Did I say something that suggests that I’m exempting myself? I’m not.
But there is an overgeneralization in your presupposition. I do not propose that we must inquire what each post means. The opportunity to inquire comes up when we disagree with something specific within a post.
When I disagree with something you say, the disagreement is usually with what I think you mean. The inquiry is to verify whether what I think you mean is in fact what you mean. Substantive disagreement is about the perceptions that the sender wants the recipient to control. We could elaborate that in technical terms, but that would be a tedious recitation of recursive control loops which has been done by others much better than I could do here. I think you know what I mean by substantive disagreement.
There is another kind of disagreement, about the form of a communication rather than about the intended substance. It’s important to have agreed-upon ways of talking about the objects and relations of our subject-matter. Every technical field, and especially every field and subfield of science, imposes constraints on word-combinings in addition to the constraints that constitute common usage of the given language. Technically, this is called a sublanguage. The sublanguage phenomenon has a formal definition. I see three classes of people who may lapse from the technical sublanguage of PCT into common usage (or may appear to do so). Some people may do this because they don’t yet understand control or PCT as an explanation of control; some because they haven’t yet mastered the technical sublanguage. Thirdly, experts may do so (Bill often did) when communicating with people in those two classes.
Confusion of these two kinds of disagreement, as well as efforts to clarify what is and is not in the sublanguage of PCT, contributed to what I called verbal sclerosis.
As above, disagreement about the form of communication (the correctness of the language) is much less disruptive if the first step upon disagreeing is to inquire curiously into what the sender intended us to perceive, however unskillfully they expressed it. Instruction about the specialized sublanguage of PCT can then be effective, but without that first inquiry into the substance the challenge to the form becomes its own distracting subject matter, and often is resisted as disturbances to the person’s mastery of our common language.
So we have two questions about intended meaning before us. You have said that I got your intended meaning wrong, so let’s start there.
Really? You said there’s no such thing, there are only control loops.
How is that anything other than a dismissal? What did you intend me to understand when you said this? I’m obviously missing something important.
You then went on to talk about conflict between control loops. You said that conflict is limited only in two ways, by the output capacities of the conflicting loops, or if a higher-level loop dismantles one or both of the conflicting loops. Does ‘dismantling’ refer to reorganization? If so, I think ‘dismantling’ is just one way a higher system can intervene. That should lead into a good on-topic discussion, but please let’s defer that discussion for a bit (best in a different topic) and clear up these two questions. I’ll answer your question next.