[From Bill Powers (940901.0825 MDT)]
Rick Marken (940831.1450 MDT) --
I see my vision of society as the essence of what I think of as
"liberalism";
Easy; category perception. But it seems to be a category of principles
including things like "do unto others", "live in harmony with others",
"don't coerce others", "people should be in control".
If "liberalism" is of a lower level than the list of principles above,
then if a principle like "live in harmony with others" is disturbed, you
would be willing to alter your perception of yourself as being "liberal"
in order to correct the error. For example, if your neighbor were an
outspoken conservative who told you he hated all liberals, you would be
willing to perceive yourself as a "conservative" in order to live in
harmony with your neighbor. And if your neighbor on the other side were
a civil rights worker who hated all conservatives, then when interacting
with him or her you would perceive yourself as a "liberal" in order to
live in harmony with that neighbor. The lower level perceptions are
varied to resist disturbances of the higher level ones. Is this how it
works with you? Never mind the definitions of the levels; when we have
real examples they don't matter.
ยทยทยท
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Avery.Andrews (940901.1544)--
In the case of PIFs, we assume, with some evidence but perhaps wrongly,
that there really is a correct, unique description of brain activity in
terms of perceptual signals, etc, and a correct decomposition of its
structure into ECS's with their PIFs, etc. This is part of the
empirical content of PCT (I think)
That is the empirical content of PCT as seen by an observer outside the
behaving system. When the behaving system is you, however, the problem
reverses. What you experience as a world is the set of outputs of all
PIFs associated, at the moment, with your awareness. The assumption that
needs to be examined from this point of view is that there are external
CEVs (or somethings) corresponding to the elements of your experienced
world, which according to PCT exists as signals in your brain. Is there
actually some thing in the external world that corresponds to your
perception of purple, or of lemonade, or of distance, or of friendship?
Whichever point of view you take, experience itself remains the same. It
is simply the totality of the world in which you find yourself, and
includes whatever you experience that you call yourself. This is where
we always begin, with the given world. The problem is not how we should
experience it, because we already experience it exactly as we experience
it. The problem is how to model the system that is having these
experiences.
The traditional and natural way to solve the problem is to accept the
world of experience as external, and to try to model its effects on the
insides of an organism, which are invisible to the observer. This means,
of course, the effects on some _other_ organism. We ourselves stand in
some sort of disembodied form just offstage, watching another organism
interacting with the world, and trying to guess what is going on inside
the other organism. We can see what is actually happening in the
environment, so we try to construct models that will create
representations of the environment inside the other organism: PIFs,
neural signals, hierarchies, and so forth. While we assume that such
things exist inside ourselves, we can't see them in ourselves, either,
so we might as well study other organisms.
The PCT view, if you follow out its logic, is substantially different.
While much that goes on inside us is invisible to us, there is one
aspect of the model that is vividly observable from inside ourselves:
our own perceptual signals. The world we experience is generated by
PIFs, which are responding to a world that we can't experience directly.
So the given in the PCT model is not the environment, but the hierarchy
of perceptions. When we observe the environment interacting with another
organism, we are observing our own perceptual signals. When we try to
guess how the nervous system works, the problem is to guess what might
be going on in the environment and in our own neural computations that
might create a world of signals like the one we experience -- a world in
which we see an environment, and another organism, and an interaction
between them.
It's this latter view that led to the hierarchical model. Instead of
just using our perceptual capacities, we look for evidence about them in
the world of experience. If we see an organism acting in a certain
relationship to the environment, this tells us primarily that we are
capable of perceiving in terms of "relationships." The particular
relationship then becomes of secondary interest, because we have
identified a class of perceptions that seems to be given. If we see a
logical connection between what the environment does and what an
organism does, or between events in the environment, this alerts us (if
we are paying attention) to the fact that we can perceive in terms of
logic, another class of perceptions. The particular logical connection
that we see then becomes just an example of this discovery, that we can
perceive logial connections. It's a matter of transferring attention
from the _content_ of experience to the _form_ of experience.
The CEV is simply an unneeded concept.
The complex environmental variable is neither complex nor
environmental.
Maybe for psychology, but I think it is useful for ecology. For
example one of the things the herpetologist I was listening to would
like to do is reconfigure the tourists' lighting arrangements on Heron
Island so that they no longer impinge on the baby turtles' CEVs.
Why not just say that they want to reconfigure the lights so they don't
bother the baby turtles? You don't need PCT to deal with that problem,
unless you're intending to apply the Test to see what baby turtles
actually control for. The empirical approach doesn't require a model.
You just vary things until you get the result you want. I don't like
using technical terms when we're not really talking technically.
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Best to all,
Bill P.