[Martin Taylor 2020.10.22.12.20]
This is a response both to Rick and to a CSGnet posting by Warren Mansell.
Here’s the relevant segment from Rick’s relevant posting to CSGnet. Note his substitution of “external reality” for my “Real Reality”.: On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 7:48 AM Martin Taylor <csgnet@lists.illinois.edu> wrote:
Rick forgets that one’s actions influence real reality, whereas one perceives (and creates thereby) a perceived reality from the resulting input quantity. FN, WM, and EJ realize this and their quoted statements are correct. The precision with which the perceptual variable’s Perceived Reality corresponds to that of a variable in Real Reality determines the best possible Quality of Control. Real Reality may not function anything like Perceptual Reality, but the effects we produce on Real Reality do affect the input quantities that correspond to variables we perceive and control.
RM: No, I didn’t forget that actions influence external reality. See my reply to Bruce Nevin at the IAPCT Discourse site.
The rest is my response to Warren’s “On 2020/10/21 11:22 PM, Warren Mansell (wmansell@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) wrote”, but it applies equally to Rick’s unfortunate sunstitution of “external” for “real”.
All we control is our perception of the variable; that doesn’t mean that the variable itself isn’t also controlled, but we have no way of directly knowing that because we are all perceptual control devices even the people with rulers and electronic measuring devices. We just have to assume it is the case because we’ve survived and haven’t crashed our car yet…
I think it is a little more assured than that, though that is indeed part of the argument.
The argument I would use is that we perceive and directly control a variable property of something in Perceived Reality (PR), but can act only on whatever is really “out there”, a Real Reality (RR) variable. Disturbances in RR cause the value of the RR variable to change, with some variance if we do not act to influence it, and with some other variance if we do act in such a way that we do influence it. If we control the RR variable successfully, the latter variance is smaller than the former.
According to PCT, we control a variable in PR, not RR, and we sometimes compute Quality of Control (QoC) as the ratio of the disturbance-caused variance of the perceptual variable if we don’t act to the variance of the same variable when we act to control it. The question is then about the relation between the RR Quality of Control and the PR QoC. An outside observer cannot determine either kind of QoC, because the observer has perceptual reality different from that of the controller, and has access only to the effect produced by the controller’s actions in RR on the observer’s own unique PR.
An Analyst, however, has no such limitation. By definition, the Analyst has access to all variables related to a problem, in this case, including the values of the RR variable that is responsible for all influences on the sensory system of the organism, the Perception inside the organism, and the context of the perception in the Perceptual World (Perceptual Reality). The PR value of the externalized perception in PR is identical to the perception, and it is the discrepancy between that value and the reference value that generates the error value, and together with its history, the current output value.
The limit to the Quality of Control has two independent components: (1) the variance in how much the RR variable influenced by the control loop’s output changes over the effective loop transport lag time (which includes delays in any integrating or differentiating processes), and (2) the variance in how exact values of the momentary inputs (spikes) influence the exact momentary value of the perception. The second type is what Powers was referring to when he said that he hoped that using “neural current” as a time average over a “bundle” of neurons would not cause more than a 10% error rate.
Only the RR variable affects the sensor values that create the perceptual value, not the externalized perception in its perceptual reality context where it might be, say, the relative locations of a target and a cursor, which might not exist as entities in RR. When one acts to bring the relative location value to a reference, something happens in RR that we perceive as change in that relative location value. Of that we can be assured. Indeed, we can always, at any level of the hierarchy, be assured that if control quality is thus and so, then our actions have caused functional effects in RR that are to that extent correctly modelled in PR. Good control = much knowledge about functional relationships among components of RR.
What we cannot know is what the components of RR might be, nor how they produce their outputs given their inputs. We can, however — and this is the business of much of science — find sets of functional relationships among perceived sub-components that would produce these same functional relationships among the components. The position of a perceiver is closely analogous to that of a programmer trying to analyze an undocumented complicated programme written in an unknown, perhaps Object Oriented Programming (OOP), language.
The programmer could unravel the program into the input-output (functional) relationships among the objects by reprogramming in OOP those same observed functional relationships, and could do it in terms of ever simpler component objects that are re-used in different objects. The programmers version would behave just like the subject programme, but might be programmed entirely differently. The original program might not even have been written using objects in OOP form.
We are in that programmer’s position with regard to what we can (n principle) and cannot (even in principle) know about Real Reality. Our ability to control precisely sets limits on the ways RR interactions might play out in producing the perceptions (replicated in PR) that we control. The Perceptual Functions that produce precisely controllable perceptions necessarily are closely similar to corresponding functional relationships in RR. Our Perceptual Functions have evolved and been tuned and perhaps built from scratch in ways that improve the survival to reproduce of all extant species. What we all can control depends entirely on how well out perceptual functions match Real Reality, and since we are here, that is likely to be “pretty well”.
Martin