Conflict a consequence of ignorance?

[MartinT]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

    I am inclined to the

hypothesis that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me it

sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is caused by
incorrect perception, and that therefore the degrees of freedom
limitation usually invoked as the reason for conflict is actually
just a side-effect of some misperception. Or are you saying that the
ignorance involved is a failure to perceive that it might be
possible to control by using some different, possibly as yet
unlearned, lower-level perceptions?

Martin

[bnhpct]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-14_08:28:20]

MMT: Or are you saying that the ignorance involved is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned, lower-level perceptions?

BN: Yes, the latter. The hunch is that it is possible to control by closing the loop through a different (or altered) environmental feedback function that does not depend upon the same aspects of the environment that the conflicting control loop depends upon. The alternative perceptions to be controlled may be unlearned, or (in my experience at least) they are just unrecognized, unnoticed, or ignored–three common forms of ignorance.

···

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

    I am inclined to the

hypothesis that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me it

sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is caused by
incorrect perception, and that therefore the degrees of freedom
limitation usually invoked as the reason for conflict is actually
just a side-effect of some misperception. Or are you saying that the
ignorance involved is a failure to perceive that it might be
possible to control by using some different, possibly as yet
unlearned, lower-level perceptions?

Martin

[MartinT]

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.14.23.34]

      [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-14_08:28:20]

MMT: Or are you
saying that the ignorance involved is a failure to perceive
that it might be possible to control by using some
different, possibly as yet unlearned, lower-level
perceptions?

      BN: Yes, the latter. The

hunch is that it is possible to control by closing the loop
through a different (or altered) environmental feedback
function that does not depend upon the same aspects of the
environment that the conflicting control loop depends upon.
The alternative perceptions to be controlled may be unlearned,
or (in my experience at least) they are just unrecognized,
unnoticed, or ignored–three common forms of ignorance.

Yes. I accept all that, and suspect that you see this as a

substantial part of learning, as do I. But my original question was
more slanted to your use of the word “always” when I asked you to
elaborate on “* I am inclined to the hypothesis that conflict is
always a consequence of ignorance*.​”.

I had one background thought in asking this question, and that was

the degree of freedom problem. You can’t simultaneously control N
perceptions if their control loops are constrained at any point to
pass through a bottleneck of less than N degrees of freedom. You may
resort to time-multiplexing, but that’s not an escape, since degrees
of freedom are a matter of bandwidth; they involve both space and
time.

As a crude example, although two people may be able to pass through

a door at the same time, three cannot. One must wait until the other
two have gone. That takes time, say 1 second. If you have a column
of people three wide, the column that exits the door is only two
wide, and if rows of the column appear more often than on average
1.5 seconds per row, there will be a crowd building up waiting to
get through (witness the fatalities in nightclub fires). If they
arrive on average more than 1.5 seconds apart, the exiting column
can form up in threes again and from the point of view of an
observer of the parade, the door might as well not have existed. If
a person now represents a degree of freedom, the door represents a
two df per second bottleneck, ensuring that the people all
controlling perceptions of being on the other side of the door will
be in conflict if they arrive at more than two per second, but no
conflict if they arrive more slowly.

Such bottlenecks can occur anywhere in the feedback loops, in the

output stages, in the environmental feedback functions, or even in
the sensory/perceptual levels below the ones that might be in
conflict.

···

---

Subsequently, another relevant point has shown up through your

interactions with Rick. He seem to feel that when two (or more?)
people are seeking the same scientific goal of understanding some
phenomenon, they must necessarily be in conflict, because one has by
some magic a correct and final understanding already, and anyone who
does not acknowledge that fact and continues to seek understanding
is necessarily (and unnecessarily) in conflict with the one who is
correct. I would like to see an analysis of that situation in the
“classic” terms of two control systems trying to control one
environmental variable to different perceived values. [My own
interpretation of this situation is that it is a model for a
conflict between a “young earth creationist” and a researcher into
evolutionary processes.]

Martin

Martin

[bnhpct]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_14:17:53 ET]​

​
Martin Taylor 2018.07.14.23.34 --​

​

Re degrees of freedom, yes, one may stipulate severely restrictive preconditions–there is only the one exit, each person must leave as soon as possible, etc. (Also, for the mathematical nicety of your analysis, they are extraordinarily orderly, but let that pass with an indulgent smile. Ironically, such strictures are reminiscent of the establishing condition for a behaviorist experiment. But even in the most viciously constrained circumstances not all perceptual variables are trapped. We are talking now of extremes. Viktor Frankl wrote most illuminatingly about the range of sometimes quite unexpected possibilities. Frankl as I am sure you know points to the crucial necessity of control–of purpose, as he put it. (It will be easy for someone to trivialize this too brief statement. I refer any such cavil to Frankl, but of course the caviller would have to actually read Frankl. Tant pis.) Is it really sufficient for Sysiphus to love his stone? Somewhere years ago I read an account of an encounter with the 10th Panchen Lama on his return to Tibet, whose equanimity and sense of humor were unperturbed after years of torture by the Chinese. (I haven’t been able to relocate that essay.) Fantasy, delusion, hallucination, despair, and perhaps psychosis can also escape double-bind strictures, though in ways that we I think would not willingly embrace or advocate.

On your second point, affect-laden variables (“saving face” is a mild form) are often controlled by controlling at zero a perception of being perceived as the loser of arguments. The discussion of the

Freier or Fraier perception is germane. More on that:

http://www.balashon.com/2007/10/freier.html

https://www.haaretz.com/1.4955222

https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-word-of-the-day-freier-1.5224434

https://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/freier-1.5970

I think I suggested already that the current incumbent of the White House exemplifies this zero-sum dynamic.

/Bruce

​

···

On Sat, Jul 14, 2018 at 11:59 PM Martin Taylor csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.14.23.34]

      [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-14_08:28:20]

MMT: Or are you
saying that the ignorance involved is a failure to perceive
that it might be possible to control by using some
different, possibly as yet unlearned, lower-level
perceptions?

      BN: Yes, the latter. The

hunch is that it is possible to control by closing the loop
through a different (or altered) environmental feedback
function that does not depend upon the same aspects of the
environment that the conflicting control loop depends upon.
The alternative perceptions to be controlled may be unlearned,
or (in my experience at least) they are just unrecognized,
unnoticed, or ignored–three common forms of ignorance.

Yes. I accept all that, and suspect that you see this as a

substantial part of learning, as do I. But my original question was
more slanted to your use of the word “always” when I asked you to
elaborate on “* I am inclined to the hypothesis that conflict is
always a consequence of ignorance*.​”.

I had one background thought in asking this question, and that was

the degree of freedom problem. You can’t simultaneously control N
perceptions if their control loops are constrained at any point to
pass through a bottleneck of less than N degrees of freedom. You may
resort to time-multiplexing, but that’s not an escape, since degrees
of freedom are a matter of bandwidth; they involve both space and
time.

As a crude example, although two people may be able to pass through

a door at the same time, three cannot. One must wait until the other
two have gone. That takes time, say 1 second. If you have a column
of people three wide, the column that exits the door is only two
wide, and if rows of the column appear more often than on average
1.5 seconds per row, there will be a crowd building up waiting to
get through (witness the fatalities in nightclub fires). If they
arrive on average more than 1.5 seconds apart, the exiting column
can form up in threes again and from the point of view of an
observer of the parade, the door might as well not have existed. If
a person now represents a degree of freedom, the door represents a
two df per second bottleneck, ensuring that the people all
controlling perceptions of being on the other side of the door will
be in conflict if they arrive at more than two per second, but no
conflict if they arrive more slowly.

Such bottlenecks can occur anywhere in the feedback loops, in the

output stages, in the environmental feedback functions, or even in
the sensory/perceptual levels below the ones that might be in
conflict.

------------



Subsequently, another relevant point has shown up through your

interactions with Rick. He seem to feel that when two (or more?)
people are seeking the same scientific goal of understanding some
phenomenon, they must necessarily be in conflict, because one has by
some magic a correct and final understanding already, and anyone who
does not acknowledge that fact and continues to seek understanding
is necessarily (and unnecessarily) in conflict with the one who is
correct. I would like to see an analysis of that situation in the
“classic” terms of two control systems trying to control one
environmental variable to different perceived values. [My own
interpretation of this situation is that it is a model for a
conflict between a “young earth creationist” and a researcher into
evolutionary processes.]

Martin





Martin

[MartinT]

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.15.30]

      [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-15_14:17:53 ET]​

          ​
            Martin

Taylor 2018.07.14.23.34 --​

​

          Re degrees of

freedom, yes, one may stipulate severely restrictive
preconditions–there is only the one exit, each person
must leave as soon as possible, etc.

I think you missed my point about degrees of freedom by the

proverbial country mile.

The "severely restrictive conditions" I was trying to exemplify

were, for example, that we have only two arms that we can move with
precision only at a certain speed. How fast can an expert
whack-a-mole? Three every two seconds? We have on the order of 100
muscles that could be independently tensioned, most at sub-Hz rates,
so for an order of magnitude guess, we might be able in principle to
control possibly 50 df/sec. I think that might be even an order of
magnitude too high, but it illustrates the principle that I was
trying to get across.

On the environmental side of the loop, a basic mouse has two degrees

of freedom for movement, and if we allow the arm holding it to move
accurately at 2 Hz, any loops that use the mouse as a method of
action for control are limited to a total of about 4 df/sec. A 3D
accelerometer with pressure sensitivity might get you up to maybe 10
df/sec, or even 20, but that is far below the rates of change of
perceptions that might, in principle, be controllable. So time
multiplexing is constrained in the way I tried to illustrate with
the trivial example of the df lining up to get through the door.

So my question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,

which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by learning new
techniques for controlling low-level perceptions. The new techniques
not only need to bypass the immediate bottleneck, but also need to
circumvent the absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature.
So the “always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.

By the way (to quote Trump) I don't think we are very far from being

in close agreement on this issue. If you had used “very often” for
“always” initially, I probably would not have commented.

Martin

[bnhpct]

MMT: my question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck, which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by learning new techniques for controlling low-level perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the “always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a little off-hand) remains suspect. ​

​

Yes, an off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

​But help me to understand how your observation about degrees of freedom applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular control loop certainly limits the control that can be effected by that loop. In a canonical conflict, a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths that can be means of control at the higher level? Otherwise, I don’t see how the line of argument applies to the considerations at hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being found or created as means of controlling at a higher level when the initial means of control are not working. Failure to find or create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance, though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to the range of freedom to employ alternative means, then by saying that the degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying my premise that the creativity of control systems is not finite, at least not in any obvious way.

···

​/Bruce​

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

    I am inclined to the

hypothesis that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me it

sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is caused by
incorrect perception, and that therefore the degrees of freedom
limitation usually invoked as the reason for conflict is actually
just a side-effect of some misperception. Or are you saying that the
ignorance involved is a failure to perceive that it might be
possible to control by using some different, possibly as yet
unlearned, lower-level perceptions?

Martin

[MartinT]

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved. Let’s go back to the three-abreast columns of
people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.
Think of each person as representing successive samples of the
output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.
The “classic” conflict is a simplification of this, in which the
“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.
That’s certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of
limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).
No. The single loop isn’t the source of the problem, but finding
alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.
which, I hope you now see, I am not,
I’m not denying it. I’m simply saying that there are “envelope”
limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.
Martin

···

On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin
wrote:

MMT: my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect. ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

[bnhpct]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

···

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin > wrote:

MMT: my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect. ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor > > <csgnet@lists.illinois.edu          > > > wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

···

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[PHILIP_JERAIR_YERANO]

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[PHILIP_JERAIR_YERANO]

It’s common sense though

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:39:47]

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:35 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

It’s common sense though

Yes, it sure is. And it would be lovely if it were correct. But I think this is a good example of where common sense is wrong.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[PHILIP_JERAIR_YERANO]

show me its wrong

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:39:47]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:35 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

It’s common sense though

Yes, it sure is. And it would be lovely if it were correct. But I think this is a good example of where common sense is wrong.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_15:44:51]

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:47 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

PY: show me its wrong

RM: It’s tough to prove a negative. I think it would be better if you could show me that it is right. That is show me that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations. Â

BestÂ

Rick

–

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:39:47]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:35 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

It’s common sense though

Yes, it sure is. And it would be lovely if it were correct. But I think this is a good example of where common sense is wrong.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[PHILIP_JERAIR_YERANO]

Its common sense that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations.Â

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:45 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_15:44:51]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:47 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

PY: show me its wrong

RM: It’s tough to prove a negative. I think it would be better if you could show me that it is right. That is show me that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations. Â

BestÂ

Rick

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:39:47]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:35 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

It’s common sense though

Yes, it sure is. And it would be lovely if it were correct. But I think this is a good example of where common sense is wrong.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_15:57:46]

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:50 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Its common sense that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations.Â

QED.

BestÂ

RickÂ

–

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:45 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_15:44:51]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:47 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

PY: show me its wrong

RM: It’s tough to prove a negative. I think it would be better if you could show me that it is right. That is show me that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations. Â

BestÂ

Rick

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:39:47]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:35 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

It’s common sense though

Yes, it sure is. And it would be lovely if it were correct. But I think this is a good example of where common sense is wrong.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[PHILIP_JERAIR_YERANO]

are you not going to show its wrong?

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:57 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_15:57:46]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:50 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Its common sense that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations.Â

QED.

BestÂ

RickÂ

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 3:45 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_15:44:51]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:47 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

PY: show me its wrong

RM: It’s tough to prove a negative. I think it would be better if you could show me that it is right. That is show me that conflict is, indeed, due to interpretations and is resolved by changing interpretations. Â

BestÂ

Rick

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:39:47]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:35 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

It’s common sense though

Yes, it sure is. And it would be lovely if it were correct. But I think this is a good example of where common sense is wrong.Â

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:29 PM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_12:28:17]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:40 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

Conflict is due to interpretations. Conflict is resolved by changing interpretations.

RM: Not according to PCT.

BestÂ

Rick

Â

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 11:13 AM, Richard Marken csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]

RM: I haven’t had time to read this thread in detail but I’ll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â

RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one’s existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the “correct” (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a “non-directive” therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying “why don’t you just take the bike to the beach”) since that obviously “correct” solution may not be one that fits into the person’s existing hierarchical control structure.Â

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â

Best

Rick

Â

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

–

[bnhpct]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-17_09:22:12 ET]

RM: all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables.

That’s a good point. To be accurate, the hypothesis is that the persistence of a conflict is due to ignorance.Â

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error “E. coli” process.

That’s one way in which a solution can be reached, but examples given by Tim and others include cases of ordinary evaluation and decision-making processes which were not possible until the client was concurrently aware of both of the purposes that were attempting to employ the same means in different ways. That’s my experience too, but unlike these reported examples my experience is not documented where you can look at it.

RM: So when you say that “conflict is a result of ignorance” you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of.

Rather, the hypothesis can only be true if there is an unknown solution to the conflict. The hypothesis says nothing about the role of the therapist, but my understanding an experience of MoL is that it is the client who comes up with the solution, and often that how the magic happens is unknown to the therapist, and sometime even to the client. I did affirm this in this thread. Maybe you missed that because you answered before taking time to read what you’re answering?

···

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]

OK. I guess we can say it’s a suggestive but unproven “hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance”, where ‘ignorance’ ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â

Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.

I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A
 low-level example: the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an ‘ignoring’ function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

  On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin

wrote:

MMT:Â my
question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck,
which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by
learning new techniques for controlling low-level
perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass
the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the
absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the
“always” in your original comment (which I suspect was a
little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​
​

        Yes, an

off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis
and hedged with “I’m inclined toward”.

        ​But help me to

understand how your observation about degrees of freedom
applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A
DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular
control loop certainly limits the control that can be
effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a

misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of
conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop
is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of

people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows
only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad,
the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand
one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be
possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and
green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per
second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third.
Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an
inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the

output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the
magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The
rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples
arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any
one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as
fast as the input sample rate. The “door” perhaps represents the two
independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can
be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement.
Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the
three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the

“door” is the value of some external variable that two controllers
want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value
is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic
equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and
Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y.
Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference
values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

        In a canonical conflict,

a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing
action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you
considering the “degrees of freedom” here to be the range of
alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths
that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of

limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and
arms (and even of our speech, though that’s rather a special case).

        Otherwise, I don't see

how the line of argument applies to the considerations at
hand. That’s why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to
be “off by a country mile.” I don’t see a direct application
of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that
alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being
found or created as means of controlling at a higher level
when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding

alternative means of control that don’t create a new bottleneck when
coupled with the competing controller’s operation, is the
single-loop’s solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops
may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive
the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go
example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of
the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for
the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of
conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of
concern for MoL.

        Failure to find or

create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance,
though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in
fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to
the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

        then by saying that the

degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying
my premise that the creativity of control systems is not
finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope"

limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a
finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and
if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time,
it won’t work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

      On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor

<csgnet@lists.illinois.edu >
wrote:

        [Bruce Nevin

2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

            I am inclined to the hypothesis

that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

        Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me

it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is
caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the
degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason
for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some
misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved
is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to
control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned,
lower-level perceptions?

        Martin

–
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[rsmarken]

[Rick Marken 2018-07-17_11:02:19]

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-17_09:22:12 ET]

RM: all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables.

BN: That's a good point. To be accurate, the hypothesis is that the persistence of a conflict is due to ignorance.Â

RM: That's better. If reorganization is able to find a solution to the conflict then one could say that the person was ignorant of that solution while in the conflict. But I still don't like saying that the persistence of conflict is due to ignorance because it seems to suggest that there is a specific means of solving the conflict that could be taught to the person, much as a teachers teaches a student how to solve a math problem. So it could suggest to therapists that their role is like that of a "directive" teacher rather than a "non-directive" guide. I tried to get at the difference in how one deals with psychological problems (which are the result of internal conflicts) and formal problems (like math problems) in this paper I did with Tim.Â
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/wsuxgqbokqkzlqh/SolvingPsychProbs.pdf?dl=0&gt;https://www.dropbox.com/s/wsuxgqbokqkzlqh/SolvingPsychProbs.pdf?dl=0

BestÂ

RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error "E. coli" process.

That's one way in which a solution can be reached, but examples given by Tim and others include cases of ordinary evaluation and decision-making processes which were not possible until the client was concurrently aware of both of the purposes that were attempting to employ the same means in different ways. That's my experience too, but unlike these reported examples my experience is not documented where you can look at it.

RM: So when you say that "conflict is a result of ignorance" you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of.

Rather, the hypothesis can only be true if there is an unknown solution to the conflict. The hypothesis says nothing about the role of the therapist, but my understanding an experience of MoL is that it is the client who comes up with the solution, and often that how the magic happens is unknown to the therapist, and sometime even to the client. I did affirm this in this thread. Maybe you missed that because you answered before taking time to read what you're answering?

RM: I haven't had time to read this thread in detail but I'll just say ...
/Bruce

[Rick Marken 2018-07-16_11:13:21]
RM: I haven't had time to read this thread in detail but I'll just say that I think this is a topic that is most relevant to practitioners. And one of the main practitioners on CSGNet is Warren Mansell so I would be interested in hearing what he thinks of the idea that conflict is a consequence of ignorance.Â
RM: As a non-practitioner all I have to go on is my understanding of conflict in terms of PCT and I would say that, from that perspective, conflict is never the result of ignorance. Conflicts result from setting different references for the same variable or very similar variables. These conflicts are a consequence, not of ignorance, but of the structure of one's existing hierarchy of control systems. Ignorance implies that there was some non-conflictive way to control for the higher level variables that are setting the inconsistent goals for the same lower level variable. But such a way does not exist given the current structure of the control hierarchy of the person (or persons) in conflict.Â
RM: I think this fact is the basis of the MOL approach to therapy, which recognizes that the person or persons in conflict can only resolve the conflict by reorganizing their control hierarchy via the random trial and error "E. coli" process. MOL recognizes that neither the person or persons in conflict nor an outside observer of the conflict (such as a therapist) can possibly know the "correct" (non-conflictive) solution to the conflict, which is why MOL is a "non-directive" therapy and MOL therapists are specifically instructed that their job is not to propose solutions to a conflict (such as saying "why don't you just take the bike to the beach") since that obviously "correct" solution may not be one that fits into the person's existing hierarchical control structure.Â
RM: So when you say that "conflict is a result of ignorance" you are implying that there is a known solution to a conflict and that the job of a therapist is to reveal the solution to the conflict that the conflicted person is ignorant of. As far as I can tell, this is the exact opposite of the PCT -based MOL approach to therapy.Â
Best
Rick

Â

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-15_18:22:27 ET]
OK. I guess we can say it's a suggestive but unproven "hypothesis that conflict most of the time is due to ignorance", where 'ignorance' ranges from lack of input function to ignoring, with points in between.Â
Ignoring seems to be a control process worth investigating. One reason for ignoring a variable might be because to recognize it would conflict with control of some other variable(s), as in the freier dynamic, or in a different way as in denial of white privilege.
I believe that there are control systems specifically for ignoring. A Â low-level example:Â the primary function of efferent innervation of the outer hair cells in the cochlea is understood to be to amplify the signal picked up by the inner hair cells, but they seem also to have a selective input-cancellation function. I speculate that they are involved in selectively hearing one voice amid many conversations, or following one instrument in an orchestral sound; perhaps also the muscles attached to the bones in the middle ear (tensor tympani and stapedius) whose primary function is thought to be to protect the eardrum from loud sounds can have an 'ignoring' function. (In myoclonus they can actually cause the eardrum to emanate sound out from the ear.) But there seem to be many ways to ignore perceptual input and higher-level perceptual constructs. The remarkable effects in studies of hypnosis indicate that we have very powerful capacities to ignore as well as to imagine (hallucinate). It would be hard to justify an assumption that the mechanisms operative in the special circumstances of hypnosis or other altered states have no role in ordinary experience.

/Bruce

[Martin Taylor 2018.07.15.16.46]

MMT: my question to you was how you might ease the df bottleneck, which might occur anywhere in the conflicted loops, by learning new techniques for controlling low-level perceptions. The new techniques not only need to bypass the immediate bottleneck, but also need to circumvent the absolute limits imposed by our limited musculature. So the "always" in your original comment (which I suspect was a little off-hand) remains suspect.  ​ ​

Yes, an off-hand hunch provocative of thought, labelled hypothesis and hedged with "I'm inclined toward".
​But help me to understand how your observation about degrees of freedom applies to this matter. Clearly, I am missing something. A DF bottleneck at some particular juncture in a particular control loop certainly limits the control that can be effected by that loop.

This may be true, but I think this is the start of a misunderstanding, I was intruding myself into a discussion of conflict, and that inherently means that more than one control loop is involved.

Let's go back to the three-abreast columns of people/degrees-of-freedom trying to get through a door that allows only two per second to go through. Now suppose that in each triad, the left one wears blue, the middle one green, and the right-hand one red. If they arrive at two triads per second, it would be possible for all the red-shirts to go through, leaving the blue and green piling up in the ante-chamber. If they arrive at one triad per second, any two coloured sets could bet through, leaving the third. Or in either case, a mix of colours could get through, leaving an inverse mixture in the ante-chamber.

Think of each person as representing successive samples of the output of one of three perceptions being controlled, say the magnitudes of the red, blue, and green intensities of a pixel. The rate of arrival is the rate at which independent perceptual samples arrive in sensors for the three primaries. In order to control any one of them, the output sample rate for that one must be at least as fast as the input sample rate. The "door" perhaps represents the two independent directions of movement for a mouse, which we assume can be done at a rate of one df/sec for each direction of movement. Using that mouse, one could perfectly well control any two of the three, but not all three at the same time.

The "classic" conflict is a simplification of this, in which the "door" is the value of some external variable that two controllers want to perceive each with a different reference value. That value is the bottleneck where the two control loops converge. The triadic equivalent would be a case in which there are two variables, X and Y, and three competitors have different references for X+Y and X-Y. Any two of them can bring their perceptions to their reference values, but all three cannot do so simultaneously.

In a canonical conflict, a restriction on the efficacy of q.o is imposed by opposing action produced by the conflicting control loop. Are you considering the "degrees of freedom" here to be the range of alternative control loops and environmental feedback paths that can be means of control at the higher level?

That's certainly a possibility, but I was actually thinking of limitations such as the limited number and speed of our hands and arms (and even of our speech, though that's rather a special case).

Otherwise, I don't see how the line of argument applies to the considerations at hand. That's why I reframed it in terms that seem to you to be "off by a country mile." I don't see a direct application of degrees of freedom in a single loop to a speculation that alternative lower-level loops are always capable of being found or created as means of controlling at a higher level when the initial means of control are not working.

No. The single loop isn't the source of the problem, but finding alternative means of control that don't create a new bottleneck when coupled with the competing controller's operation, is the single-loop's solution to the problem. Lower-level supporting loops may, in principle, always be imaginable, but can they also survive the other bottlenecks. In your car versus where people want to go example, the solution does not involve conflict unless the use of the car or the alternative happened to make the route impassable for the other. This situation may not be so kind in other cases of conflict, particularly internal ones such as are the realm of concern for MoL.

Failure to find or create alternative lower-level means, I called ignorance, though it might also be called failure of imagination. If in fact you are applying the notion of degrees of freedom to the range of freedom to employ alternative means,

which, I hope you now see, I am not,

then by saying that the degrees of freedom there are limited you are merely denying my premise that the creativity of control systems is not finite, at least not in any obvious way.

I'm not denying it. I'm simply saying that there are "envelope" limits to which any such creative solution must conform. There is a finite supply of tools (muscles) and time in which to use them, and if the creative solution needs unavailable tools or too much time, it won't work. I previously said that in less concrete language.

Martin

[Bruce Nevin 2018-07-13_18:15:28 ET]

I am inclined to the hypothesis that conflict is always a consequence of ignorance.​

Could you elaborate on this, emphasising the "always"? To me it sounds as though you are saying that all conflict is caused by incorrect perception, and that therefore the degrees of freedom limitation usually invoked as the reason for conflict is actually just a side-effect of some misperception. Or are you saying that the ignorance involved is a failure to perceive that it might be possible to control by using some different, possibly as yet unlearned, lower-level perceptions?

Martin

--
Richard S. MarkenÂ

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you

···

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 2:14 PM Richard Marken <<mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu>csgnet@lists.illinois.edu> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Bruce Nevin <<mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu>csgnet@lists.illinois.edu> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:17 PM Martin Taylor <<mailto:mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net>mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net> wrote:

On 2018/07/15 4:14 PM, Bruce Nevin wrote:

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 10:07 PM Martin Taylor <<mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu>csgnet@lists.illinois.edu> wrote:

have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery

--
Richard S. MarkenÂ
"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.�
                --Antoine de Saint-Exupery