causation and misc

CSGnet Archive CSG1992
1

In response to Bill (920626)
Joint determination, Hmmmm. Well, I certainly agree that the reference
signal plus all the other influences on the controlled variable completely
account for the action. I would say the same for the outcome, too. I have
no problem saying that this means that all of these things determine the
action (or outcome) either. But my purpose in using these terms is to note
the relationship between disturbances and actions (an inverse relationship
in your tracking tasks) and referenced perceptions and outcomes (a strong
positive relationship in your tracking tasks). Because if we define
determine as "A determines B, if, given A, B is completely predictible..."
then it seems my use of the terms is true to the phenomenon. I easily
embrace what you said about joint determination, although it seems to imply
that prediction is impossible since one cannot know all the influences. I
am saying that prediction is possible without knowing all the variables and
I would think you would say the same.

Thanks for clearing up the issue on temporality and causality. The PV=nrt
example was used last semester in a grad philosophy class as a nonexample
of causality. I suppose it there had been a physics student in the class
we would not have come up with this conclusion. Your explanation makes
alot more sense to me--the balloon example was always disatisfying even
after we "understood" it.

Martin Taylor (920626)
Perhaps I missed a post, but could you help me understand the differences
between physical observables, low-level interpretation, more-abstract
interpretation, and a "solid" testable interpretation, and the remaining
terms you use on the "World" side of your diagram? The idea of levels in
the world is odd to me. Is the LINE a mirror, for I do not understand why
the World items become more abstact as they move AWAY from the organism. I
think I am missing something simple, but I can't get past my way of
perceiving the diagram.

Carpe' Diem

Mark

Educational Psychology 210 USmail: 405 South 6th St. #4

College of Education Champaign, IL 61820
Univ of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
phone: (home) 351-8257 e-mail: (Internet) m-olson@uiuc.edu
       (office) 244-8080 (Bitnet) FREE0850@uiucvmd

2

[Martin Taylor 920630 10:10]
(Mark Olson undated ?920629)

Martin Taylor (920626)
Perhaps I missed a post, but could you help me understand the differences
between physical observables, low-level interpretation, more-abstract
interpretation, and a "solid" testable interpretation, and the remaining
terms you use on the "World" side of your diagram? The idea of levels in
the world is odd to me. Is the LINE a mirror, for I do not understand why
the World items become more abstact as they move AWAY from the organism. I
think I am missing something simple, but I can't get past my way of
perceiving the diagram.

What the World IS depends on how we perceive it. At present, physics tells
us it is a soup of interacting quarks, gluons, and so forth. Ordinary
people don't perceive it that way. We see chairs, friends, books; we perceive
happiness, group cohesions, or whatever. The interface between the control
sytem that is a person and the world outside is very public and generally
observable and measurable. It consists of photons, pressure waves, and the
like (if we accept the entities that are currently the currency of physics).
To perceive something useful, like a chair, the incoming data (fluctuations
in photon flus, etc.) must be transformed through many layers of abstraction.
The chair itself is an abstraction, an arbitrary separation of the quarks of
the world into those that form part of the chair and those that don't. It
exists only in the mind of the perceiver (and if we believe in evolutionary
efficiency it exists only if it can be a controlled perception).

In HPCT, control of high-level perceptions is exercised through the mediation
of control of lower level perceptions. A high-level perception is very
abstract. So, therefore, is the complex environmental variable (CEV) it
controls. The intermediary controlled percepts, and hence the corresponding
CEVs, are less abstract. Democracy is more abstract than voting, which is
more abstract than putting a piece of paper in a box, which is more abstract
than pressing a pencil onto the paper...

But from the point of view of the ECS that controls a percept, the CEV that
it is perceiving is the one solid and testable aspect of the world. It is
also the most abstract entity involved in the whole hierarchy that participates
in its control.

As I see it, a CEV and the corresponding percept in an ECS are not so much
mirror images as corresponding foci. What lies in between is distributed
and hard to identify uniquely with any aspect of the controlled percept or
the CEV that leads to the percept. If you want another (imperfect) metaphor,
a hologram of an object derives from a well-defined scene, and can recreate
a convincing image of that scene, but no part of the hologram can be credited
with responsibility for recreating any specific element of the scene. The
hologram is concrete and physical, the recreated scene is abstract, though it
may look solid.

If you missed a posting, it was one of Bill's, which I thought could be
illustrated by my diagram.

Martin