Martin,
What do you mean by a “non-change event”? To me it sounds like “nothing happened”,
Yes that is – at least partially – right. But it should not, however, be trivialized. For example, think about an oscillator which for some reason stops for a while. First it is changing all the time (a long process) and then happens that it is not changing for a moment. That is an surprising event. Or a life of someone is a chaotic process of changes like it is for so many today and then there is a calm moment – a precious event, isn’t it?
Of course a problem is that in PCT it seems to be a convention that event is change. But if it is so, shouldn’t we rather call them just changes?
Nerves generally do that, yes, for evolutionary reasons I hope I explained intelligibly in PPC I.9.1. Basically, it is an energy saving way of reducing the problem of dissipating the heat generated by every neural firing, by reducing the number of firings beyond those needed to indicated that there has been a change (something happened, or in my language, there was a distinction either between before and after or between this place and that place, or both in the form of a moving edge).
True, I had read it but I forget it when I was writing. I think it is very good explanation why changes are more important than non-changes.
In your second paragraph, you talk about controlling the value of A as if you were instead controlling something else that you call an event.
Yes, because I am not sure whether events can be controlled at all, as you said. Perhaps it really is something else than events which are controlled.
In paragraph 3 you talk about perception of events as “good” and “bad”. This kind of evaluation does not correspond to anything in PCT “seen” from the controllers’ points of view.
I should have explained that a little more. “Bad” means a controlled perception which causes big or increasing error. Respectively “good” is a perception which decreases error. I think that is how we (axiologically) evaluate different phenomena.
Some kind of external observer/analyst might choose to apply those labels as some kind of evaluation of the expected effect of the control action, but nothing in my understanding of the perceptual control hierarchy does this kind of evaluation. Any evaluation, if you could call it that, is done by the biochemical system, in the form of making you feel alive and healthy or unwell or internally uneasy.
An evaluation done by our biochemical system or somatic branch as Bruce calls it is not so easily available to the controller because we usually cannot perceive our intrinsic variables. Some times we do. We can for example control for health.
Thanks for good comments.
Eetu