[quote=“wmansell, post:82, topic:15683”]
With respect to variables versus functions, I would kindly suggest that you bear your audience in mind too. On IAPCT Discourse, we all know the difference and that’s not Phil’s point. The discussion was about what to rename Bill’s Feedback Function in the environment because this term in engineering would equate to the Input Function in PCT. [/quote]
I take your point, but I would suggest that there are not many options for effective naming, either of functions or of variables, even within PCT, let alone requiring differentiation of PCT names for functions and variables from the names used in classical control for the analogous entities.
One option is neologism, a choice Kent and I made together when we coined “atenfel” for a combinations of Gibson’s “affordance” and the ability to use an “affordance” (which can be analyzed as such by an outside observer) with the ability to use it in controlling a specific perception. We also coined the related “atenex”, for a nexus of atenfels, often but not always a concrete object that can be used to control a variety of perceptions by someone skilled in these different perceptual controls.
In PCT there’s a level of naming problem introduced by the hierarchical nature of the control structure. Apart from at the physical boundary of the individual organism, every level of control has its own output process (a function) that supplies values to one or (usually more) next level lower reference input functions. The control of a perception of level N is turned into action on the environment only by affecting the reference values of one or more perceptions being controlled at level N-1, and so on to level N-M until we arrive at the periphery where the individual affects and senses the Real Reality environment.
All these controlled perceptions, reference values, and outputs are components of similarly constructed control loops, but the N-X-level loops are parts of the “environmental feedback function” of the level N set of “PCO” (Perceptual, Comparator, Output) set of processes, and the construction of its perceptual value.
Naming here becomes really hard. For example, should or should not the level N “Environmental Feedback Function” name include the atenexes (lower-level control loops to which the level N output feeds reference values, including their components in the external environment). If so, the level N Environmental Feedback Function would include the control quality of the level N-1 down to N-M “supporting” control loops — and there’s a name not ordinarily used when talking about the components of a control loop.
In the “solo” control loop diagrams being discussed here, all the supporting loops, the atenexes, are subsumed under “Output Function”, but since those supporting loops actually include their own Environmental Feedback Processes, parts of which are in the external environment, where would “the environment” for a solo control loop begin? As drawn, the dividing line between environment and inside the individual is at the skin surface. As conceived in the hierarchy, it cannot be there.
I’m not offering solutions to the naming problem here. What I am saying is that if you want to find naming conventions for the whole hierarchy (in my mind Bill’s most important idea), what works for a solo loop is difficult to extend usefully to a loop that is part of a perceptual control hierarchy. If that’s a cop-out, so be it. In PPC, I try to keep clear these distinctions, but I’m quite sure I fail more often than I notice the failure.
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