Collective Control and Environmental Stabilities -- Degrees of Freedom

Kent · November 14, 2010, 4:18pm

[From Kent McClelland (2010.11.14.0930 CST)]

[From Bill Powers (2010.11.13.0815 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2010.11.12.16.27 --

KM: In the exchange between Bill Powers and Martin Taylor about affordances, I agree with Bill about the difficulties of using the term "affordance". The problem with the term, as I see it, is that it attributes to an object or condition a property that is really the property of a relationship between that object and the organism making use of the object. An object has as many "affordances" as there are potential users of the object and potential uses that they might put the object to. So talking about "an environmental affordance" as if it were the property of the object alone is misleading.

I'm inclined to agree with Martin, however, in seeing the need for some reasonable way of talking about differences among the relationships between acting organism and parts of the environment that support (or don't support) their action. We can talk about an environment "offering" or "allowing" or "permitting" or "making easy" or "making impossible" or, to quote the nonscientific term that I used, "channelling" some action on the part of acting organisms within that environment, but all these ways of speaking seem open to the same objections as the word affordances.

The way I tried to discuss these relationships between environment and acting organism in the essay that I circulated was use Bill's language about "degrees of freedom" for a given organism in a given environment. This term, degrees of freedom, has the virtue, in my view, of locating the "agency" in the acting organism, not in the environment. But, as I think about it, I'm concerned that this way of speaking may also be open to some of the same objections.

In a post sent shortly after I posted my essay last week, Martin Lewitt had this criticism of my use of degrees of freedom:

[Martin Lewitt Nov 5, 2010 1420]

" . . . Degrees of freedom are discussed abstractly without any quantification. . . ."

I didn't respond at the time, because this criticism and his others in the post seemed somewhat wide of the mark to me, and they raised issues I wasn't eager to get into at that point, but I think Martin has put his finger on an issue that needs to be confronted.

My immediate reaction to Martin's comment was that trying to count degrees of freedom is ludicrous. We're talking about 800 or so degrees of freedom at any perceptual level, if I remember correctly the number given in Bill's article that I quote in my essay, and the precise number of degrees of freedom for a given organism in a given environment would vary enormously depending on what purpose the organism had in mind and what other perceptions the organism was trying to keep in control at the same time. And in some sense, the only numbers of degrees of freedom that matter for the organism are one and zero, either being able to control the perception or not.

But I still think it matters for the sociological arguments I would like to make for me to be able to characterize some environments as "rich" in degrees of freedom for people of a given culture (sets of widely distributed similar control systems for doing certain kinds of things), and other environments as relatively "poverty stricken" in degrees of freedom.

To make my arguments more concrete let me offer a couple of silly examples. If you're a birdwatcher and want to spot a pileated woodpecker, you probably wouldn't find one inside a WalMart store. Or if you're a gourmand and want an exquisite seven-course meal with a different fine wine for every course, you're not going to find that in a McDonald's. I'm not saying those things could never happen, but we can confidently predict that those environments are likely to offer few degrees of freedom for those purposes.

On the other hand, a WalMart or a McDonald's are comparatively rich in degrees of freedom for lots of other purposes, when compared to solitary confinement in a bare prison cell or a spot in a desert that's completely bare of vegetation, water, and any human-built structures.

It worries me though, that I can't give you a scientific way, even in principle, to enumerate the differences in degrees of freedom for certain kinds of organisms with certain kinds of purposes in those various environments.

So what's a more fruitful way to talk about the relationships between organisms and environments and about how some environments make certain things easier to do and other things harder?

My best,

Kent

···

MMT: I have the impression that you don't like using the word
"environmental affordance" as a short form for "feature of the
environment that can form part of an environmental feedback path"
because Gibson used the word.

BP: It's true that I don't much like Gibson's work, but that's not
the reason I don't like "affordance" I think that nonliving things in
the environment have physical properties, but no psychological
properties. To speak of affordance as a property of something in the
environment is to endow it with characteristics that are not in it
(not in my model of the environment), but that exist only in the
viewer. It leads to objectification of things that are subjective,
like attributing "value" to objects in economics.

MMT: I don't think that's a sensible reason, any more than it would
be sensible to complain about using "perception" as a short form for
"variable that changes as certain factors of the environment change"
on the grounds that most people take "perception" to mean something
of which one is conscious.

BP: I agree, my dislike of Gibson's writings wouldn't be a sensible
reason for rejecting affordance as a property of the environment --
if that were my reason, which it isn't. In fact, it's the other way
around: I dislike Gibson's writings because they attribute
nonexistent properties to environmental objects. And that is quite
aside from the fact that "it's all perception." I just think that a
transitive verb like afford is a simple mistake in a model of the
non-living world

MMT: I think that if something affords an opportunity, the right
word for it is an affordance.

BP: It would be, if things in the environment could do such a thing.
I don't think they can; the term is a metaphor. It's as if the object
were telling us what it could be used for -- which of course is
precisely what Gibson claims.

The stones someone placed for crossing a small creek do not do
anything but be where they are and be flat on top. I could use them
for crossing the creek, or for placing my fishing gear on while I
wade beside them, or to start building a dam, or as foundations for a
bridge, or to provide a point of interest in a painting or a
photograph, or to study flow patterns, or to give evidence that
another person has been there, or to pry up and use to build a fire
pit on the shore, or to tie my boat to -- pretty smart stones, to be
able to afford all those uses, as well as many others I was too
insensitive to notice. Think of the incredible variety of affordances
that are obtained when iron, copper, or aluminum ore is mined; we may
never discover all of them. One would think that chemists would have
detected them by now.

MMT: Thick ice on a lake surface is an affordance for snowmobilers,
fishers, skaters, ice-yachters... The use of an affordance for one
purpose in no way detracts from its use for another purpose unless
resource limitations come into play.

BP: The metaphor can be carried as far as you wish, and that's fine
for poetry or simply colorful communication or entertainment. But I
don't think it has a role in any scientific discussion of how things
work. Nonliving objects do not have a property of affordance, nor can
they actively afford uses to people. As soon as you start trying to
explain how affordance works, you have to begin talking about human
goals and actions, and physical properties of feedback functions. A
serious model doesn't contain a variable or function called affordance.

BP earlier: And one person's affordance is another person's
disturbance, as would probably have been the case if I had used
someone else's precious laptop to prop the door open.

MMT:" The environmental affordance itself would not be a
disturbance, at least not as I think of disturbances.

BP: Of course it would. I'm using someone else's laptop for a purpose
of my own in a way that might damage it, and that is definitely
something that would cause an error signal in most owners of laptops
-- if only in their imaginations, but perhaps also in present time
perception. "Look at that, you've scratched the case!"

MMT: It's a state of the perceived environment. That state may not
correspond to the reference value of someone else's controlled
perception. But if all perceived states of the world that don't
match our reference values are called disturbances, what do you call
the changes of state that would in the absence of control move a
perception away from it reference value? I tend to use "disturbance"
to refer to the changes rather than to the static states. After all,
very little of our world matches our ideal world.

BP: Put the straw man away, Martin. A disturbance is something that
affects the state of a controlled variable in a way that causes an
error signal in someone's control system. The resulting state does
"not correspond to the reference value of someone else's controlled
perception." What did you think I meant by "disturbance?" Isn't that
what you mean? If someone sees me pick up his laptop, set it down on
the floor, and push it with my foot against the bottom of the door to
keep it open, is that not a "dynamic" enough disturbance for you?
You're playing tricks with connotations that shift in the middle of a
paragraph: starting with disturbance (formally: something that
changes the state of a controlled perception independently of a
control system's action), then shifting to something that is just
different from a reference value for any reason, and ending with
things that would change a variable "in the absence of control." I
wasn't talking about the absence of control, but of its presence in
the person who objects to my using his laptop in a particular way,
even though it obviously (to me) "affords" that use. It's not my
fault that it obviously affords that use, is it? That convenient
excuse is one of the reasons people like to objectify their private
preferences.

MMT: Anyway, that's not really the point of Kent's work, which is
that a network of controllers tend to generate an environment of
greater stability than would any one controller acting alone.

BP: I don't think "stability" is the word you want in control-system
context. When people construct things that will last for a long time,
those things can be used for any purpose a person might invent to use
them for. But simply because they are semi-permanent, they also
present problems for other people whose controlled variables are
disturbed by those constructions, like the wall the Israelis built
between the Palestinians and the fields they farmed, or the highway
some politician finagled across what most local residents wanted to
be open space.

MMT: If a network of control systems tend to rigidly stabilize some
features of the environment through a mixture of conflict and
(deliberate) cooperation, then those features can be stable
environmental affordances for control of quite independent
perceptions. Their stability allows control system structures to
reorganize to use them. Linguistic and cultural patterns have this
characteristic.

BP: I have no argument with that. Now you're just talking about the
physical properties of whatever was created. Sometimes people try to
use those properties as means of control and discover that they are
wrong for the job; quite often they are good enough to allow a
reasonable degree of control. The physical properties of the feedback
function create multiple relationships between the action and the
local variables in which the controlled variable is perceived. But
the number of higher-order purposes for which those variables might
be used is probably uncountable.

MMT: I tend to think of the rigidity of networking as somewhat
analogous to Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity structures (of which I
saw a marvellous example at the Science Centre at Baltimore Harbour
a couple of weeks ago). They hold themselves up because of the
entire structure. If you remove some cable or rod, the rest might or
might not remain stable, but you can be sure that no hitchup of a
couple of rods or cables by themselves would do so.

BP: All true, and I'd be happy to see the subject discussed in that
way without attributing any active role in those structures for
determining what purposes a person might use them for.

BP earlier: I think that "accidental" cooperation is much like the
correlation between two variables that is actually the result of a
third variable affecting them both: an illusion. You can
distinguish intentional from accidental cooperation by watching
what happens when various disturbances affect whatever it is that
both parties seem to be cooperating in accomplishing. When you
start seeing one person reacting against some disturbances and the
other person not reacting, you will know that the cooperation is
accidental and therefore illusory.

MMT: True, but how is that comment relevant?

Don't you remember? You and Rick were also discussing cooperation. I
should have labeled the change of subject.

Best,

Bill P.
'

Kenneth_Kitzke_Value · November 14, 2010, 7:39pm

[From Kenny Kitzke (2010.11.14)]

I too agree with Bill Powers about affordances in the environment. This borders on a rejection of what seems to me to be one of the strongest distinctives of PCT/HPCT. The environment does not stimulate (or afford, or cause or enable) the responses of humans as living control systems.

I previously attempted to negate the concept that the apparent behavior of non-living systems such as political, governmental, judicial, economic, environmental, military, public education, religious etc., can be understood and explained by PCT which applies only to living things.

Since people basically design and even manage such non-living systems, it is tempting to attribute perceptual control to their behavior. When I speed on the highway (my last speeding ticket was for driving 70 in a 45 mph zone) the governmental and judicial systems both reacted to my behavior. The interaction with these non-living systems was through a state trooper and a justice of the peace. So, in some sense it seems these systems are acting in accordance with PCT principles. But, it is the inanimate systems which authorize the state trooper and the constable to act to enforce their systems to limit the behavior of living drivers like me. I can see the temptation to think they afford me certain degrees of freedom.

All this is relevant to your focus on collective control and how and how much individuals can create and manage and enforce social systems. I see the social systems as inanimate. All these systems form my environment. I must interact with these systems as I control my perceptions. But, I remain convinced that these inanimate systems don’t themselves have perceptions or act to control them. PCT does not explain what they do or don’t do. But, there may well be an illusion that they do.

As always, I enjoy your pursuit of how individual control systems can control their environments both through aware and cooperative action and through unaware and even conflictive action that results in a stable or changing environment. Power to the science of sociology. I sense that past efforts to have a controlled and stable society for its individuals has tended to end in conflict and instability like the laws of thermodynamics but reflecting the self-centered (not community centered) nature of mankind.

Best wishes,

Kenny

In a message dated 11/14/2010 11:19:17 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, mcclel@GRINNELL.EDU writes:

···

[From Kent McClelland (2010.11.14.0930 CST)]

[From Bill Powers (2010.11.13.0815 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2010.11.12.16.27 –

KM: In the exchange between Bill Powers and Martin Taylor about affordances, I agree with Bill about the difficulties of using the term “affordance”. The problem with the term, as I see it, is that it attributes to an object or condition a property that is really the property of a relationship between that object and the organism making use of the object. An object has as many “affordances” as there are potential users of the object and potential uses that they might put the object to. So talking about “an environmental affordance” as if it were the property of the object alone is misleading.

I’m inclined to agree with Martin, however, in seeing the need for some reasonable way of talking about differences among the relationships between acting organism and parts of the environment that support (or don’t support) their action. We can talk about an environment “offering” or “allowing” or “permitting” or “making easy” or “making impossible” or, to quote the nonscientific term that I used, “channelling” some action on the part of acting organisms within that environment, but all these ways of speaking seem open to the same objections as the word affordances.

The way I tried to discuss these relationships between environment and acting organism in the essay that I circulated was use Bill’s language about “degrees of freedom” for a given organism in a given environment. This term, degrees of freedom, has the virtue, in my view, of locating the “agency” in the acting organism, not in the environment. But, as I think about it, I’m concerned that this way of speaking may also be open to some of the same objections.

In a post sent shortly after I posted my essay last week, Martin Lewitt had this criticism of my use of degrees of freedom:

[Martin Lewitt Nov 5, 2010 1420]

" . . . Degrees of freedom are discussed abstractly without any quantification. . . ."

I didn’t respond at the time, because this criticism and his others in the post seemed somewhat wide of the mark to me, and they raised issues I wasn’t eager to get into at that point, but I think Martin has put his finger on an issue that needs to be confronted.

My immediate reaction to Martin’s comment was that trying to count degrees of freedom is ludicrous. We’re talking about 800 or so degrees of freedom at any perceptual level, if I remember correctly the number given in Bill’s article that I quote in my essay, and the precise number of degrees of freedom for a given organism in a given environment would vary enormously depending on what purpose the organism had in mind and what other perceptions the organism was trying to keep in control at the same time. And in some sense, the only numbers of degrees of freedom that matter for the organism are one and zero, either being able to control the perception or not.

But I still think it matters for the sociological arguments I would like to make for me to be able to characterize some environments as “rich” in degrees of freedom for people of a given culture (sets of widely distributed similar control systems for doing certain kinds of things), and other environments as relatively “poverty stricken” in degrees of freedom.

To make my arguments more concrete let me offer a couple of silly examples. If you’re a birdwatcher and want to spot a pileated woodpecker, you probably wouldn’t find one inside a WalMart store. Or if you’re a gourmand and want an exquisite seven-course meal with a different fine wine for every course, you’re not going to find that in a McDonald’s. I’m not saying those things could never happen, but we can confidently predict that those environments are likely to offer few degrees of freedom for those purposes.

On the other hand, a WalMart or a McDonald’s are comparatively rich in degrees of freedom for lots of other purposes, when compared to solitary confinement in a bare prison cell or a spot in a desert that’s completely bare of vegetation, water, and any human-built structures.

It worries me though, that I can’t give you a scientific way, even in principle, to enumerate the differences in degrees of freedom for certain kinds of organisms with certain kinds of purposes in those various environments.

So what’s a more fruitful way to talk about the relationships between organisms and environments and about how some environments make certain things easier to do and other things harder?

My best,

Kent

MMT: I have the impression that you don’t like using the word
“environmental affordance” as a short form for “feature of the
environment that can form part of an environmental feedback path”
because Gibson used the word.

BP: It’s true that I don’t much like Gibson’s work, but that’s not
the reason I don’t like “affordance” I think that nonliving things in
the environment have physical properties, but no psychological
properties. To speak of affordance as a property of something in the
environment is to endow it with characteristics that are not in it
(not in my model of the environment), but that exist only in the
viewer. It leads to objectification of things that are subjective,
like attributing “value” to objects in economics.

MMT: I don’t think that’s a sensible reason, any more than it would
be sensible to complain about using “perception” as a short form for
“variable that changes as certain factors of the environment change”
on the grounds that most people take “perception” to mean something
of which one is conscious.

BP: I agree, my dislike of Gibson’s writings wouldn’t be a sensible
reason for rejecting affordance as a property of the environment –
if that were my reason, which it isn’t. In fact, it’s the other way
around: I dislike Gibson’s writings because they attribute
nonexistent properties to environmental objects. And that is quite
aside from the fact that “it’s all perception.” I just think that a
transitive verb like afford is a simple mistake in a model of the
non-living world

MMT: I think that if something affords an opportunity, the right
word for it is an affordance.

BP: It would be, if things in the environment could do such a thing.
I don’t think they can; the term is a metaphor. It’s as if the object
were telling us what it could be used for – which of course is
precisely what Gibson claims.

The stones someone placed for crossing a small creek do not do
anything but be where they are and be flat on top. I could use them
for crossing the creek, or for placing my fishing gear on while I
wade beside them, or to start building a dam, or as foundations for a
bridge, or to provide a point of interest in a painting or a
photograph, or to study flow patterns, or to give evidence that
another person has been there, or to pry up and use to build a fire
pit on the shore, or to tie my boat to – pretty smart stones, to be
able to afford all those uses, as well as many others I was too
insensitive to notice. Think of the incredible variety of affordances
that are obtained when iron, copper, or aluminum ore is mined; we may
never discover all of them. One would think that chemists would have
detected them by now.

MMT: Thick ice on a lake surface is an affordance for snowmobilers,
fishers, skaters, ice-yachters… The use of an affordance for one
purpose in no way detracts from its use for another purpose unless
resource limitations come into play.

BP: The metaphor can be carried as far as you wish, and that’s fine
for poetry or simply colorful communication or entertainment. But I
don’t think it has a role in any scientific discussion of how things
work. Nonliving objects do not have a property of affordance, nor can
they actively afford uses to people. As soon as you start trying to
explain how affordance works, you have to begin talking about human
goals and actions, and physical properties of feedback functions. A
serious model doesn’t contain a variable or function called affordance.

BP earlier: And one person’s affordance is another person’s
disturbance, as would probably have been the case if I had used
someone else’s precious laptop to prop the door open.

MMT:" The environmental affordance itself would not be a
disturbance, at least not as I think of disturbances.

BP: Of course it would. I’m using someone else’s laptop for a purpose
of my own in a way that might damage it, and that is definitely
something that would cause an error signal in most owners of laptops
– if only in their imaginations, but perhaps also in present time
perception. “Look at that, you’ve scratched the case!”

MMT: It’s a state of the perceived environment. That state may not
correspond to the reference value of someone else’s controlled
perception. But if all perceived states of the world that don’t
match our reference values are called disturbances, what do you call
the changes of state that would in the absence of control move a
perception away from it reference value? I tend to use “disturbance”
to refer to the changes rather than to the static states. After all,
very little of our world matches our ideal world.

BP: Put the straw man away, Martin. A disturbance is something that
affects the state of a controlled variable in a way that causes an
error signal in someone’s control system. The resulting state does
“not correspond to the reference value of someone else’s controlled
perception.” What did you think I meant by “disturbance?” Isn’t that
what you mean? If someone sees me pick up his laptop, set it down on
the floor, and push it with my foot against the bottom of the door to
keep it open, is that not a “dynamic” enough disturbance for you?
You’re playing tricks with connotations that shift in the middle of a
paragraph: starting with disturbance (formally: something that
changes the state of a controlled perception independently of a
control system’s action), then shifting to something that is just
different from a reference value for any reason, and ending with
things that would change a variable “in the absence of control.” I
wasn’t talking about the absence of control, but of its presence in
the person who objects to my using his laptop in a particular way,
even though it obviously (to me) “affords” that use. It’s not my
fault that it obviously affords that use, is it? That convenient
excuse is one of the reasons people like to objectify their private
preferences.

MMT: Anyway, that’s not really the point of Kent’s work, which is
that a network of controllers tend to generate an environment of
greater stability than would any one controller acting alone.

BP: I don’t think “stability” is the word you want in control-system
context. When people construct things that will last for a long time,
those things can be used for any purpose a person might invent to use
them for. But simply because they are semi-permanent, they also
present problems for other people whose controlled variables are
disturbed by those constructions, like the wall the Israelis built
between the Palestinians and the fields they farmed, or the highway
some politician finagled across what most local residents wanted to
be open space.

MMT: If a network of control systems tend to rigidly stabilize some
features of the environment through a mixture of conflict and
(deliberate) cooperation, then those features can be stable
environmental affordances for control of quite independent
perceptions. Their stability allows control system structures to
reorganize to use them. Linguistic and cultural patterns have this
characteristic.

BP: I have no argument with that. Now you’re just talking about the
physical properties of whatever was created. Sometimes people try to
use those properties as means of control and discover that they are
wrong for the job; quite often they are good enough to allow a
reasonable degree of control. The physical properties of the feedback
function create multiple relationships between the action and the
local variables in which the controlled variable is perceived. But
the number of higher-order purposes for which those variables might
be used is probably uncountable.

MMT: I tend to think of the rigidity of networking as somewhat
analogous to Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity structures (of which I
saw a marvellous example at the Science Centre at Baltimore Harbour
a couple of weeks ago). They hold themselves up because of the
entire structure. If you remove some cable or rod, the rest might or
might not remain stable, but you can be sure that no hitchup of a
couple of rods or cables by themselves would do so.

BP: All true, and I’d be happy to see the subject discussed in that
way without attributing any active role in those structures for
determining what purposes a person might use them for.

BP earlier: I think that “accidental” cooperation is much like the
correlation between two variables that is actually the result of a
third variable affecting them both: an illusion. You can
distinguish intentional from accidental cooperation by watching
what happens when various disturbances affect whatever it is that
both parties seem to be cooperating in accomplishing. When you
start seeing one person reacting against some disturbances and the
other person not reacting, you will know that the cooperation is
accidental and therefore illusory.

MMT: True, but how is that comment relevant?

Don’t you remember? You and Rick were also discussing cooperation. I
should have labeled the change of subject.

Best,

Bill P.
’

FredNickols · November 14, 2010, 8:13pm

[From Fred Nickols (2010.11.14.1304 MST)]

See my comments embedded in Kenny’s post…

···

From: Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) [mailto:CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU] On Behalf Of Kenneth Kitzke Value Creation Systems
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 12:40 PM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Subject: Re: Collective Control and Environmental Stabilities – Degrees of Freedom

[From Kenny Kitzke (2010.11.14)]

I too agree with Bill Powers about affordances in the environment. This borders on a rejection of what seems to me to be one of the strongest distinctives of PCT/HPCT. The environment does not stimulate (or afford, or cause or enable) the responses of humans as living control systems.

FN: I understand (or think I do) that statement in the context of PCT denying the S->R view of human behavior but taken at face value the statement above beginning with “The environment…” would seem to suggest that we can safely dispose of words such as “threat” or “opportunity” or “require” or “demand” and so forth. Granted, those words refer to our perceptions of certain aspects of our environment but those are, to me, good and useful words and so I tread carefully when rejecting out of hand all that has gone before.

I previously attempted to negate the concept that the apparent behavior of non-living systems such as political, governmental, judicial, economic, environmental, military, public education, religious etc., can be understood and explained by PCT which applies only to living things.

FN: I agree that such “inanimate” systems are not susceptible or amenable to treatment using PCT; only living organisms are.

Since people basically design and even manage such non-living systems, it is tempting to attribute perceptual control to their behavior. When I speed on the highway (my last speeding ticket was for driving 70 in a 45 mph zone) the governmental and judicial systems both reacted to my behavior. The interaction with these non-living systems was through a state trooper and a justice of the peace. So, in some sense it seems these systems are acting in accordance with PCT principles. But, it is the inanimate systems which authorize the state trooper and the constable to act to enforce their systems to limit the behavior of living drivers like me. I can see the temptation to think they afford me certain degrees of freedom.

FN: Well, I would hazard a guess that the trooper and the JP were behaving in accordance with PCT.

All this is relevant to your focus on collective control and how and how much individuals can create and manage and enforce social systems. I see the social systems as inanimate. All these systems form my environment. I must interact with these systems as I control my perceptions. But, I remain convinced that these inanimate systems don’t themselves have perceptions or act to control them. PCT does not explain what they do or don’t do. But, there may well be an illusion that they do.

FN: I think it might be useful to acknowledge that these “inanimate systems” are not completely inanimate. For example corporations and government agencies have employees and these employees are viewed as part of those larger, “inanimate” systems, which, of course, means that they are not completely inanimate. So, these “inanimate systems” do have animate agents (some of which are machines – e.g., the cameras that take a picture when you run a red light or speed). Maybe, Kenny, you are drawing a distinction between “living” and “non-living” systems.

As always, I enjoy your pursuit of how individual control systems can control their environments both through aware and cooperative action and through unaware and even conflictive action that results in a stable or changing environment. Power to the science of sociology. I sense that past efforts to have a controlled and stable society for its individuals has tended to end in conflict and instability like the laws of thermodynamics but reflecting the self-centered (not community centered) nature of mankind.

Best wishes,

Kenny

In a message dated 11/14/2010 11:19:17 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, mcclel@GRINNELL.EDU writes:

[From Kent McClelland (2010.11.14.0930 CST)]

[From Bill Powers (2010.11.13.0815 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2010.11.12.16.27 –

KM: In the exchange between Bill Powers and Martin Taylor about affordances, I agree with Bill about the difficulties of using the term “affordance”. The problem with the term, as I see it, is that it attributes to an object or condition a property that is really the property of a relationship between that object and the organism making use of the object. An object has as many “affordances” as there are potential users of the object and potential uses that they might put the object to. So talking about “an environmental affordance” as if it were the property of the object alone is misleading.

I’m inclined to agree with Martin, however, in seeing the need for some reasonable way of talking about differences among the relationships between acting organism and parts of the environment that support (or don’t support) their action. We can talk about an environment “offering” or “allowing” or “permitting” or “making easy” or “making impossible” or, to quote the nonscientific term that I used, “channelling” some action on the part of acting organisms within that environment, but all these ways of speaking seem open to the same objections as the word affordances.

The way I tried to discuss these relationships between environment and acting organism in the essay that I circulated was use Bill’s language about “degrees of freedom” for a given organism in a given environment. This term, degrees of freedom, has the virtue, in my view, of locating the “agency” in the acting organism, not in the environment. But, as I think about it, I’m concerned that this way of speaking may also be open to some of the same objections.

In a post sent shortly after I posted my essay last week, Martin Lewitt had this criticism of my use of degrees of freedom:

[Martin Lewitt Nov 5, 2010 1420]

" . . . Degrees of freedom are discussed abstractly without any quantification. . . ."

I didn’t respond at the time, because this criticism and his others in the post seemed somewhat wide of the mark to me, and they raised issues I wasn’t eager to get into at that point, but I think Martin has put his finger on an issue that needs to be confronted.

My immediate reaction to Martin’s comment was that trying to count degrees of freedom is ludicrous. We’re talking about 800 or so degrees of freedom at any perceptual level, if I remember correctly the number given in Bill’s article that I quote in my essay, and the precise number of degrees of freedom for a given organism in a given environment would vary enormously depending on what purpose the organism had in mind and what other perceptions the organism was trying to keep in control at the same time. And in some sense, the only numbers of degrees of freedom that matter for the organism are one and zero, either being able to control the perception or not.

But I still think it matters for the sociological arguments I would like to make for me to be able to characterize some environments as “rich” in degrees of freedom for people of a given culture (sets of widely distributed similar control systems for doing certain kinds of things), and other environments as relatively “poverty stricken” in degrees of freedom.

To make my arguments more concrete let me offer a couple of silly examples. If you’re a birdwatcher and want to spot a pileated woodpecker, you probably wouldn’t find one inside a WalMart store. Or if you’re a gourmand and want an exquisite seven-course meal with a different fine wine for every course, you’re not going to find that in a McDonald’s. I’m not saying those things could never happen, but we can confidently predict that those environments are likely to offer few degrees of freedom for those purposes.

On the other hand, a WalMart or a McDonald’s are comparatively rich in degrees of freedom for lots of other purposes, when compared to solitary confinement in a bare prison cell or a spot in a desert that’s completely bare of vegetation, water, and any human-built structures.

It worries me though, that I can’t give you a scientific way, even in principle, to enumerate the differences in degrees of freedom for certain kinds of organisms with certain kinds of purposes in those various environments.

So what’s a more fruitful way to talk about the relationships between organisms and environments and about how some environments make certain things easier to do and other things harder?

My best,

Kent

MMT: I have the impression that you don’t like using the word
“environmental affordance” as a short form for “feature of the
environment that can form part of an environmental feedback path”
because Gibson used the word.

BP: It’s true that I don’t much like Gibson’s work, but that’s not
the reason I don’t like “affordance” I think that nonliving things in
the environment have physical properties, but no psychological
properties. To speak of affordance as a property of something in the
environment is to endow it with characteristics that are not in it
(not in my model of the environment), but that exist only in the
viewer. It leads to objectification of things that are subjective,
like attributing “value” to objects in economics.

MMT: I don’t think that’s a sensible reason, any more than it would
be sensible to complain about using “perception” as a short form for
“variable that changes as certain factors of the environment change”
on the grounds that most people take “perception” to mean something
of which one is conscious.

BP: I agree, my dislike of Gibson’s writings wouldn’t be a sensible
reason for rejecting affordance as a property of the environment –
if that were my reason, which it isn’t. In fact, it’s the other way
around: I dislike Gibson’s writings because they attribute
nonexistent properties to environmental objects. And that is quite
aside from the fact that “it’s all perception.” I just think that a
transitive verb like afford is a simple mistake in a model of the
non-living world

MMT: I think that if something affords an opportunity, the right
word for it is an affordance.

BP: It would be, if things in the environment could do such a thing.
I don’t think they can; the term is a metaphor. It’s as if the object
were telling us what it could be used for – which of course is
precisely what Gibson claims.

The stones someone placed for crossing a small creek do not do
anything but be where they are and be flat on top. I could use them
for crossing the creek, or for placing my fishing gear on while I
wade beside them, or to start building a dam, or as foundations for a
bridge, or to provide a point of interest in a painting or a
photograph, or to study flow patterns, or to give evidence that
another person has been there, or to pry up and use to build a fire
pit on the shore, or to tie my boat to – pretty smart stones, to be
able to afford all those uses, as well as many others I was too
insensitive to notice. Think of the incredible variety of affordances
that are obtained when iron, copper, or aluminum ore is mined; we may
never discover all of them. One would think that chemists would have
detected them by now.

MMT: Thick ice on a lake surface is an affordance for snowmobilers,
fishers, skaters, ice-yachters… The use of an affordance for one
purpose in no way detracts from its use for another purpose unless
resource limitations come into play.

BP: The metaphor can be carried as far as you wish, and that’s fine
for poetry or simply colorful communication or entertainment. But I
don’t think it has a role in any scientific discussion of how things
work. Nonliving objects do not have a property of affordance, nor can
they actively afford uses to people. As soon as you start trying to
explain how affordance works, you have to begin talking about human
goals and actions, and physical properties of feedback functions. A
serious model doesn’t contain a variable or function called affordance.

BP earlier: And one person’s affordance is another person’s
disturbance, as would probably have been the case if I had used
someone else’s precious laptop to prop the door open.

MMT:" The environmental affordance itself would not be a
disturbance, at least not as I think of disturbances.

BP: Of course it would. I’m using someone else’s laptop for a purpose
of my own in a way that might damage it, and that is definitely
something that would cause an error signal in most owners of laptops
– if only in their imaginations, but perhaps also in present time
perception. “Look at that, you’ve scratched the case!”

MMT: It’s a state of the perceived environment. That state may not
correspond to the reference value of someone else’s controlled
perception. But if all perceived states of the world that don’t
match our reference values are called disturbances, what do you call
the changes of state that would in the absence of control move a
perception away from it reference value? I tend to use “disturbance”
to refer to the changes rather than to the static states. After all,
very little of our world matches our ideal world.

BP: Put the straw man away, Martin. A disturbance is something that
affects the state of a controlled variable in a way that causes an
error signal in someone’s control system. The resulting state does
“not correspond to the reference value of someone else’s controlled
perception.” What did you think I meant by “disturbance?” Isn’t that
what you mean? If someone sees me pick up his laptop, set it down on
the floor, and push it with my foot against the bottom of the door to
keep it open, is that not a “dynamic” enough disturbance for you?
You’re playing tricks with connotations that shift in the middle of a
paragraph: starting with disturbance (formally: something that
changes the state of a controlled perception independently of a
control system’s action), then shifting to something that is just
different from a reference value for any reason, and ending with
things that would change a variable “in the absence of control.” I
wasn’t talking about the absence of control, but of its presence in
the person who objects to my using his laptop in a particular way,
even though it obviously (to me) “affords” that use. It’s not my
fault that it obviously affords that use, is it? That convenient
excuse is one of the reasons people like to objectify their private
preferences.

MMT: Anyway, that’s not really the point of Kent’s work, which is
that a network of controllers tend to generate an environment of
greater stability than would any one controller acting alone.

BP: I don’t think “stability” is the word you want in control-system
context. When people construct things that will last for a long time,
those things can be used for any purpose a person might invent to use
them for. But simply because they are semi-permanent, they also
present problems for other people whose controlled variables are
disturbed by those constructions, like the wall the Israelis built
between the Palestinians and the fields they farmed, or the highway
some politician finagled across what most local residents wanted to
be open space.

MMT: If a network of control systems tend to rigidly stabilize some
features of the environment through a mixture of conflict and
(deliberate) cooperation, then those features can be stable
environmental affordances for control of quite independent
perceptions. Their stability allows control system structures to
reorganize to use them. Linguistic and cultural patterns have this
characteristic.

BP: I have no argument with that. Now you’re just talking about the
physical properties of whatever was created. Sometimes people try to
use those properties as means of control and discover that they are
wrong for the job; quite often they are good enough to allow a
reasonable degree of control. The physical properties of the feedback
function create multiple relationships between the action and the
local variables in which the controlled variable is perceived. But
the number of higher-order purposes for which those variables might
be used is probably uncountable.

MMT: I tend to think of the rigidity of networking as somewhat
analogous to Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity structures (of which I
saw a marvellous example at the Science Centre at Baltimore Harbour
a couple of weeks ago). They hold themselves up because of the
entire structure. If you remove some cable or rod, the rest might or
might not remain stable, but you can be sure that no hitchup of a
couple of rods or cables by themselves would do so.

BP: All true, and I’d be happy to see the subject discussed in that
way without attributing any active role in those structures for
determining what purposes a person might use them for.

BP earlier: I think that “accidental” cooperation is much like the
correlation between two variables that is actually the result of a
third variable affecting them both: an illusion. You can
distinguish intentional from accidental cooperation by watching
what happens when various disturbances affect whatever it is that
both parties seem to be cooperating in accomplishing. When you
start seeing one person reacting against some disturbances and the
other person not reacting, you will know that the cooperation is
accidental and therefore illusory.

MMT: True, but how is that comment relevant?

Don’t you remember? You and Rick were also discussing cooperation. I
should have labeled the change of subject.

Best,

Bill P.
’

JohnK · November 15, 2010, 2:02pm

It's Gibson's complementary concept about which commentary from
seasoned, well-read and experienced PCT personnel would be most
welcomed.
He introduced 'affordance' as well as its dancing partner, 'direct perception'.
Further, Gibson also offered an alternative to the 'information
processing' metaphor.
Nice going JJ.

With appreciation

JohnK

···

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 1:43 AM, Fred Nickols <fred@nickols.us> wrote:

[From Fred Nickols (2010.11.14.1304 MST)]

See my comments embedded in Kennyï¿½s postï¿½

From: Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet)
[mailto:CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU] On Behalf Of Kenneth Kitzke Value
Creation Systems
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 12:40 PM
To: CSGNET@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU
Subject: Re: Collective Control and Environmental Stabilities -- Degrees of
Freedom

[From Kenny Kitzke (2010.11.14)]

I too agree with Bill Powers about affordances in the environment.ï¿½ This
borders on a rejection of what seems to me to be one of the strongest
distinctives of PCT/HPCT.ï¿½ The environment does not stimulate (or afford, or
cause or enable) the responses of humans as living control systems.

FN:ï¿½ I understand (or think I do) that statement in the context of PCT
denying the S->R view of human behavior but taken at face value the
statement above beginning with ï¿½The environmentï¿½ï¿½ would seem to suggest that
we can safely dispose of words such as ï¿½threatï¿½ or ï¿½opportunityï¿½ or
ï¿½requireï¿½ or ï¿½demandï¿½ and so forth.ï¿½ Granted, those words refer to our
perceptions of certain aspects of our environment but those are, to me, good
and useful words and so I tread carefullyï¿½ when rejecting out of hand all
that has gone before.

I previously attempted to negate the concept that the apparent behavior of
non-living systems such as political, governmental, judicial, economic,
environmental, military, public education, religiousï¿½etc., can be understood
and explained by PCT which applies only to living things.

FN: I agree that such ï¿½inanimateï¿½ systems are not susceptible or amenable to
treatment using PCT; only living organisms are.

Since people basically design and even manage such non-living systems, it is
tempting to attribute perceptual control to their behavior.ï¿½ï¿½When I speed on
the highway (my last speeding ticket was for driving 70 in a 45 mph
zone)ï¿½the governmental and judicial systems both reacted to my behavior.
The interaction with theseï¿½non-living systems was through a state trooper
and a justice of the peace.ï¿½ So, in some sense it seems these systems are
acting in accordance with PCT principles.ï¿½ But, it is the inanimate systems
which authorize the state trooper and the constable to act to enforce their
systems to limit the behavior of living drivers like me.ï¿½ I can see the
temptation to think they afford me certain degrees of freedom.

FN: Well, I would hazard a guess that the trooper and the JP were behaving
in accordance with PCT.

All this is relevant to your focus on collective control and how and how
muchï¿½individuals can create and manage and enforce social systems.ï¿½ I see
the social systems as inanimate.ï¿½ All these systems form my environment.ï¿½ I
must interact with these systems as I control my perceptions.ï¿½ But, I remain
convinced that these inanimate systems don't themselves have perceptions or
act to control them.ï¿½ PCT does not explain what they do or don't do.ï¿½ But,
there may well be an illusion that they do.

FN:ï¿½ I think it might be useful to acknowledge that these ï¿½inanimate
systemsï¿½ are not completely inanimate.ï¿½ For example corporations and
government agencies have employees and these employees are viewed as part of
those larger, ï¿½inanimateï¿½ systems, which, of course, means that they are not
completely inanimate.ï¿½ So, these ï¿½inanimate systemsï¿½ do have animate agents
(some of which are machines ï¿½ e.g., the cameras that take a picture when you
run a red light or speed).ï¿½ Maybe, Kenny, you are drawing a distinction
between ï¿½livingï¿½ and ï¿½non-livingï¿½ systems.

As always, I enjoy your pursuit of how individual control systems can
control their environments both through aware and cooperative action and
through unaware and even conflictive action that results in a stable or
changing environment.ï¿½ Power to the science of sociology.ï¿½ I sense that past
efforts to have a controlled and stable society for its individuals has
tended to end in conflict and instability like the laws of thermodynamics
but reflecting the self-centered (not community centered)ï¿½nature of mankind.

Best wishes,

Kenny

In a message dated 11/14/2010 11:19:17 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
mcclel@GRINNELL.EDU writes:

[From Kent McClelland (2010.11.14.0930 CST)]

[From Bill Powers (2010.11.13.0815 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2010.11.12.16.27 --

KM: In the exchange between Bill Powers and Martin Taylor about affordances,
I agree with Bill about the difficulties of using the term "affordance". The
problem with the term, as I see it, is that it attributes to an object or
condition a property that is really the property of a relationship between
that object and the organism making use of the object. An object has as many
"affordances" as there are potential users of the object and potential uses
that they might put the object to. So talking about "an environmental
affordance" as if it were the property of the object alone is misleading.

I'm inclined to agree with Martin, however, in seeing the need for some
reasonable way of talking about differences among the relationships between
acting organism and parts of the environment that support (or don't support)
their action. We can talk about an environment "offering" or "allowing" or
"permitting" or "making easy" or "making impossible" or, to quote the
nonscientific term that I used, "channelling" some action on the part of
acting organisms within that environment, but all these ways of speaking
seem open to the same objections as the word affordances.

The way I tried to discuss these relationships between environment and
acting organism in the essay that I circulated was use Bill's language about
"degrees of freedom" for a given organism in a given environment. This term,
degrees of freedom, has the virtue, in my view, of locating the "agency" in
the acting organism, not in the environment. But, as I think about it, I'm
concerned that this way of speaking may also be open to some of the same
objections.

In a post sent shortly after I posted my essay last week, Martin Lewitt had
this criticism of my use of degrees of freedom:

[Martin Lewitt Nov 5, 2010 1420]

" . . . Degrees of freedom are discussed abstractly without any
quantification. . . ."

I didn't respond at the time, because this criticism and his others in the
post seemed somewhat wide of the mark to me, and they raised issues I wasn't
eager to get into at that point, but I think Martin has put his finger on an
issue that needs to be confronted.

My immediate reaction to Martin's comment was that trying to count degrees
of freedom is ludicrous. We're talking about 800 or so degrees of freedom at
any perceptual level, if I remember correctly the number given in Bill's
article that I quote in my essay, and the precise number of degrees of
freedom for a given organism in a given environment would vary enormously
depending on what purpose the organism had in mind and what other
perceptions the organism was trying to keep in control at the same time. And
in some sense, the only numbers of degrees of freedom that matter for the
organism are one and zero, either being able to control the perception or
not.

But I still think it matters for the sociological arguments I would like to
make for me to be able to characterize some environments as "rich" in
degrees of freedom for people of a given culture (sets of widely distributed
similar control systems for doing certain kinds of things), and other
environments as relatively "poverty stricken" in degrees of freedom.

To make my arguments more concrete let me offer a couple of silly examples.
If you're a birdwatcher and want to spot a pileated woodpecker, you probably
wouldn't find one inside a WalMart store. Or if you're a gourmand and want
an exquisite seven-course meal with a different fine wine for every course,
you're not going to find that in a McDonald's. I'm not saying those things
could never happen, but we can confidently predict that those environments
are likely to offer few degrees of freedom for those purposes.

On the other hand, a WalMart or a McDonald's are comparatively rich in
degrees of freedom for lots of other purposes, when compared to solitary
confinement in a bare prison cell or a spot in a desert that's completely
bare of vegetation, water, and any human-built structures.

It worries me though, that I can't give you a scientific way, even in
principle, to enumerate the differences in degrees of freedom for certain
kinds of organisms with certain kinds of purposes in those various
environments.

So what's a more fruitful way to talk about the relationships between
organisms and environments and about how some environments make certain
things easier to do and other things harder?

My best,

Kent

MMT: I have the impression that you don't like using the word
"environmental affordance" as a short form for "feature of the
environment that can form part of an environmental feedback path"
because Gibson used the word.

BP: It's true that I don't much like Gibson's work, but that's not
the reason I don't like "affordance" I think that nonliving things in
the environment have physical properties, but no psychological
properties. To speak of affordance as a property of something in the
environment is to endow it with characteristics that are not in it
(not in my model of the environment), but that exist only in the
viewer. It leads to objectification of things that are subjective,
like attributing "value" to objects in economics.

MMT: I don't think that's a sensible reason, any more than it would
be sensible to complain about using "perception" as a short form for
"variable that changes as certain factors of the environment change"
on the grounds that most people take "perception" to mean something
of which one is conscious.

BP: I agree, my dislike of Gibson's writings wouldn't be a sensible
reason for rejecting affordance as a property of the environment --
if that were my reason, which it isn't. In fact, it's the other way
around: I dislike Gibson's writings because they attribute
nonexistent properties to environmental objects. And that is quite
aside from the fact that "it's all perception." I just think that a
transitive verb like afford is a simple mistake in a model of the
non-living world

MMT: I think that if something affords an opportunity, the right
word for it is an affordance.

BP: It would be, if things in the environment could do such a thing.
I don't think they can; the term is a metaphor. It's as if the object
were telling us what it could be used for -- which of course is
precisely what Gibson claims.

The stones someone placed for crossing a small creek do not do
anything but be where they are and be flat on top. I could use them
for crossing the creek, or for placing my fishing gear on while I
wade beside them, or to start building a dam, or as foundations for a
bridge, or to provide a point of interest in a painting or a
photograph, or to study flow patterns, or to give evidence that
another person has been there, or to pry up and use to build a fire
pit on the shore, or to tie my boat to -- pretty smart stones, to be
able to afford all those uses, as well as many others I was too
insensitive to notice. Think of the incredible variety of affordances
that are obtained when iron, copper, or aluminum ore is mined; we may
never discover all of them. One would think that chemists would have
detected them by now.

MMT: Thick ice on a lake surface is an affordance for snowmobilers,
fishers, skaters, ice-yachters... The use of an affordance for one
purpose in no way detracts from its use for another purpose unless
resource limitations come into play.

BP: The metaphor can be carried as far as you wish, and that's fine
for poetry or simply colorful communication or entertainment. But I
don't think it has a role in any scientific discussion of how things
work. Nonliving objects do not have a property of affordance, nor can
they actively afford uses to people. As soon as you start trying to
explain how affordance works, you have to begin talking about human
goals and actions, and physical properties of feedback functions. A
serious model doesn't contain a variable or function called affordance.

BP earlier: And one person's affordance is another person's
disturbance, as would probably have been the case if I had used
someone else's precious laptop to prop the door open.

MMT:" The environmental affordance itself would not be a
disturbance, at least not as I think of disturbances.

BP: Of course it would. I'm using someone else's laptop for a purpose
of my own in a way that might damage it, and that is definitely
something that would cause an error signal in most owners of laptops
-- if only in their imaginations, but perhaps also in present time
perception. "Look at that, you've scratched the case!"

MMT: It's a state of the perceived environment. That state may not
correspond to the reference value of someone else's controlled
perception. But if all perceived states of the world that don't
match our reference values are called disturbances, what do you call
the changes of state that would in the absence of control move a
perception away from it reference value? I tend to use "disturbance"
to refer to the changes rather than to the static states. After all,
very little of our world matches our ideal world.

BP: Put the straw man away, Martin. A disturbance is something that
affects the state of a controlled variable in a way that causes an
error signal in someone's control system. The resulting state does
"not correspond to the reference value of someone else's controlled
perception." What did you think I meant by "disturbance?" Isn't that
what you mean? If someone sees me pick up his laptop, set it down on
the floor, and push it with my foot against the bottom of the door to
keep it open, is that not a "dynamic" enough disturbance for you?
You're playing tricks with connotations that shift in the middle of a
paragraph: starting with disturbance (formally: something that
changes the state of a controlled perception independently of a
control system's action), then shifting to something that is just
different from a reference value for any reason, and ending with
things that would change a variable "in the absence of control." I
wasn't talking about the absence of control, but of its presence in
the person who objects to my using his laptop in a particular way,
even though it obviously (to me) "affords" that use. It's not my
fault that it obviously affords that use, is it? That convenient
excuse is one of the reasons people like to objectify their private
preferences.

MMT: Anyway, that's not really the point of Kent's work, which is
that a network of controllers tend to generate an environment of
greater stability than would any one controller acting alone.

BP: I don't think "stability" is the word you want in control-system
context. When people construct things that will last for a long time,
those things can be used for any purpose a person might invent to use
them for. But simply because they are semi-permanent, they also
present problems for other people whose controlled variables are
disturbed by those constructions, like the wall the Israelis built
between the Palestinians and the fields they farmed, or the highway
some politician finagled across what most local residents wanted to
be open space.

MMT: If a network of control systems tend to rigidly stabilize some
features of the environment through a mixture of conflict and
(deliberate) cooperation, then those features can be stable
environmental affordances for control of quite independent
perceptions. Their stability allows control system structures to
reorganize to use them. Linguistic and cultural patterns have this
characteristic.

BP: I have no argument with that. Now you're just talking about the
physical properties of whatever was created. Sometimes people try to
use those properties as means of control and discover that they are
wrong for the job; quite often they are good enough to allow a
reasonable degree of control. The physical properties of the feedback
function create multiple relationships between the action and the
local variables in which the controlled variable is perceived. But
the number of higher-order purposes for which those variables might
be used is probably uncountable.

MMT: I tend to think of the rigidity of networking as somewhat
analogous to Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity structures (of which I
saw a marvellous example at the Science Centre at Baltimore Harbour
a couple of weeks ago). They hold themselves up because of the
entire structure. If you remove some cable or rod, the rest might or
might not remain stable, but you can be sure that no hitchup of a
couple of rods or cables by themselves would do so.

BP: All true, and I'd be happy to see the subject discussed in that
way without attributing any active role in those structures for
determining what purposes a person might use them for.

BP earlier: I think that "accidental" cooperation is much like the
correlation between two variables that is actually the result of a
third variable affecting them both: an illusion. You can
distinguish intentional from accidental cooperation by watching
what happens when various disturbances affect whatever it is that
both parties seem to be cooperating in accomplishing. When you
start seeing one person reacting against some disturbances and the
other person not reacting, you will know that the cooperation is
accidental and therefore illusory.

MMT: True, but how is that comment relevant?

Don't you remember? You and Rick were also discussing cooperation. I
should have labeled the change of subject.

Best,

Bill P.
'