[From Bill Powers (931213.0930 MST)]
Kent McClelland (931212) --
Good, I'm glad you agree about contingencies. There's obviously
more to say on the subject; I just wanted to point out that
contingencies aren't an active form of social control. They can,
of course, be used as part of a control process by a person ("If
you do that again I'll clobber you"), in the form of a threat or
a promise. They can also be used to deny responsibility: "If you
don't give me what I want, the bloodshed will be on your head."
Chuck Tucker pointed out to me that his use of the term
"arrangements" means about the same as what I mean by
contingencies, and that I couldn't see what he meant until I had
put it in my own words. Too true.
···
---------------------------------------------------------------
Avery Andrews (931213.1047) --
RE: controller needing right perceptions
Of course the first bit of this was just cribbed off David
Chapman: `deciding what to do is easy when you know what's in
front of you'
David Chapman's saying is much too facile and egocentric for my
taste. Here in front of you is an apple, a pin, a razor blade, a
cheap stopwatch, and a 2.5-meter piece of string with two knots
in it 99.3121 cm apart, one knot right at one end. Now you know
what to do, right?
Obviously, since the length of a seconds pendulum at 39 degrees
latitude is 99.3121 cm, you stick the pin in the apple, use the
razor blade to cut off 1.2 meters of string, tie the string to
the pin, then use the distance between the knots on the remaining
piece of string to tell you where to hold the string while the
apple swings. You can then tell if the cheap stopwatch is
reasonably accurate. Any fool looking at what's in front of him
could see what to do.
There are uncountable ways of seeing what's in front of you,
depending on what perceptual functions you apply to the input
data. You have to pick a state of the chosen perception as a goal
before there's any reason to act at all. Even when you do act,
you can't predict what you're going to DO, because you can't
predict what disturbances will occur. What what's in front of you
doesn't tell you what to do at all. If you lean on the world
you'll fall on your face.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Best to all,
Bill P.