[From Bill Powers (930417.1530)]
Greg Williams (930416-2) --
In the last post to you, I applied a number of disturbances,
assuming that your goal was to maintain that the Test had not met
your requirements.
Basically I just kept asserting that you had agreed, and the
evidence I had presented was sufficient, and that you
acknowledged that, and that therefore you had accepted that I had
met the challenge.
In today's post, you clearly rejected every such claim, giving
your reasons for the rejection and in general trying to correct
the false impression of your position that I was giving.
So I deduce that there is some controlled perception here, which
was disturbed by my assertions, your statements today being
designed to protect correct some effect of that disturbance. I
would guess that this reference perception is the perception that
the challenge has not been met.
To say that this is your reference level for that perception is
not to say that the desired level of the perception was
established arbitrarily or simply to be wilfully contrary. It is
to say only that for whatever reason, you have decided that this
perception belongs in that state, and deserves to be maintained
in that state, at least for now, until there is some higher-level
reason for changing it. If I were trying to persuade you that you
aren't living near Gravel Switch, KY, and you cared to set me
straight, much the same thing would happen. Anything that I said
to intimate that you were not living there would be perceived,
for very good reasons, as erroneous -- as different from the fact
that you choose to accept about where you do live. So your
perception of where you live is not just a perception, it is a
_reference_ perception. If you awoke one morning to discover that
you own and live in a house in Northbrook, IL, this perception
would constitute a huge error, for you wouldn't recall having
moved there, and you would KNOW that you live in Gravel Switch.
That is your reference picture of where you live, not simply a
neutral observation, changeable merely by a change in
circumstances.
We have reasons for choosing to set our reference perceptions as
we do. They have have been set by higher-level systems, for their
own purposes. When we began this challenge, you had already
expressed doubts about the ability of the Test to uncover
controlled variables in the wild. To some extent you had already
accepted this as a fact. This fact was consistent with many of
your higher-level perceptions. That is one reason that you issued
the challenge; you had doubts about the Test. The outcome was a
belief, or hunch, or opinion, that the Test would fail under the
uncontrolled conditions of network correspondence. Whether you
labeled it as such or not, this became a reference perception:
The test cannot work under these conditions. If you say it will,
you said to me, then prove it, if you can.
Instead of picking some easy subject, like your intention to
publish the next Closed Loop with certain subject matter in it, I
chose to meet the challenge head on, by making the challenge
itself the object of the Test. You see, I like a challenge, too.
The interesting thing that emerged was that quite involuntarily
you started finding reasons for fending off any direct approach
to the question of why you were responding as you were. Because
you doubted that the Test could succeed, particularly not easily,
you countered all my questions and suggestions so as to keep them
from eliciting a directly opposing response. This seemed
perfectly reasonable to you: after all, the Test is difficult to
apply, and my failures to break through simply supported that
idea. Each time we went around, you satisfied yourself that I had
not yet met the challenge. The opinion with which you started was
functioning as a reference signal, and the appended control
system was working just as it should.
After the hiatus, I wrote once again, this time exerting a
blatantly obvious disturbance by claiming that you had actually
agreed that the challenge had been met. This brought forth the
most direct denial of all: you stated a number of times that this
was false, that it had not been met. If you had agreed with me,
that would have constituted an error for you, a wrongness. You
might have dealt with that wrongness just by concluding that I
had abandoned logic altogether, or was indulging in wishful
thinking, and opted out of the whole thing. But evidently you
considered my statements to be worth correcting, and did so.
So once again, my disturbance of what I considered to be a
controlled variable for you resulted in opposition that
counteracted the disturbance. I can tell that I'm in the same
ballpark as one of your controlled variables. There are, of
course, many ways to describe a controlled variable, and I don't
know if you would describe it the same way I do. At least I have
a pragmatically useful way of characterizing it, and if this were
the end of the matter I could predict opposition from you when I
make statements of certain kinds, and none (relating to the same
controlled variable) when I talk about other things with you. If
I said "Gee, it's pretty hard to apply the test here," I would
not anticipate opposition. So I would know at least something
functionally and practically equivalent to this one sample of
your controlled variables. On later occasions I might find no
resistance where I expected it, and refine my definition further,
and perhaps get a little closer.
In the Coin Game, one person might guess that the other was
creating a "zig-zag" or the letter "Z", while the other person
insisted that the target pattern was actually an "N". If you look
at the coins instead of listening to the names, you can see that
all these terms describe the same pattern in different
orientations. The Test reveals the correct pattern, but not
necessarily the same name of the pattern that the other was
thinking of.
So I think I see the pattern in your control behavior, and I have
given a name to it, but I don't know how you would describe it.
To discover more in that regard, the person applying the Test
would have to see the behavior in a larger context, and look at
higher levels of controlled variables.
The easiest way to demonstrate a reference perception in someone
else is to wait for a Tuesday, and say "This is Monday, isn't
it?" If the person is controlling for it being Tuesday, you'll
get a corrective answer. If you insist that it must be Monday,
you'll get more elaborate corrections ("Look, here's today's
newspaper -- look at the date"). Now maybe the person really
wants you to be set aright, but that's an equivalent reference
signal, and could be distinguished if you thought of it and
varied the Test. And most people, when confronted with a
statement as to what day of the week it is, will experience a
little doubt, a little error, because it's not that easy to
_verify_ what the day is right off the bat. For a lot of us,
there is some relief in finding that we had been under the
impression that today is Tuesday, and it actually is Tuesday.
It's that little frisson that occurs when someone suggests that
it's Monday that tells us that Tuesday isn't just a perception of
the existing state of affairs. It's a reference signal that we
advance to its next setting once a day -- usually, but not
always, correctly.
If I wanted to find out why you are controlling the variable in
question here, I would begin applying disturbances to the idea
that subjective impressions are not sufficient evidence for a
scientific test. I might just insist that they are quite
sufficient, or even more directly, intimate that YOU think they
are quite sufficient. Having established, more or less, that this
opinion _is_ a reference level, perhaps I would try to go still
more more level higher, trying to see what would be disturbed if
this opinion were to change. But by that time we could hardly do
without a continuous face-to-face interchange -- and an audience
might not be appropriate.
Notice that my intent is never to prove that this is a "wrong"
setting for a reference level. It is right in terms of the
higher-level perceptions that it is there to support. Applying
disturbances might give the impression that I think it is wrong,
but that is not true. I am simply trying to see whether
disturbances will be opposed. If they are opposed, then I am
disturbing a controlled variable. Perhaps by varying my
disturbances in a clever enough way, I can arrive at a
pragmatically correct understanding of it. Basically, I don't
care what the reference level is, or argue with it; I simply want
to identify it.
And perhaps now you might be willing to concede that it's not as
hard as it seems.
Best
Bill P.