[Bruce Nevin 2018-03-17_19:42:31 ET]
philip 2018.03.14 --
I'll start with your objections to using the terminology and concepts of
PCT. You say that doing so makes what we say less clear than ordinary
language used by other people.
PJY: Instead of saying "I am controlling a perception of doing such and
such by keeping a perception of it at my reference level and I have such
and such loop gain", these people simply say "I am doing such and
such because it is my intention and I am able".
But of course when we talk about what we are currently intending and doing,
as in this example, we do in fact use ordinary language like everybody
else. We only use the terminology and concepts of PCT when we are concerned
with modeling behavior, with understanding some aspect of the perceptual
control hierarchy, or with learning better how to employ the terminology
and concepts of PCT. And we do that here because this email forum is
dedicated to such purposes.
PJY: It is as if speaking in PCT makes you less intelligible but at the
same time makes you think you're being more precise.
Well, no, we actually are being more precise when we are concerned with the
purposes to which this email forum is dedicated, and actually it is very
difficult and perhaps not possible to to be intelligible about such matters
without using the terminology and concepts of PCT. This is true of any
science. Speaking as a linguist, I can affirm that every science has its
specialized sublanguage with subject-matter specific vocabulary, strict
definitions, and consequent restrictions on word combinability that make
the ways of talking within the science less intelligible to people who are
not engaged in the science and have not learned to use its sublanguage. (On
sublanguages, see e.g. Kittredge, Richard & John Lehrberger, 1982,
*Sublanguage:
Studies of Language in Restricted Semantic Domains*, de Gruyter, and Harris
et al. 1989, *The form of information in science*, Springer Verlag.)
PJY: People who have interesting and brilliant philosophies about
life become, upon adopting the language of PCT, more concerned with
expressing these philosophies in the language of PCT than about simply
expressing the philosophies in whichever way they would have done naturally
before. It is as if PCT is a hindrance to people because it doesn't help
them build a better language out of english. I am saying this because I
truly want to benefit from all of your experiences.
Perhaps you want to contact individuals privately and see if they are
willing to talk to you about their personal philosophies and experiences.
If they have time and interest they might do so.
PJY: The purpose of language is to contain language. We use one language to
build another and so on.
You'll have to explain what you mean. A language does contain
subject-matter sublanguages, including its own metalanguage, but I would
hardly say that was the purpose of language.
Your post has two other main parts, one concerned with your ideas about
consciousness and the other advocating that we acquaint ourselves with Mr.
Preda's ideas about physics.
PJY: It is not within the scope of PCT to discuss the laws of nature. The
reality of what is "out there" is a discussion tangential to PCT.
I agree, and in particular exploration of Mr. Preda's ideas about physics
is outside the purposes of this forum. You could certainly invite people
here to participate in an email discussion group devoted to this. It could
be as simple as a list of email addresses that a group of people maintain
in the headers of the email that they exchange with each other. But you are
quite correct, this forum is not the place for it, and that discussion is
not going to happen here. If you persist in trying to discuss it here, you
will be frustrated by a lack of response because that is not what we are
talking about here.
You give an agentive role to consciousness. Your diagrams show connections
between control loops, such that a variable in the environment of one
control loop (call it A) provides reference input to the comparator of
another (call it B). This corresponds to the assertion in your post that
PJY: consciousness is the control of intention.
In the diagrams, loop A (the superordinate one) is closed through a blue
dot in its environment, receiving input from it on the left side and
influencing its state by its output on the right side. In addition, a
disturbance influences the state of the environment variable represented by
the blue dot. So taken by itself loop A is the familiar PCT loop (although
the disturbance label is rather awkwardly placed at the same level as the
input and output functions, so that the line separating the organism from
its environment has to be hand-drawn like a bell curve.)
Subordinate loop B has the same familiar constituents in the same mostly
familiar arrangement, except that it receives its reference input from the
environment of loop A above it. This is like nothing in PCT. In PCT, the
input that constitutes the reference signal for B comes from the error
outputs of the other control loops which are thereby calling for the
perceptual signal from B. Those connections in the perceptual control
hierarchy are missing from your diagrams.
If the environment of loop A is also outside loop B and in its environment,
then this says that one control system can reach inside another and set its
reference value, much as a person can go over to the thermostat on the wall
and change its setting. I don't think this is what you intend this diagram
to mean.
If loop A is above loop B in the perceptual hierarchy, then you are
proposing something new and you need to provide the justification for it.
Everything in the canonical PCT loop diagram has been subject to test and
verification, including neuro-anatomical verification at the lowest levels.
Loop B controls a perception, with the amount of that perception that is to
be perceived determined by the strength of the error output from level A.
There is no intervening disturbance, no intervening environmental variable
to be disturbed nor perception of same to be controlled, indeed there is no
intervening environment in the technical sense that is meant by that term
in the theory.
Your reason for doing this seems to arise from your subjective sense that
consciousness has an agentive role. In my experience--and it is also my
experience so far that anybody can verify this--consciousness does not
*do* anything;
it just *is*.
You write about the shifting of attention from an ongoing control process
to the control of some other control process, and then the resumption of
the first when the second is concluded or abandoned. We are already able to
describe and model this phenomenon reasonably well within PCT without
adding consciousness as an agency. Two ways of doing this were discussed in
connection with a quotation of Bill's description of looking for his
glasses. The simplest is at the sequence level. In B:CP, Bill proposes a
neural structure (others are possible) that could recognize the sequence of
phonemes /j/, /u/, and /s/ comprising the word *juice*. The signal that /j/
has been perceived is persisted by a local feedback loop, and then the /u/
likewise, until with perception of /s/ the recursive signals are terminated
and a signal is sent up representing the word *juice*. A word is a brief
event perception, not usually interruptable (pace things like
"unbef*ckinglievable"). The same persisting of interim states applies at
the sequence level, as long as a higher level is producing error that
connects to the reference input for that sequence even while control of the
sequence is temporarily not possible because the means of control are
occupied for some other purpose. Example: I'm on the telephone with you and
I'm writing down an address, my pencil breaks, I take it to the pencil
sharpener and sharpen it, then I resume writing down the address.
You say that consciousness directs this.
PJY: Suppose I am doing something and then I become totally distracted from
it due to some external event. The thing I was doing before is no longer in
the least occupying my attention. And then the distractor passes and I
remember what I was doing before and resume doing it. I cannot be said to
have been doing this something while I was distracted and this makes me
think that the intention was totally gone for that interval. Consciousness
is what allows me to resume what I was doing based upon my memory.
What you are talking about According to PCT, the reference signal for the
first thing you were doing at the program or sequence level is still
present even while your means of control (your eyes and hands, in many
cases) are being used to control other perceptions that constitute the
interruption. You had a moment of conflict--do I continue doing X, or do
this interrupting Y instead? You resolved the conflict by interrupting
control of X long enough to control Y, and then you could resume
controlling X. We resolve these kinds of conflicts all the time, very often
without any conscious thought at all. You get a telephone call from a
friend. You want to get an address from her. You get a pencil out of a
container on your desk. The pencil tip is broken. You sharpen it. All this
while you are talking to your friend on the phone. You ask her for the
address. As you hear the address, you write it down. You conclude your
conversation. You put the pencil back in the container. There are at least
three overlapping control processes here (treating the conversation as
though it were a single process).
You're saying that consciousness is a function of a control loop that sets
the reference value or intention for other control loops. This is a
homunculus theory of consciousness. Where does the reference value for the
reference-setting consciousness agent loop come from? What determines the
intentions of the homunculus? And how does it shift rapidly from one
internal 'environment' to another? How does it stop setting the reference
of one control loop and start setting the reference for another?
PJY: consciousness is like teleportation, where you teleport yourself to a
position you have been to in the past[...].Think of it like encountering a
fork in the road and taking one path, and then upon hitting a dead end,
teleporting back to the fork and taking the other path.
These are similes ("like teleportation") and metaphors. Similes and
metaphors are suggestive, and may be useful for a non-technical
presentation of a science, but they must refer to testable principles and
demonstrable phenomena.
And very often, perhaps most of the time, an interrupted control process
resumes after successfully concluding the control of perception that
interrupted it, not after a 'fork' reaches a dead end.
PJY: I'm not trying to give the impression here of memory being a copy of
a perceptual signal.
There is lots of evidence that memory is made of stored copies of
perceptual signals. (A caveat: there is definitely a creative aspect to
memory, not entirely separable from imagination. Lower-level signals from
memory can be recombined at higher levels with a balance of strengths that
is different from the strengths that they precisely had in any particular
prior experience.)
PJY: Consciousness is inextricably tied to knowing "I am doing this" as
well as to knowing that you are not being prevented from doing this.
Suppose I am doing something and someone knows what I am doing and comes
along and tries to totally distract me from doing it. Consciousness is in
my behavior of resisting the distraction that I know he's attempting.
You don't need to know anything about the disturbance or the origin of the
disturbance to resist it. You might be aware of either or both, but it's
not necessary. All that is necessary is for the perception that you are
controlling to deviate from its reference value, the way you want it to be.
Control is where the controlled variable is not affected by disturbances.
A disturbance can certainly interfere with control without ending control.
You can take the mouse away from the cat, but the cat continues being quite
alert for the possibility that you might drop it where it can grab it back.
Gusts of wind can make your car veer from the center of its lane but your
control by means of the steering wheel never stops. Someone opening the
door on a windy day causes the ambient temperature to drop before the
control loop with the source of heat is able to bring it back up to the
reference level but thermostatic control never stops. You control the
heading of the car while your conscious attention is on your conversation
with a passenger in the back seat. The thermostat has no need of
consciousness.
PJY: consciousness is the control of intention. Well, the only thing that
can disturb your intention is a distraction to your awareness - a load on
your cognitive capacity.
A disturbance is an influence which would cause the controlled variable to
depart from its reference value unless it is resisted. A distraction is an
alternative variable such that in order to start controlling it you must
suspend controlling what you had been controlling. A distraction is not a
disturbance unless it actually causes the variable that you were
controlling to depart from its reference value.
But here you are talking about your homunculus of consciousness, where
the *reference
value* for control loop B is what homunculus control loop A is controlling.
Yes, your diagram says that A is controlling something represented by a
*blue
circle in its environment *which is the *origin *of the reference value for
B, but your words say that homunculus-consciousness control loop A
*controls
the intention* or reference value of control loop B, so your words take
that spurious blue dot and that spurious internal 'environment' right out
of the picture. The controlled variable for homunculus consciousness loop A
is a perception of the reference value for control loop B. This is true for
every control loop in the control hierarchy that may be subject to
conscious attention--which is *every* control loop in the hierarchy. And
the consciousness-homunculus control loop can shift from the reference
value of one control loop to the reference value of another instantly and
control it, even as that reference value is determined by the error outputs
of other control loops in the conventional PCT hierarchy.
Please do explain how you are going to test that.
/Bruce
On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 9:46 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN > <pyeranos@ucla.edu >> wrote:
[philip 2018.03.14]
I have written this to express something I feel about our place in the
world. It begins with a discussion relevant to this thread and ends on a
different note.
This is what consciousness means to me:
Suppose I am doing something and then I become totally distracted from it
due to some external event. The thing I was doing before is no longer in
the least occupying my attention. And then the distractor passes and I
remember what I was doing before and resume doing it. I cannot be said
to
have been doing this something while I was distracted and this makes me
think that the intention was totally gone for that interval.
Consciousness
is what allows me to resume what I was doing based upon my memory. In
this
sense, consciousness is like teleportation, where you teleport yourself
to
a position you have been to in the past (note that you are teleporting to
a
position you have already been to and not to an arbitrary position). I'm
not trying to give the impression here of memory being a copy of a
perceptual signal. Think of it like encountering a fork in the road and
taking one path, and then upon hitting a dead end, teleporting back to
the
fork and taking the other path.
Consciousness is inextricably tied to knowing "I am doing this" as well
as
to knowing that you are not being prevented from doing this. Suppose I am
doing something and someone knows what I am doing and comes along and
tries
to totally distract me from doing it. Consciousness is in my behavior of
resisting the distraction that I know he's attempting.
Consciousness is not so much a matter of "well now that you mention it, I
am in fact doing this" as it is "these are my choices, and I am choosing
this option". In a big way, consciousness is involved in preventing
conflict or error before it happens. But once it happens, you teleport
back
to where you were before it happened and see if you could have made
another
choice. This may sound like the MOL. But I don't want to give the
impression here of moving to higher levels. It is simply a matter of
remembering all the variables which existed at the time you made the
first
choice, and then seeing if the opportunity is there to make another
choice.
Taking a look at what I said earlier: consciousness is the control of
intention. Control is where the controlled variable is not affected by
disturbances. Well, the only thing that can disturb your intention is
a distraction to your awareness - a load on your cognitive capacity. If
this distraction it is an inanimate thing, you can remove this inanimate
thing from your presence. But if its a person who is intending to
distract
you or stand in your way, you cannot just remove this thing. You have to
somehow do something different. You have to somehow do something to this
person's awareness.
Communication occurs through words and these words exist in a hierarchy
in
the sense that words contain other words. For example, the word computer
is
greater than the word transistor, and the word controller is greater than
the word computer. When you describe the truth to someone in such a
manner
that they truly understand something that concerns them, you sometimes
elicit in them an "aha" moment where you can see them visibly radiate
energy at the realization that you have helped them make. This sight
makes
me think about the release of energy occuring as a result of nuclear
fusion. And so it just seems to me like what we are always trying to do
is
to fuse nuclei by using words. There is no way to do this without words.
Thus the words are inextricably linked to our awareness. And it is this
awareness that keeps us from becoming feral as is the fate
of humans prevented from any exposure to language.
Now, the purpose of language is not to say "the behavioral illusion is
such and such". The purpose of language is to contain language. We use
one
language to build another and so on. I have noticed that people who do
not
study PCT often speak more clearly about behavior than those who do.
Instead of saying "I am controlling a perception of doing such and such
by
keeping a perception of it at my reference level and I have such and such
loop gain", these people simply say "I am doing such and such because it
is
my intention and I am able". It is as if speaking in PCT makes you
less intelligible but at the same time makes you think you're being more
precise. People who have interesting and brilliant philosophies about
life become, upon adopting the language of PCT, more concerned with
expressing these philosophies in the language of PCT than about simply
expressing the philosophies in whichever way they would have done
naturally
before. It is as if PCT is a hindrance to people because it doesn't help
them build a better language out of english. I am saying this because I
truly want to benefit from all of your experiences.
Now, I have come to the point in the conversation where I have to say
something useful to lead us all in the right direction. It is not within
the scope of PCT to discuss the laws of nature. The reality of what is
"out
there" is a discussion tangential to PCT. But physics is something that
the people of the world need help with to understand - to fuse their
nuclei, so to speak. The problems of physics are monumentally difficult,
and no ordinary man could solve them. But imagine there is another man
out
there like Bill, a man who could take the world by intellectual force.
Bill Powers was not alone, as it has come to my attention that there is
another. This man's task, which is to provide a unified theory of
everything in physics, is so important that the fate of all of humanity
depends on it. He is a man worthy of attention, and I believe we should
put
his theories to the test. The renaissance and englightenment were a time
when knowledge was fueled by a growing body of literature
concerning the scientific exploration of natural phenomena. In this
culture, science was born through the reproduction of experimental
results. I have seen a man explain phenomena of nature,
hitherto unexplainable, through the use of scientific inquiry and
investigation. Yet he is accused of pseudo-science and ignored. I am
appaled at what I have seen, first with Bill, and then with Dan Preda. We
should reproduce his experiments and see if he tells lies. And if he
does
not, we should publish our results and plant the seeds of the next
scientific revolution. I have said my piece.
On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 4:27 PM, Bruce Nevin <bnhpct@gmail.com> wrote:
[Bruce Nevin 2018-03-14_19:07:06 ET]
Philip,
I think you're talking about consciousness in the sense of awareness.
The
difference between conscious control and subconscious control is
awareness.
You are not aware of the numerous muscle tensions in many parts of your
body that maintain the orientation of your head and eyes toward these
words
until perhaps you might become aware of these tensions now as I suggest
that you pause and become aware of them. Before that, I suppose that you
were consciously controlling perceptions which we might call "What the
heck
is this Bruce Nevin guy saying now?".
Awareness is mobile. You can become aware of perceptions at every level
of the hierarchy. You can become aware of virtually any perception. How
might you represent this property of awareness in a diagram? Your
diagram
suggests a meta-control system functioning as a kind of homunculus.
Awareness has no outputs and does not control its inputs. Consciousness
is
simply aware.
People sometimes confuse awareness with use of language. You can talk
about any perception that you become aware of. But simple awareness of a
perception is without words, and words that seem perfectly plausible may
correspond to no nonverbal perception. The familiarity of those
particular
word co-occurrences seems to suffice. This happens frequently in some
fields.
A number of people have tried to make awareness an epiphenomenon of some
kind, to exorcise the "ghost in the machine". I don't think they have
succeeded. Awareness, consciousness, and qualia remain unaccounted for.
Perceptions as we experience them are not rates of firing in neural
bundles. A robot has no functions that distinguish conscious control
from
subconscious control.
/Bruce
On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 2:48 PM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN < >>> pyeranos@ucla.edu> wrote:
I do not agree with the topology i have demonstrated in the figure
above
because I have drawn a controlled variable inside a controller. This can
be
seen by the circles labeled as "?" inside a closed region. In trying to
keep the controlled variable inside the environment at all times, I
have
edited the figure into the following, which always shows an arrow from
CV
to input crossing a boundary line:
On Sun, Mar 11, 2018 at 11:22 AM, PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN < >>>> pyeranos@ucla.edu> wrote:
This is an incomplete diagram representing conscious control.
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