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From: Richard Marken (rsmarken@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Sent: Saturday, June 9, 2018 7:48 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Behavior is control (was Re: The controlled quantity (q.i) is data…)
[Rick Marken 2018-06-09_10:45:23]
On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:27 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
RM: all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control.
RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT.
BN: In my earliest readings and discussions of PCT with Bill and others I learned to distinguish the meaning of ‘behavior’ as we understand it in PCT from two other prevalent meanings of the word.
RM: My point is not about how to define behavior; it’s about how to see behavior as control.
HB : You are not lonely one. Most of the people on Earth are talking about “control of driving a car”, “control of children” or just think in that way, whether you can “control your life” or not, etc. Why you would be the exception and try to explain to people what they already know ? It’s much more difficult to understand that “Perception is controlled”.
RM : And that means learning how to see controlled quantities (or controlled variables).
HB : Right. Learning how to see (perceive) and control. That’s all that you can do.
BN: You say “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities”. I’m sorry, Rick, I am unable to follow you there. I would not put those words together in that way, because behavior is control and controlled quantities do not control. Controlled quantities, being inanimate, ‘behave’ only in sense (a).
RM: Again, it’s not a matter of how words are put together;
HB : It does matter whether you call elephant a god or you say a dog to a fly. Nobody will understand you.
RM : it’s a matter of understanding the phenomenon that PCT explains – the phenomenon of control as it is seen in the behavior of living organisms.
HB : PCT is not about that. From the behavior of living beings it’s hard to see anything. But if you help yourself with your imagination and control inside organism, then you can understand many things.
Bill P :
Our only view of the real world is our view of the neural signals that represent it inside our own brains. When we act to make a perception change to our more desireble state when we make the perception of the glass change from »on the table« to »near the mouth« - we have no direct knowledge of what we are doing to the reality that is the origin of our neural signal; we know only the final result, how the result looks, feels, smells, sounds, tastes, and so forth It means that we produce actions that alter the world of perception
RM :Controlled quantities (or controlled variables) are the central feature of this phenomenon. When I say that “behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities” all I am saying is that the behaviors we see and name – behaviors such as walking, talking and playing chess – are controlled quantities
HB : Walking, and talking and and playing chess and dancing are not “controlled quantites” but are the result of “error” signal which is the result of “control” process in comparator. Hence “Behavior : The control of perception”. How can “behavior” be a "controlled quantiy"in this sense ? So that’s why you think that you can control “behavior of other people” as you think of behavior as “controlled quantiy”.Â
Behavior itself can’t be a “controlled quantitty” but perception of the behavior can be. As you said. But then you agree that “Behavior” itself can’t be controlled. But perception of the behavior can.
RM : .that are behaving in the sense that they are varying over time. So what we see as “walking” is controlled limb and body positions – controlled quantities – varying over time – behaving.
HB : Sorry Rick. You mean again “controlled quantites” and behavior outside happening at the same time. What we see is surely not controlled limb or body position. How you control it ? With controlling muscle tension ?
Bill P. (B:CP) :
Rather, the central problem has been to find out a plausible model which can behave at all . For example it will be shown later that the brain does not command the muscles to act. That concept implies properties that the neuromuscular system simply does not have There is just no way the brain can select a muscle tension that will produce one and only one behavioral effect, even if that tension is accurately produced. The result of this approcah is a model nearly devoid of specific behavioral content.
Boris
RM: consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.
BN: Yes, a controlled quantity is the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception of the controlled quantity–but it is the control loop that is behaving.
RM: Sure, you can say that too. That is an appropriate description of the theory that explains behavior when it is seen as a control process. And the controlled quantity is not just the essential and crucial evidence that an organism is controlling a perception; it is the only evidence that it is doing that. Indeed, Powers observation that behavior is control – that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities – is the reason why he was able to properly apply control theory to behavior, modeling it as the control of perception. Before Powers and the recognition that behavior is control, control theory was applied to behavior in stimulus-response terms; perception was seen as the cause of output. This is easy to do; the perceptual input is what we would call “error”, the comparison between reference and output being carried out in the environment, and this error drives (controls) the output, which is what is controlled.
BN: We can’t pick out one part of the loop and say that is what is behaving.
RM: When you are talking about a control loop you are already talking theory. We don’t see control loops. We don’t see control of perception. What we see (or can see if we learn how to look at behavior through control theory glasses) are controlled quantities. Everything we call “behaviors” are controlled quantities. The non-theoretical definition of behavior from a PCT perspective is “controlled quantities”.
Best
Rick
It’s kind of like the rhetorical device called synecdoche, taking a part of something for the whole. The commonplace (b) usage takes the output of the loop and calls it 'behavior. Saying that behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities just moves the synecdoche to another part of the loop, at another place in the environment.
/Bruce
On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 10:40 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
[Rick Marken 2018-06-06_19:40:05]
[Bruce Nevin 2018-06-05_12:09:33 ET]
BN: For the sake of those who might be interested in the context of that passage, it’s from p. 115 of LCS (the first collection). As Bill says in the quoted passage, “There is no need to think of all controlled quantities as simple physical variables: force, angle, position. Human beings are equipped to perceive not only such elementary variables, but highly complex functions of such variables.” The context of this passage is a general introduction to the notion of a perceptual hierarchy (reference 12 points to Hayek’s 1952 book for corroboration) and the notion of hierarchical control. He’s not talking about quantities measured in an experiment. And except at the very lowest level he’s not talking about immediate input from the environment.
RM: Right. He’s just talking about what controlled quantities are. Controlled quantities (which can also be called controlled variables) are rarely measured in experiments since so few people are doing PCT research. But it’s important to be able to recognize controlled quantities outside the lab (in everyday behavior) because PCT is based on the observation that all purposeful behavior is the behavior of controlled quantities. That’s what we mean when we say that behavior is control. By “we”, by the way, I mean Bill Powers and myself. Since (mindbogglingly) many fans of PCT here on CSGNet have been vehemently opposed to my claim that PCT is based on the idea that behavior is control and also reject the idea that Bill Powers would ever say such a thing, here’s post from Bill (trying, as usual, to set Martin Taylor straight) where he rather clearly does say such a thing:
From Bill Powers (2009.06.17.1623 MDT)]
Martin Taylor 2009.06.17.17.26 –
MT: …What misunderstanding of what control is do you perceive to be in the article?
BP: from my angle, the misunderstanding about control would be the idea that one has only the illusion of control (Ellen J. Langer’s idea in the cited book), so to make people happy it’s necessary only that they think they are in control. This contradicts the basic idea of PCT, that all behavior is control or an attempt to control. (emphasis mine)
RM: So learning to see purposeful behavior as control (that is, to see behavior as the behavior of controlled quantities) is really the essential first step in learning PCT. You can take this step by learning how to look at behavior through “control theory glasses” (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1qnd8qdqcadvz7x/PCTGlasses2002.pdf?dl=0). This is done by noticing that people (and other living organisms) are producing consistent results – such as opening doors, making breakfast, walking without tripping, etc – where such consistency is not expected due to the effects of disturbances. These consistent results that are produced in the face of disturbance are controlled quantities.
RM: It’s often difficult to see that consistently produced results are controlled quantities, particularly when the disturbances that should produce inconsistency and the compensatory actions that prevent this are invisible. This was the case for the curved movements produced in power law studies. For example, it’s hard to tell that the movements we see when a person traces out ellipses in the air with their finger are a controlled quantity. But when you look at this behavior through control theory glasses you can “see” that a consistent result – the elliptical movement trajectories – is being produced in the face of invisibly varying disturbances (the changing direction of the force of gravity on the arm, for one) that are being prevented from having an effect on the elliptical shape of these movement trajectories by precisely opposed muscle forces.
BN: The references I cited report a number of experiments. In the one that I singled out, q.i is from the subject’s point of view a one-syllable word that she hears herself repeating,
RM: It’s also a controlled quantity from an observer’s point of view. In general, the fact that people consistently produce the words they intend – the words being the consistently produced results – suggests that words are controlled quantities. Again, we can see this by looking through control theory glasses and realizing that these words are being consistently produced in the face of disturbances, such as transient changes in characteristics of the vocal tract. Indeed, Katseff, in the beginning of her dissertation, recognizes the fact that speaking is involves control when she says “…adults automatically and routinely adjust their speech production to accommodate their environments…”. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand the concept of a controlled quantity as being a function of environmental variables. So she wasn’t able do a more precise analysis of what the subjects were actually controlling. That is, she wasn’t able to do a more precise analysis of what the controlled quantity, q.i, was and, thus, what perception, p, the subjects were controlling.
BN: But to revert to the experiment by Katseff et al., of course they were uninformed about control theory. That’s not a surprise. But they did disturb a perceptual variable and record the subject acting so as to resist that disturbance. Lacking an understanding of control, they called this ‘compensation’. They were puzzled why subjects did not completely ‘compensate’ for the disturbance.
RM: This is where knowing PCT and reading the “Experimental Methods” chapter in B:CP would have helped. When a disturbance to a hypothetical controlled quantity has something close to the expected effect then the most reasonable explanation is that the hypothesis about the controlled quantity is wrong. In the Katseff these we find this graph:
RM: This is a plot of the time course of “adaptation” for a single subject to a disturbance to the first (lowest) formant (F1) in the vowel component of the word “head”. The graph shows that the subject produced a lower frequency F1 formant when the disturbance – a 200 Hz digital upward shift in the heard formant – was introduced. The assumption here is that F1 is a controlled quantity. To test this they apply (gradually) the disturbance; the output that compensates for this disturbance is the actual frequency of F1 produced by the subject (“F1 produced”). The combination ofdisturbance and output is “F1 heard”.
RM: If F1 were a controlled quantity then the disturbance would have little effect; F1 would deviate very little from its undisturbed value ) of ~ 640 HZ (shown in the initial “no shift” part of the graph . But, in fact, the disturbance Is quite effective; F1 goes from ~ 640 Hz to ~ 790 Hz. This is less than the 200 Hz shift that would be expected if the subject made no attempt to compensate for the disturbance. But it certainly rules out F1 as a controlled quantity.
RM: Since the researchers noted that the subjects heard themselves pronouncing the word “head” properly even with the ineffectively compensated F1, my guess would be that the 200 Hz F1 shift was a disturbance to some aspect of the sound spectrum that is heard as the vowel in the word “head”, but that aspect was not F1. I would suggest that the next step in this research would be to come up with a new hypothesis about aspect of the sound spectrum that is controlled when producing the vowel in “head”. That is, the next step would be to come up with a new hypothesis about the controlled quantity, q.i, in this experiment. The hypothesis that F1 is the controlled quantity, q.i, can be rejected. An alternative hypothesis, such as q.i = F1/F2, would be where I would go next.
BN: They did surmise that it had to do with some kind of interference from perceptions of articulation of speech, but they had no way of saying how that ‘interference’ would work. The model that I sketched explains their results as conflict between control in two sensory modalities.
RM: That’s excellent. The model can provide a basis for hypotheses about the variables controlled when people produce consistent speech sounds. But a model is only as good as the results of testing it against data.
I think this research could serve as another good example of the problems that come from failure to understand that q.i is an aspect of the environment and not an objective property of it. But I may be wrong.
BN: In the experimental work that I pointed you to they did not have problems due to a conception that perceptual variables are present in the environment. They were quite aware of dealing with perceptual variables, as indeed is any linguist.
RM: What I meant is that they may have ended up being puzzled by the weak amount of compensation for the shift in F1 because they thought that F1 as an objective property of the environment that had to be one of the variables controlled in word production. When you can think of what is controlled – the controlled quantity – as some unknown function of variables in the environment then you can start doing the kind of research required to test the PCT model of purposeful behavior; research aimed at finding what function of environmental variables – in this case, what functions of the acoustic waveform and, possibly of the articulatory forces the produce this waveform – are the variables that are controlled in speech.
Best
Rick
–
Richard S. Marken
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.â?
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery
–
Richard S. Marken
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.â?
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery
