Complexity-list comments on PCT

[From Paul Stokes (991005.1219 GMT)]

Mary,

You have decided to keep this discussion alive for one more round at least!
I have circulated your comments to the complexity-list and await with
interest their responses. I appended your comments with some remarks of my
own, which I have placed below and augmented with excerpts from Complexity-L
for the sake of clarity. In these remarks I express my own considered
position vis-a-vis some of these questions.

I should say that I am working on a major text on 'emotions as control
systems' for which the following short-hand remarks act as some kind of a
template. Knowing the temperament of members of this group any deviation
from the 'pure standard' is likely to meet with fierce resistance. However,
I think I have found the via media in which Powers and Beer can live a
symbiotic and fruitful co-existence. I don't expect to be thanked for my
efforts but I do want to say that PCT does form the cornerstone for what I
am doing. I may want members of this group to actually read what I have
written and have yet to write . . .! Over to the comments:

I have been lurking on this list for some time. My interest was piqued
recently thought by the discussion on Powers' perceptual control theory. I
took the liberty of ventilating some of this discussion on the PCT
discussion mailserve list to which I also subscribe. I got the following
remarks in return from Mary Powers, with permission to circulate them here.
I look forward to hearing your views.

On one point I think Kim scores a direct hit on Powers: PCT is a theory of
the hierarchical (i.e., top-down) organization of control and this, as Kim
and many others have pointed out, cannot be the whole story.

Excerpt from Complexity-list discussion on PCT:

Discussant: "Powers seems, unlike a leopard, to have been able to change his
spots.
'Making Sense of Behavior' does not seem reductionist, at all, although I
may have missed it. Take a look at the new book. After 20 years further
study, and change in the world around him, it is possible he amended his
views. Take, for example, a single sentence from the new book: 'The higher
systems, rather than telling the lower ones how to act, tell the lower
systems what to perceive.' This doesn't sound at all like reductionism to
me."

Kim James: "Sorry Ken it happens to be rather the reverse. The lower brain
parts seem to
steer the upper ones according to the latest work reported by Jaak
Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience.OUP. New York 1998. ISBN:0195096738. $70.
Trouble with writing anything in this area is that it is out of date before
it hits the press."

Unfortunately, neither is it true, however, to argue that the mind operates
in a bottom-upwards priority fashion, as James appears to do here. This just
does not make sense. What we are looking at is multiple control systems
operating at different levels with sometimes divergent values, priorities or
goals. I think that Stafford Beer's viable system model is possibly the best
way to capture this. However, having said that I still think that Powers is
way ahead of the posse in his account of the architecture and dynamic system
of control. If Kim is seriously interested in the potential contribution of
cybernetics to an understanding of emotions he and others cannot do better
than a serious engagement with both of these outstanding workers in that
field.

    Paul A. STOKES
    Department of Sociology
    University College Dublin

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