[From Rick Marken (2007.04.02.0920)]
A small complaint. In MSOB, p. 25, after an excellent discussion of the nature of perception from a PCT perspective, comes the following:
Half of the jokes in the world are about one person assuming that everyone else sees the world the same way. The husband hangs his new moose head over the fireplace in the living room and says to his aghast wife, “There, doesn’t that look great?”. The other half of the jokes are about people who are unable to see what everyone else (supposedly) can see – that the wife looking at the moose head is trying to remember the phone number of her lawyer.
My complaint is this. Although it is never stated explicitly, this passage leaves me (anyway) with the impression that disagreements result when different people perceiving the same things differently.
I can see two possible implications people might pick up from what is being said here. One implication is that the wife is calling her lawyer because the moose head that looks great to her husband looks terrible to her; the husband and wife have different perceptions of the quality of the moose head. I think someone new to PCT could pick up this implication and conclude that PCT views disagreements as a result of people seeing the quality of same thing (the moose head) differently. I think this is misleading because, from a PCT point of view, perceptions are just perceptions. The quality of a perception (like the perception of a moose head) is determined by the reference specification for that perception; a high quality perception is one that matches the reference and a low quality perception is one that deviates from the reference. Assuming that the wife and husband both perceive a moose head, the reason why the wife is calling the lawyer about it is not because she perceives the moose head as low quality but, rather, because she has a different reference for “things over fireplace” than does her husband.
A second possible implication is that the wife and husband are actually perceiving two different things; the husband is perceiving a moose head and the wife is perceiving some kind of monstrous rat, say. Again, however, the implication is that it is the difference in perception that is cause of the disagreement. But this, like the implication that it is a difference in the perception of quality that is the reason for the disagreement, ignores the fact that it is references – not the perceptions themselves – that determine whether a perception is disliked or liked. Even if the wife perceives as a monstrous rat what the husband perceives as a moose head, there will be no disagreement unless the rat perception is not wanted by the wife while the moose head perception is wanted by the husband.
The way the situation is described in the story quoted above, one could walk away (I think) with a cause-effect notion of how disagreement works. It sounds like different perceptions of the same things cause different actions; the husband’s perception of the thing over the fireplace as a nice moose head causes his joy while the wife’s perception of the same thing as either an ugly moose head or some other awful thing causes her to call the lawyer. In fact, it’s not the perceptions that cause the different behaviors of wife and husband. Rather, it’s the perceptions relative to each of their references for the state of those perceptions that lead to actions aimed at bringing those perceptions to their reference levels.
I am working on a new approach to explaining the role of perception in PCT. Such an explanation will include a discussion (as in the first part of the chapter on perception in MSOB) of the epistemology of perception; that all we know is perception. But I will emphasize the fact that what is important about seeing control in terms of control of perception (rather than control of environmental events) is that there are different ways to perceive the same environmental circumstance. So you can control different perceptual aspects of what is in fact the same physical situation. I will demonstrate this using my “Control of Perception” demo (
http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/ControlP.html), which is a clunkier (though earlier) version of the demo that Bill Powers showed at the Conference in China last year. In my demo, you can control any of three aspects of a square with a line through it. In Bill’s you can control any of three aspects of a rotating spheroid.
What I will emphasize about control of perception is that we often have many different perceptions of the same situation to pick from to try to control. Controlling some of these perceptions may prove more effective at getting us what we want (at a higher level of control) than controlling others. For example, in playing tennis, controlling for a certain wrist configuration perception may be more effective as a means of hitting a consistent forehand than is controlling of other perceptions of one’s connection to the racquet. In driving, controlling certain perceptions of the relationship between the car and the road may prove more effective (in terms of avoiding collisions) than others.
I’m still working on this idea. If anyone has any suggestions – such as examples of where control of several different perceptions of the same situation can produce the same higher level results, though not all as effectively – they would be greatly appreciated.
Best
Rick