[From Bruce Abbott (2011.02.19.1510 EST)]
BP: Bill Powers (2011.02.18.1455 MST)] –
BA: Bruce Abbott (2011.02.17.2250 EST)
I’m sorry that what appears below is a bit long-winded, but I thought it necessary to provide a detailed, point-by-point explanation or clarification of my position or rebuttal of yours, showing both where I agree and disagree, in order to be as clear as possible about my position.
BA: Certain environments will force a change in organization somewhere in the hierarchy of control systems. For example, if the old means of control are unavailable, one must find new ones or give up control over that perception.
BP: This is true in a broad sense, but not in detail. The environment by itself can’t force any organism to do any specific thing.
I’m not claiming that it does.
It has no means for doing so. Martin Taylor says, and I agree, that all the environment can do is give properties to any particular environmental feedback function, and apply disturbing forces to environmental variables.
Yes, of course.
It is the organism that determines what variables it will sense, and then how it will try to control them.
This statement raises a host of questions for me. How does the organism determine what variables it will sense? Can it decide not to sense them? How does it determine how it will try to control them? Where do its options come from? What does the determining?
Once that determination is made, a controlled variable has been defined. Now we can see environmental variables in terms of their effects on this new controlled variable; we can see them as disturbances of the CV, or of the connection between the organism’s action and consequent changes in the CV.
Yes.
If the organism reorganizes, the same environment will have different effects on an altered CV,
(if reorganization changes the input function)
and actions will change to oppose those different effects even though the environment is the same.
Or to put it differently, observed behavior will change.
If you don’t know what the CV is, you can’t tell what it is in the environment that matters.
Yes; without appropriate tests, you don’t know why exposure to this particular environment resulted in the observed changes in behavior.
BA: We are who we are, to a great extent, because of what happened to us when we interacted with parents, the kids on the block, our classmates, teachers, and many others. We learned to trust or suspect, to love or hate, to feel confident in our abilities or unsure of ourselves.
BP: I think we have to clean out this little pocket of SR thought. You seem to be describing personality characteristics that are the result of what happened to us, in a cause-effect way.
Well, yes, but not in an S-R way. The causal sequence runs through the reorganization system’s random change and selective retention process. The relatively stable changes that result from this process emerge from an interaction between the environmental inputs (disturbances to controlled variables, changed environmental feedback functions, etc.) and the current organization of the control hierarchy.
If that were true, all people would be affected the same way by the same events, and they aren’t.
That isn’t true, even from an S-R perspective. Everyone is different enough from everyone else that one cannot expect the same response to the same inputs.
You are actually describing ways in which people reorganize to prevent external events from having adverse effects on them, and to increase the occurance of beneficial effects.
Yes, and that comes as no surprise to me, because that is exactly what I intended to describe. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough about that.
At the same time these influences are felt, we are reorganizing our behavior so as to change the influences and their effects on us.
Well, “we” aren’t reorganizing our behavior (as if there is some little person inside there doing these things), our nervous system is reorganizing ITSELF so as to change the influences and their effects on us.
What we retain is not the effects of those influences, but the organization we created and then kept changing to improve control or regain control where it was lost.
I’d replace the second “we” by “the reorganization process,” but otherwise find nothing inconsistent here with what I had said about this process previously.
BP: What we want from life is thus protected against such influences, the more so as we learn better methods of control. Others do not determine what our basic needs and desires are. Those come from our nature as human beings which has been changing and expanding since before we were human.
When you state these things in this context, it sounds like you are offering a rebuttal to something I asserted, which I never did.
BP earlier: It seems to me that learning is a very difficult achievement that requires a lot of organization to accomplish; without this organization, evolved over a few billion years, exposure to “certain things” would have no more systematic effect on an organism than it would have on a rock or a bowl of jello. Nothing happens just because of “exposure” to something. Saying that it does seems to me like a way to minimize the need to understand the inner mechanisms that organisms have developed over history for controlling the world around them and inside them.
BA: I agree. Does that surprise you? If predictable changes in behavior occur under certain well-defined conditions, one has demonstrated that such conditions are sufficient to bring about those changes.
BP: No one hasn’t. That shows only that the conditions include some feature that disturbs something which a particular organism is controlling. Another organism may show similar changes under entirely different circumstances. You are forgetting that both reorganization and natural environments have a large random component. Repeating the same condition will not bring about the same changes, and even if it did, normal changes elsewhere in the environment see to it that what is needed to repeat a desired effect is most likely to be a different behavior.
I do agree with you here that I overstated the case – but not as much as you suggest. Remember, I was referring specifically to the process of classical conditioning. It’s a relatively primitive process that piggybacks onto previously established control systems, many of which are innately organized rather than having been created through reorganization (e.g., we don’t LEARN to salivate when some substance enters the mouth). Classical conditioning has been demonstrated in relatively primitive organisms such as sea slugs (aplysia) and nematodes (flat worms with a nervous system of fewer than 200 neurons), as well as complex ones such as ourselves. Pair a tone and food in the right way for a few dozen trials and every normal dog will begin to salivate to the sound of the tone. After finding that one cannot prevent the playground bully from beating him up, a normal child will undergo a relatively predictable set of physiological changes the next time he sees the bully approaching. There’s a lot more consistency in the changes that follow such experiences than you are willing to grant.
BA: Pavlov’s dogs always began to salivate to the sound of that metronome after that sound had been followed by the delivery of meat powder into the dog’s mouth. Whether such
an arrangement of the dog’s environment brings about such changes in a normal animal is not a matter for debate; the question to be addressed is how: what is the mechanism?
BP: The dog may salivate when there is no food powder blown into its mouth, and it may fail to salivate when the metronome ticks. “Always,” as you know, is an exaggeration or idealization of the truth.
As for the first part, that a dog may salivate for other reasons than food in the mouth is true but not relevant. I did not claim that the sound of the metronome would gain EXCLUSIVE access to salivation. As to the second part, that the dog may fail to salivate when the metronome ticks is true, because the internal state of the dog may be different from its normal state at that moment. So I grant you that “always” is an idealization. I didn’t mean to imply that every tick of the metronome would produce salivation, but that every normal dog exposed to this procedure would reach a point where the metronome’s sound (ticking at a given rate) would become a reliable elicitor of salivation. [There are known ways to block this result; here I’m discussing results with normal dogs who have not been exposed previously to these other conditions.]
In order to get what looks like predictable control, it is necessary to overpower an animal and prevent it from satisfying its own needs on its own schedule, and limit the environment so that one and only one action will have the desired result - a most rare and artificial circumstance in nature.
That’s certainly not the case for classical conditioning. We are not talking here about a process in which you disturb some controlled variable and then restrict the animal’s options for correcting the resulting error. We are talking about a process in which the animal learns about relationships among events and conditions in its environment, as the animal perceives them, and takes advantage of them to improve control over certain of its controlled perceptions.
As I think I remarked once in a Skype conversation with you, I can cause you to pick up a spoon by first serving you soup that I know you like at lunchtime when I know you will be hungry, then making sure there is no handy utensil but the spoon and preventing you by some means from bending down and slurping the soup out of the bowl or picking up the bowl and drinking from it. You must already have nearly complete physical control over an animal to make it do any arbitrary thing you want. That is why you see cages in experimental laboratories.
I don’t quite agree with you here, either (I don’t have to deprive a dog of anything, nor administer any form of punishment, to teach it to heal, sit, or fetch), but since we are discussing here a proposed explanation for classical conditioning (within the PCT framework, or so I believed), and not operant conditioning, the last few paragraphs of your post are simply irrelevant to this conversation.
In my reply to Boris Hartman, I tried to explain how, within the PCT framework, certain correlations among environmental events or conditions, as experienced by the individual, can lead to relatively predictable changes in behavior of the sort labeled as classical conditioning. My explanation was based on my understanding of your own proposal for explaining classical conditioning. I asserted that an implication of that proposal is that conditioning will occur under those conditions that foster it, whether the person wants it to happen or not.
Apparently you disagree with that conclusion. One line of attack was to deny that the process of classical conditioning is capable of producing relatively consistent outcomes, but this assertion must be weighed against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Another was to assert that the explanation represents S-R thinking. But that assertion will not stand up to an examination of what I actually stated, which was phrased completely in terms of the PCT processes of control and reorganization. So, either you have misunderstood what I was trying to say, or I have missed something important. I don’t see where I’ve gone off the tracks, but I’m willing to be educated.
Bruce A.