Rich, the person you refer to isn’t mentioned in that archival PDF because he came into the picture later. The dates of email in the PDF are between 2005 and 2010. The discussion refers mainly to CSGnet email from its inception about 1990, and somewhat to conferences and other communications during that period. Boris joined CSGnet in 2007. I suppose he could have come up because of his CSGnet activities in 2009 and 2010, but there was no particular reason for Bill and Dag to talk about whatever is going on with him, which as a new phenomenon surely was even more puzzling then than it is now.
Boris’s posts to CSGnet and to Discourse do include disturbances to good scientific discussion or debate. I guess it’s worth a summarizing review ‘for the record’. I will will try to say nothing that might be construed as criticizing or insulting, though of course that’s (nominally) 50% in the eye of the reader.
I had a number of email conversations with Boris. He told me that his first contact with Bill was in 1999. His initial introduction to PCT was Kent’s 1994, 1996, and 1998 presentations, I guess in 1999, possibly 1998. He told me that he “needed some years to get through Bill’s books with their “heavy” terminology” and that “Kent’s literature was much easier to read and understand PCT.” He said that he had only occasional contacts with Bill after 1999, and that “Our relation went wrong when I proposed ‘arrow’ from genetic source to intrinsic variables.” That occurred in a CSGnet conversation with Bill in August 2009 in reference to Fig. 14.1 in B:CP. He said he joined CSGnet in 2007.
The relevant portion of Fig. 14.1 is below. ‘Neural or chemical signals’ from the somatic branch are transformed by an input function into ‘intrinsic perceptual signals’. In a comparator, these are compared to ‘intrinsic reference signals’ originating in the ‘genetic source’, yielding ‘intrinsic error signals’. Their only effect, through the output function, is to alter the organization of the HPCT hierarchy. Fig. 14.1 has no arrows from above down into the ‘intrinsic quantities’, only arrows coming upward from them to the input function for that comparator.
In the first post of a CSGnet thread under the subject heading ‘Re: memory’ in August 1999, Bill was reconsidering the role of homeostatic systems, control systems in the somatic branch of the hierarchy. After sending a reply privately to Warren Mansell, he decided to send a copy of it “to CSGnet because this is a major reorganization of my thinking about the reorganizing system.” This was a recognition that the output based on intrinsic error should complete a control loop through the intrinsic quantities sensed in the somatic branch, as well as causing reorganization when the intrinsic error is not reduced.
Boris claims that this change was his idea. In a note affixed to Dag’s revision of Figure 14.1, he said that Bill requested this change in a CSGnet post of 20 August 2009:
He does not say from whom Bill requested that change.
In his 8/20/2009 post, Bill provided this diagram:
About this diagram, Bill said
Boris is very familiar with homeostatic systems. I don’t think he quarreled with Bill’s description (though it’s sometimes hard to tell), so I don’t think he meant that an arrow should go directly from the genetic source to the intrinsic somatic quantities, bypassing the homeostatic systems, though a reader might come away with that interpretation.
Dag pointed out that plural arrows would be appropriate, and stood ready to provide the revised figure below once Bill’s thinking about it had stablilized. At that point, Bill referred to his communications with Alice; maybe another revision of B:CP was in the air. Maybe Boris is referring to that offer as a ‘request for a change’ to the diagram. Here’s Dag’s revision.
From Boris’s commentaries about it, one might get the impression that this is a diagram that Boris created and gave to Bill.
Bill’s post of 20 August is here in the midst of the ‘Re: memory’ email thread from 17-25 August 2009. On any reading of this thread it is evident that their “relation went wrong” by the end of it. In it, Bill (and Dag) also showed that Bill had thought of these ideas two years before, in 2007, but had set them aside.
This discussion of a change in Bill’s conception of the reorganization system is intrinsically an important reference, but also more narrowly this thread is worth reading through in its entirety as context for Boris’s perpetual complaints about his ideas being stolen from him.