Beliefs/Conflicts

[Marken_Richard_S1]

[From Rick Marken (921230.0900)]

Eileen Prince (921229)

I also think that art can stand alone, outside of its political context.

Yes, I agree now -- after long years of being amazed by the ridiculous
beliefs embraced by some of the artists I've loved best.

Bill Powers (921229.2100)

The greatest mystery of the human mind, in my view, is this
phenomenon of Belief.

I agree. We should explore this from a PCT perspective. The
problem, of course, is that, when it comes to many of one's own
beliefs, they are not treated as beliefs but as knowledge. I think
many of our most tenacious INTRA - personal and INTER-personal
conflicts are the result of controlling perceptions that based more on
beliefs (replayed reference signals) than Boss Reality.

I think it would be worthwhile to say what beliefs are in the context
of the PCT model; describe examples of the everyday beliefs that
people are walking around with (from the divine, like religious
beliefs, to the profane, like beliefs about the "right" foods to eat); also,
it would be nice to discuss the difference (from a PCT perspective)
between belief and knowledge. I know this is a difficult discussion to
have -- precisely because beliefs are so important to people. With Bill
I ask "WHY is this so? Why do people "fight and fight to prove that what
they do not know is so?" There must be a reason that this species has
been willing to persecute itself for millenia over fantasies. It must be
an aspect of our nature as control systems. What is it? I think
that this could be a very satisfying (and even theraputic) investigation.

Or is this a level at which we are all helpless, including me?

No. I think people, like you (and me?), who are willing to consider the
possibility that ANYTHING we think may be just a belief and, more
importantly, are willing to wonder what a belief is, are not helpless
victims of our beliefs (at least, when we are able to keep our awareness
"above" the levels that create those beliefs -- something that I don't
do nearly as often as I would like). I think it requires some effort to
defeat some of the insidious consequences of belief -- but it can be done,
I think.

It's only people who don't
ever do any experiments with real people who think that PCT is
just another belief system handed down from on high. The basis of
PCT is a set of easily reproducible phenomena that conventional
science has overlooked.

Here, here.

Rick Marken (921229) --

Your experiment with conflict is fundamental and new to our
repertoire. It is neat and beautiful. The fact that the model
reproduces the human behavior says that the real control systems
don't reorganize much until the task starts to become impossible.

Thank you. Thank you.

Can you give us some numbers from the experiment?

Yes, once I set it up to get them. Right now I'm just using the inter-
ocular trauma test. I plot the x-y position of the mouse over some
period of the experiment; I was using a sine wave disturbance at first
so the mouse movements (due to the coefficients of the conflict) are
an elipse. When you plot the model mouse movements over the
human mouse movements, they fall on top of each other (though the
human's are a bit more ragged). I will get measures of fit of model
to human with different values of D (conflict) over the weekend. I'm
not planning to do any fancy parameter estimation -- but based on my
manual approach (and visual test) I would say that the error of prediction
(as percent of maximum possible deviation of model from human) is not
more than 5%.

Best

Rick

[_Martin_Taylor]

[Martin Taylor 921230 14:45]
(Rick Marken 921230.0900)

I think it would be worthwhile to say what beliefs are in the context
of the PCT model; describe examples of the everyday beliefs that
people are walking around with (from the divine, like religious
beliefs, to the profane, like beliefs about the "right" foods to eat); also,
it would be nice to discuss the difference (from a PCT perspective)
between belief and knowledge. I know this is a difficult discussion to
have -- precisely because beliefs are so important to people. With Bill
I ask "WHY is this so? Why do people "fight and fight to prove that what
they do not know is so?" There must be a reason that this species has
been willing to persecute itself for millenia over fantasies. It must be
an aspect of our nature as control systems. What is it? I think
that this could be a very satisfying (and even theraputic) investigation.

At this moment I don't want to speculate about what beliefs "are." That
impinges on the question of consciousness. But I would like to make an
analogy that could be helpful. (Since writing this, I succumbed, and added
a final paragraph in which I do so speculate. I plead irresponsible
festivity).

The argument is that normal reorganization leads to superstitious actions,
defined as actions that are neither helpful nor hurtful to the control of
the perceptions in the ECS (Elementary Control System) whose output leads
to those actions. Superstitious actions are more likely to persist at
higher levels of the hierarchy than at lower. The speculation is that
we believe that what we do is what we *should* do, in the absence of
evidence to the contrary, and that much of what we do is superstitious
in the sense I just defined.

What does reorganization do? It modifies connection patterns and strengths
within the hierarchy, makes new ECSs that control for previously undetected
patterns (e.g. configurations, intensities, sequences, principles--it doesn't
matter which level, I use "pattern" as the input to any Perceptual Input
Function (PIF)), and perhaps modifies existing PIFs. We assume that
reorganization occurs as a consequence of error, particularly growing error,
in some intrinsic variable. When a reorganization event occurs, it is
a random event, subject to some (unspecified here) constraints. If the
reorganization event succeeds in creating connections that result in behaviour
that reduces the error in the intrinsic variable, reorganization stops,
leaving the connections as they are "forevermore."

In a complex hierarchy, each output of an ECS branches many ways to
contribute to the reference inputs of lower ECSs. Another way of saying this
is that many lower-level behaviours are actions that form part of the
feedback loop involved in the control of any perception. These lower
level behaviours are independent of each other, except insofar as the
nature of the world (and of their support structure in lower ECSs) creates
conflict. Ignore conflict, for now. But consider--the reorganization
that linked these lower-level actions to the ECS output was random. That
means that there can be actions that neither support nor conflict with
actions that support the perceptual control performed by the higher ECS.
Nevertheless, when the higher ECS is generating output, these actions are
performed in addition to the ones that actually provide the negative
feedback. I call them "superstitious" actions. A golfer's waggle before
starting the swing might be an example. Things work when you perform a
superstitious action in support of a "higher purpose," but not because of
the superstitious action.

But would you believe the superstitious actions had nothing to do with
your success? Not unless you tried to control the higher-level perception
without using those actions, and why would you do that? Reorganization
has left you with a perfectly workable system of output-to-reference links,
and there is nothing to tell you that one action is important and another
pointless--WITHIN the construct of control for that higher ECS.

At low levels of the hierarchy, any ECS may be part of the actions of many
higher ones, and if it is irrelevant in the context of one higher-level control
loop, it may be important in the context of another. So its connections
may be reorganized without affecting the behaviour that happened to result
in control of the intrinsic variable we first considered (in the previous
two paragraphs). One might expect much of the low-level superstitious
behaviour to be washed away by the random currents of reorganization. But
not a high levels, because there is less opportunity for the kind of conflict
among system-level and principle-level perceptual control than there is
at lower levels. There are (I would speculate) fewer of them, and they
operate more slowly (it makes no evolutionary sense to reorganize a control
system more rapidly than it can operate).

What this seems to result in is that high-level superstitious behaviour
is likely to persist. If we make an assumption that we generally believe
that what we do is what we should do, provided that it doesn't lead to
internal conflict, we arrive at the proposition that people might be
expected to have and to maintain belief systems that are unsupportable
by perceptual evidence. (This paragraph is even more speculative than
the rest, but it's the fextive season, so why not indulge?).

Martin