Collective control, conflict, and stabilization

[bnhpct]

There’s a pedestrian crosswalk from the south to north side of Turkle Street (a fictional name) at its intersection with Main Street. Repainting it is on an annual schedule maintained by Matt, the office administrator of the Department of Public Works (DPW) within a more general system for work assignment, resources, budgeting, and planning. The repainting work is assigned to Fred when it comes up, coordinated with the crew painting center lines and parking space boundaries in the spring.

Alfretta sees that the paint is becoming less and less visible over the course of the summer. She relies on the crosswalk being visible as a signal to drivers that they must stop when a pedestrian enters the crosswalk. (In California, as I recall, stepping off the curb anywhere suffices, but here in Massachusetts the legal sanction applies only to the crosswalk.) In mid October, she sees that the lines are barely visible. This is a disturbance to her control of a perception of pedestrian safety, specifically her own, her neighbors’, and that of some children going to and from a playground. She makes some telephone calls and is redirected to Janet, the head of the DPW.

Alfretta’s call is a disturbance to a number of Janet’s controlled perceptions, including those concerned with the scheduling and assignment of work. She goes to the intersection and verifies the problem. She tells Fred to fit it in to his current work assignment. She then makes some changes to her budget request for the coming year, adding a description of this problem of her documentation of a more general problem calling for a new, more durable kind of paint. … And so on.

This vignette indicates many perceptual variables that are controlled by a number of individual people. The perception “pedestrian crosswalk between the south and north sides of Turkle Street at its intersection with Main Street” is clearly a controlled perception. In this brief segment of time its deterioration was a disturbance to several people who acted, each by his or her own means, to resist that disturbance. However, we must understand that this perception has been successfully controlled prior to Alfretta’s observation and complaint and that it will be controlled subsequent to Fred’s repair. No one person is the sole controller of this perception. It is collectively controlled.

An example of stabilization is the shape of the vortex in water running down the drain. Another is attractor basins. Bill emphasized the contrast between control and this kind of stabilization.

That said, Kent has preferred ‘stabilize’ for what happens to the corresponding aspects of the environment when a perception ‘of’ them is controlled. We affirm that aspects of the environment are stabilized because more than one party reports ‘stability’ in their perception of them, while perceiving them by their ideosyncratic input functions and by different means (e.g. someone perhaps measuring them). These aspects of the environment are public, and the several individuals’ perceptions are in a public, subject to designation, naming, description, prescription, discussion, etc.

In the vignette above, aspects of the environment which we readers and multiple parties in the story call “pedestrian crosswalk between the south and north sides of Turkle Street at its intersection with Main Street” may be said to be stabilized; each party controls his or her perception of those aspects of the environment so named, and by concurrently controlling it (with diverse gain, with ideosyncratic output functions distinct from one another’s, and employing disparate environmental feedback functions) they and unidentified others all participate in collective control.

The common aspects of the environment are the ‘one place’ that so troubled you; each has his or her own controlled perception of those aspects of the environment that constitute this ‘one place’. It synchronizes their several controlled perceptions, so that they perceive themselves and one another severally to be engaging as autonomous control systems in numerous activities — designating that ‘one place’, naming it, describing describing it, prescribing its reference state, discussing disturbances to its state and environmental feedback functions affecting it, assigning particular controlled perceptions and their reference values, scheduling, planning, budgeting, and so on — control activities which all in some way involve those aspects of the environment at this ‘one place’ which each perceives in his or her own way.

One place that Kent made the distinction between control of perception and stabilization in the environment is here, for example:

@Kent

from Kent McClelland (2017.07.05)

re [Eetu Pikkarainen 2017-07-04] and Boris Hartman’s reply on 2017.07.05

It’s an interesting question how best to describe what happens to the portions of the physical environment that correspond to a controlled perceptual variable and which are affected by the physical actions of the person controlling the perception.

I’ve generally used the term “stabilized”, because, unlike Rick Marken, I think that in a perceptual control process the term “controlled” should be reserved for what happens to the perceptual variable and not to the corresponding environmental variable. Furthermore, it seems to me that what most often happens to the environmental variable is that the person tries to eliminate unwanted variation in the physical variable in order to keep the perception controlled. Thus, the physical actions to counteract disturbances that affect the perceptual variable tend also to reduce the variation in the physical variable, which sounds like stabilization to me. (Of course, Rick would prefer to call it control.)

However, things may be not quite so simple as I’ve just described. As Eetu notes in his post, the stabilization of the physical variable may sometimes look to an observer like destabilization, as when the perception controlled is one of physical movement, and the error eliminated in the process of controlling the perception is the difference between the intended movement and the perceived movement (say, of feet walking or fingers writing, as Eetu suggests). I guess I would describe this kind of effect as the “dynamic stabilization” of a pattern of movement. Or, as Eetu suggests, you might call it a matter of “adjustment” of the physical environment, including one’s own physical body, in the service of controlling one’s perceptions.

Things get even more complicated when you consider actions that are intentionally violent. In everyday life we are always, of course, controlling perceptions at many different perceptual levels all at once. When there is physical stability—that is, stability of the parts of the environment that correspond to our low-level perceptions—it’s generally useful to us for controlling our higher-level perceptions. Extreme variations in heat or cold, for example, as is happening outside on this hot day in Iowa, it make it hard for a person to get anything else done. Luckily, I’m still able to pursue my higher-level goals today in spite of the heat, because I an fortunate to have a stabilized physical environment inside my house, with the air conditioner chugging away, making it possible for me to do more today than just try to stay physically cool. My point is that stability in the physical variables that correspond to our lower-level perceptions gives us a solid platform, as it were, for controlling our higher-level perceptions.

Getting back to violence: We describe actions as violent when one person intentionally destabilizes the environmental variables that correspond to another person’s controlled perceptions. The most extreme kind of violence, of course, is destruction of the other person’s physical body by killing the person, immediately ending the victim’s perceptual control of anything at all. But when a person beats another person up or vandalizes the other person’s home, we also describe that as violence. In all of such cases of violence, the intention of the perpetrator is not to stabilize some portion of the physical environment but to damage or destroy it, making it unusable by the victim to control the perceptions that had previously been supported by that aspect of the physical environment. Perpetrators of violence are apparently able to control higher-level perceptions of their own by means of actions that inflict severe disturbances on the physical environment.

In violent actions, then, “stabilization” doesn’t quite describe what’s going on. “Adjustment” also seems a little tame for it. Other words I’ve sometimes used to describe what is happening, such as “modification” or “manipulation” of the environment, may also be inadequate. To use the word “control” seems even more far-fetched to me, when we’re describing what happens to an environmental variable corresponding to a perpetrator’s perceptual variable. The perpetrator is intentionally messing things up!

Anyhow, I don’t think there’s a perfect PCT description for what happens to the corresponding environmental variable in every case, but I do think it’s important to pay attention to what is happening in a perceptual controller’s environment as well as what is happening in the perceptual controller’s head.

You refer to a third kind of stabilization.

@rsmarken

So the main message I get from descriptions of “collective control” is that it refers to social stability, in the form of stable virtual reference states of collectively controlled variables, that emerges when each and every member of the collective controls the same variable with respect to different reference specifications.

It seems to me more transparent and natural to call this agreement. Agreement as to what is to be controlled and at what reference value can be reached in various ways. I won’t attempt a survey or catalog here. One way that has been explored a bit emerges after some environmental stability has emerged from low-gain conflict among a plurality of control systems. At first, the state of the given variable is a more or less minor inconvenience to all parties, but there it sits in an intermediate but tolerable state. Then it turns out that this part of the environment, so stabilized, is discovered by some planning process or by reorganization and comes to be used as a convenient link in the environmental feedback path for one or more parties to control some other perception. Thereafter, disturbance from this intermediate state is a disturbance to control of that other perception. An atomic link within one environmental feedback path commonly comes to serve as a link in other environmental feedback paths intersecting the first and serving in control of other perceptions. The number of occasions for resisting disturbance to this environmental convenience, and the number of parties finding occasion so to resist disturbances to it, quickly multiply. Kent and Martin have given more specific examples.

Here’s Bill’s take on this fifteen years ago:

@Bill_Powers1

The biggest insight I got out of Kent’s paper was that there is really
nobody in charge of a society, nobody to complain to about it. Each person
has reasons for behaving in certain ways, and when you add up all those
reasons and all those behaviors, you get the resultant, which is the current
form of the society. The only way to change a society is to promulgate ideas
that change a large number of reference signals or ways of perceiving in a
specific way; then the resultant will shift and the society as a whole will
start defending a different set of virtual reference levels.

PCT is a system of ideas that changes reference signals and ways of perceiving in such a way that both individual control and one’s participation in collective control improves. That suggests to me that PCT as a science (a collectively controlled system of perceptions), will prevail because those who comprehend it control better, and people can be taught how to control better by educational and therapeutic means that refer to it. It is up to us to internalize it in practice. This was Bill’s stated belief, too, though not in just those words. Comprehension of collective control is essential.