions can we say that the illusion is discovered
by a disagreement between what is perceived to be the case and what
is actually the case. The illusion is always discovered by a
discrepancy between two perceptions. The illusion is always in the
mind, not in the reality, though the failure of the “A should be the
same as B” paradigm demonstrates that some perception does differ
from the purportedly corresponding reality. And so it is in the case
of the “Behavioural Illusion.”
The “behavioural Illusion” exists in the mind of someone who claims
to perceive that reality specifies that the form of a “response”
behaviour is determined by the “stimulus”, at least in the mind of a
PCT theorist it exists there. The PCT theorist perceives instead an
unbroken feedback loop that includes both “stimulus” and “response”,
but also includes a controlled perceptual variable and an
environmental variable. The PCT theorist’s perception of the reason
for the form of the response differs from what “should be the same”
if the behaviourist is describing the reason for the form of the
response, so there is an illusion, which the PCT theorist perceives
as existing in the mind of the behaviourist.
There is no “Behavioural Illusion” in real reality, but I imagine
that a behaviourist would perceive that one exists in the mind of
the PCT theorist, if they considered the question at all. When you
talk of there being a “Behavioural Illusion”, the illusion is not in
the situation, but in someone’s perception of the situation.
In Eetu’s case, you, the viewer of the person brushing the leaves,
have a succession of perceptions of the brusher’s intentions. Those
perceptions differ when they “should be the same”. Therefore at
least one, and possibly all, of them do not correspond to her
intentions in real reality. They are illusions, though one of them
might not be. Is any of the ones you proposed a “Behavioural
Illusion”? I don’t think so, because they all presuppose that she
has an intention for her brushing, which implies that the “stimulus”
of the leaves is not itself responsible for the “response” of
“brushing behaviour”.
This isn’t quite right, in an important way. The Behavioural
illusion refers to the path between the behaviour (output) and its
influence on the environmental variable, The internal processes
(plus the environmental processes between the variable and the
sensory systems) must create a function approximately the inverse of
the function relating output to the environmental variable
(approximately, because control is never perfect). The illusion is
that the internal processes determine the functional relationship
between stimulus and response, whereas it is the environmental path
function that actually determines it (according to PCT).
Martin
···
On 2018/03/9 6:37 AM, Eetu Pikkarainen
wrote:
[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-03-09_10:34:24 UTC]
I think I have conceptual problems in understanding the concept of "behavioral illusion" and its use. I start by stating how I understand it at the moment. Please correct.
[philip 2018.03.09]
The behavioral illusion refers to the fact that the behavior
[where the behavior is the observable event we are referring to]
does not correlate to the controlled variable [where the
controlled variable is the perception which is influenced by the
behavior]. Instead, the behavior correlates with the
disturbance [where the disturbance is an event that is
influencing the controlled variable independent of the
behavior].
In a pct experiment, we expect behavior to correlate with
disturbance and we expect perception to correlate with intention.
Say, a person is walking on the field with a big brush. Every now and then she is brushing the ground with that brush. We can see that she brushes fallen leaves away from the pathway. We infer that she controls for clean pathway, or for "no fallen leaves in pathway". (We could have done another inference, to which I will return.) Now we see that she suddenly starts to use the brush in a new way and with much more power. We ask what happened. We can sharpen our question and ask what went to her. Then we can infer that she got mad with endless leaves. Or we can take a closer look and infer that there is now a different kind of a leaf which is fixed to the pathway surface. So nothing went to her, she just continues what she was doing, but the situation requires different behavior for that. If in this situation we had stuck to the inference that something went to her, that would have been a "behavioral illusion", right? We thought that the happening, the change of her behavior tells or signals something about her but it was nothing in her but only a change in the environment - a change in the feedback function.
But perhaps, someone had given her that brush and asked her to bring it quick to an other end of the field. But during the walk she perceived those leaves and started to brush them away. In this situation we could have a asked what happened, what went to her. We could infer that the leaves on the pathway is a stimulus which causes the brushing reaction in her. Is this (behavioristic) inference a kind of an inverted behavioral illusion, or is it just a "normal" behavioral illusion? In reality she was already controlling for cleanness of the pathway, and the leaves were just disturbances for her perception. The change in her behavior does not tell or signal (necessarily) anything about changes in her, but changes in the environment, but now not in a feedback function but in the disturbance. What is the difference between the first and latter illusion? The change from loose to fixed leaves is a change of disturbance as much as a change of feedback function? After this my understanding is that we can first fall in a "behavioristic illusion" if we think that environment somehow linearly causes the behavior of an organism when we should think that the organism is already controlling something and the environmental change only changes the context of the action of the organism. Then later after that correction we can fall in a "behavioral illusion" if we think in an other way round that the change in the behavior of the controlling organism is caused by changes inside the organism when it in reality is caused only by the changes in the environment?
(If I think the two alternative rival worldviews of psychology, behaviorism and cognitivism, the latter one could be called "cognitivist illusion"?)
In both of these cases the term "illusion" in problematic because they are rather inferential errors?
Probably I am mixing things...
Eetu
Please, regard all my statements as questions,
no matter how they are formulated.
