Adam,
thanks for that, good points. BTW there is already a kind of a contradiction in this:
BP: So fundamentally, behavior is the control of perception, not of outputs or objective controlled variables
This can be translated as follows: ‘behavior is not the control of (objective) controlled variables.’ But I think it means that ‘behavior is not the control of (any) objective (=external) variables.’
Yes, we can perceive neural signals, but it does not mean that – currently – we could find and perceive a certain perceptual signal in the brain – especially if it is a higher-level perception. That is because the concept of neural current means a more a less vague and fuzzy bundle of neurons all signaling in their own ways.
With experience you probably mean a conscious or aware perception? If so, it is certainly a different thing than perception as a perceptual signal. The latter is a scalar variable having only one property, it’s quantity, without any qualitative tones in it. Conscious or aware perception seems like a simultaneous combination of many individual scalar variables which all have different qualitative tones or meanings. Some thinkers connect still more criteria to the meaning of the term experience, but this seems to be roughly the way how Powers uses the concept. However, Powers seems to think that control is no way depending on consciousness and most controlling is done without consciousness. So, we would not need to use the concept experience at all when talking about or studying control. (This may be a on overstatement.)
A conscious perception – or experience – is also a function or phenomenon which is realized by a neural system – I can see no other possibility. Thus, it could also be in principle perceived with an aid of some fantastic neurological instrument, but today and in a visible future it is a full impossibility.
In Making Sense of Behavior (1998) in the section The Internal View of Perception Powers says (sorry for a long quotation):
“This is why we say in PCT that behavior is the process by which we control our own perceptions. (…)
Since the world we experience is the world of perception, it usually makes little difference whether we say we’re controlling perceptions or controlling the state of the real world. It does, however, make a difference when we try to explain behavior in terms of some physical model of a behaving system. When we do that, we have to stand with one foot in each viewpoint, we construct an objective model as if our own perceptions were exactly the world as it exists, including physics, chemistry, physiology, and neurology. In doing so we explain how it is that another person can be controlling as we observe controlling to occur, using a brain organized as we think it’s organized. At the same time, knowing that all experience is experience of neural signals, we are explaining how we can control things, and why controlling seems to us the way it seems, and how we can be making up models and theories about controlling.
(…)
But even if we can count on some similarities between perceiving people, we will always remain uncertain about the relationship between human perception in general and the real nature of the world outside us.
I won’t pretend that these puzzles about perception and point of view are completely solved by the propositions put forth here. All of this is just my best try at bringing consistency into the study of both publicly observable behavior and private experience. Using the external point of view, we can make objective models that, on a computer, will reproduce some simple forms of human behavior with great precision. Using the internal point of view, we can understand many aspects of behavior by seeing control as control of perception rather than of an objective world. We can make sense not only of other people’s behavior, but of our own, using the same concept of perceptual control.”
For me it seems that Powers is here trying to solve the contradiction between the two definitions you took up. They represent the external and internal views of (or about) control. He seems to think along the figure below:
RR = Real Reality
NP = Neural Perceptual system
CE = Conscious Experience of the controller
EW = External point of View
IW = Internal point of View
From an internal point of view the controller is controlling her perceptual reality (which is realized in her neural system) but from an external point of view (of an observer) the neural system of the controller is controlling the common environment of the controller and observer. This division of the points of view is in a way helpful: From the internal point of view the controlled variable is the perception and from the external point of view the controlled variable is a physical variable in the environment. So. the two terms for control and controlled variables could also internal and external instead the ones I have suggested: perceptual and environmental.
As for your very interesting diagrams, I think that the right one depicts very clearly the external point of view. Instead, the left one could be some kind of mixture trying to be at the same time from internal and external points of views? But because you say that only p is controlled in it and qi is not controlled, then it is more from the internal point of view?
Anyway, I think, as Powers said, that the puzzles about perception and point of view are not completely solved this way and more work is needed…