Essentials of PCT

[bnhpct]

@rsmarken

I agree with most of them. But rather than get into why I disagree with some of them, I will just say that I think none of them, except possibly #2, are essential to a correct understanding of PCT.

Yes. Your list addresses some fundamentals of PCT, which has been mostly concerned with behavior of individuals.

I provided a list of some points of agreement, or at least not contested, within the discussion of multi-individual interactions, with the proposal that we set those aside as relatively firm context and discuss other items as matters for which PCT does not presently have good answers.

You’re welcome to abandon that discussion and start this one. In general, I agree with the intentions that I perceive in your list of ‘essentials’. I have some suggestions about how to express them.

@rsmarken

2. Control is an objective phenomenon that is seen when variables are being maintained in a constant or variable reference state, protected from the effects of disturbances.

Might be best to omit the word ‘objective’, and say just that control is an observed, experienced phenomenon.

Bill did challenge the notion that a phenomenon (a perception) can be ‘actually objective’ in some way:

@William_T_Powers2

The more carefully you look at the objective aspects of the world, the clearer it becomes that there are none.

Objectivity as I understand it is a perception (what else could it be?) that depends upon collective control — current, remembered, or imagined. Scientific consensus is its most disciplined form.

But I don’t want to make too much of Bill rejecting ‘objectivity’, his point in 1993 was “PCT is about experience”. What Bill was driving at was not the objectivity of the phenomenon of control, but rather that it is a straightforward, undeniable perception like rotation once you know how to recognize it, not at all abstract or theoretical. The slight lag and the asymptotic draw toward zero error gives an unmistakable feeling to disturbance-resisting, as when you gently pushed the arm projecting from that little box of his when we met in your LA hometown, and felt it resist your pressure in that unmistakable, slightly pulsating way — the feeling of life. As Dag was driving Bill someplace, his visceral experience of resisting Bill’s variable pressure on the steering wheel from the passenger seat. Aha! That’s what control is.

@rsmarken

6. PCT explains the existence of controlled variables as the control of perceptual analogs of these variables, called controlled perceptual variables, that are inside the behaving system.

This distinction between CVs and CPVs (?) is a new way to put it. Last I knew the perceptual variable is the CV, and it is a function of a set of physical variables perceived to be in the environment when you wear ‘physical science glasses’. When you don’t wear ‘physical science glasses’ you experience the CV as though it were what is ‘present in the environment’ — the taste of lemonade, the color purple. The only way to put on ‘physical science glasses’ is by participating in the scientific consensus of the physical sciences (wrt the matter at hand), which for us generally means accepting statements of such consensus as true. Yes, ma’am Ms. physicist or Mr. textbook author, you’re the expert, not I. So we rely upon variables collectively controlled by physical scientists as feedback paths for controlling variables that matter to us for PCT.

From the point of view of experimenters, their experience is of controlling something in the environment and having their control actions resisted by the subject. The experimenter is ‘actually’ controlling a perception, of course (per the PCT model), which is an analog of effects of physical variables {v1, v2, … vn} on sensors (per the physical science models), but all anyone has to go on is experiences. “PCT is about experience” is one of the essentials of PCT. When we forget that we risk treating theoretical entities as realities. Sometimes even ‘projecting’ them into the environment as though they were experiences like the taste of lemonade, the color purple, and the phenomenon of control.

@rsmarken

7. Since control systems control what they perceive, controlled perceptual variables (inside the system) are exactly equivalent to controlled variables (outside the system).

Hard to defend ‘exact equivalence’ for an individual control hierarchy. In addition to Warren’s concerns this formulation covertly smuggles in an assumption that something like the taste of lemonade is present as such in the environment. Not just hard to defend but outright indefensible for collective control. At the risk of again boring you so much that you stop reading … Say you’ve confirmed that a variable that you perceive is consistently restored to a reference value when you disturb it. You’ve even identified a living control system (LCS) whose actions as you perceive them seem to be responsible for resisting your disturbances. How do you know that is the only LCS controlling that variable? You have identified a virtual controller which might or might not have only one LCS contributing to it, the limiting case to which PCT has mostly limited itself. The answer, how you know, is of course that you consider influences from other LCSs to be confounding variables which your experimental setup is designed to eliminate. Sorry. Only works for artificial lab situations.

@bnhpct

Determining where the control outputs come from is more complicated for collective control because[, for example,] the participating control hierarchies may exert control at different times. Verifying that each can perceive the CV, can exert outputs that affect the state of the CV, when doing so is in fact perceiving the CV (i.e. control stops when perceptual input is blocked), etc.—all those steps of the Test in addition to disturbing the CV are more difficult to carry out in an interactive collective control situation. […]
In principle, it is possible to resolve the inputs and outputs of the virtual controller to the inputs and outputs of the individual autonomous control hierarchies participating in that collective control, but in actual social situations it may often not be practicable. There are just too many potentially asynchronous variables for the experimenter to bring under control in an experimental design, or for the observer to bring under control in a program of naturalistic investigation.

So am I going off topic and reverting to the Social Control topic that Kent started? If these problems are not also essential to PCT, then PCT so constrained is irrelevant to a great proportion of the experiences that interest people. And that is a problem which is essential to PCT in another way.