[Martin Taylor 931123 16:20]
(Rick Marken 931123.1100) and later (Bill Powers 931123.0830)
The independent existence of the CEV is attested by the controllability
of the perceptual signal to which it corresponds.The "independent existence" part of this gives me a problem.
...
The term "independent existence" suggests to me that there is some entity
(the CEV) "out there" whose existence is in some way represented by the
perceptual signal. The PCT view is somewhat different: the CEV is DEPENDENT
on the nature of the perceptual function.
I don't know what you are disagreeing with. I've said most of what you
say, some of it frequently. In particular, that the CEVs corresponding
to controlled perceptions (sometimes I say "controlled CEVs" as a shorthand)
are defined by the perceptual input functions of the ECSs. That's been
a given for as long as I can remember reading about PCT. As for "the set
of possible CEVs" I assert that it is infinite--in fact the infinity of
the set of all possible functions of all variables that can be sensed,
which is aleph-2 (more than the set of all real numbers) if I remember
rightly.
But any particlar CEV (which I would prefer to
call a CAS -- a controlled aspect of sensory input) does not really have
an "independent existence"; what constitutes a CEV is dependent on (or
defined by) a perceptual function in the control system.
I don't mind the term CAS for a controlled CEV. But remember that the
"C" in CEV is not "controlled" but "complex."
The problem with attributing "independent existence" to CEVs is that
it encourages a belief in the idea that certain variables are "actually"
out there to be perceived and controlled.
I would say that our conscious (i.e. rich experience type) perception is
made of CEVs that have been developed by being perceived and controlled.
They SEEM real and independent, because and only because their control
is effected by acts on entities in the real world. CEVs that have no
corresponding perceptual signals are clearly not controlled, and are
presumably not "there to be perceived and controlled" (except logically
and in the mind of the analyst) until one does acquire the necessary
effector->sensor->PIF->comparator->effector loop by way of reorganization
in one of the 12 ways I listed back in February or March.
ยทยทยท
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(Bill Powers 931123.0830)
I hope that the above plus my response earlier today to Tom Bourbon will
serve as a partial reply. Here's more in the same vein.
Tom:
I thought (perhaps incorrectly) that Bill's point in the
demonstration would be that the person can *control* his or
her perceptions by *manipulating* (using, not controlling)
dimensions that are unperceived, perhaps unperceivable. ... Did
I read you incorrectly, Bill?No, you read me correctly. What the person will control is at
best a 3-D projection of the 4-D object.
Why so? That's only what is presented, not what is perceived. When you
read this, do you perceive only the shapes of the letters? That's what
is presented to you, no more.
Any component of a
disturbance in the unseeable dimension will not be resistible or
resisted except by accident. Any effect of action in the 4th
direction will be unperceived unless there is an interaction with
one of the 3 "real" axes.
Well, yes. That is true. But your experiment had to do with rotations
in 4-space that necessarily project as sensible variations in 3-space or
2-space. Indeed, since a 4-space rotation is 2-D about a 2-D axis, I
would think there must be a visible projection in 3-space, if not in 2.
My notion, stated earlier (months or years, as well as today) and above,
is that if you don't learn to resist disturbances in some variable, you
won't perceive it (and necessarily vice-versa). But if you do control
disturbances to the 4-D rotation, you will necessarily be perceiving that
rotation (if as an experimenter you can show that you are not instead
resisting disturbances to the contributory set of lower-level perceptions).
The X^2+Y^2 function relating handle to effect on the CEV seems pointless
to me. If an ECS is perceiving the CEV, it necessarily is NOT perceiving
anything else, including the function that relates output to CEV, or
the disturbance itself. So the internal structure of the function
relating output to CEV is even less relevant to the operation of the
control system than is the function. Only an outside observer can see it.
The same point can be made using any environment that contains
more degrees of freedom than the effector's outputs or the
sensor's inputs have.
What point? We are working always with 1 df control systems. They
perceive and output real scalar values. The environment has untold
numbers of degrees of freedom, many, many, orders of magnitude more
than even the number of sensor degrees of freedom available to us.
This is a sort of Goedel's theorem of PCT: There is no way to
determine the "objective" correlate of a controlled perception.
I really don't see the connection. The "objective" correlate of
a controlled perception is the PIF applied to the sensory variables,
no more and no less. What does it matter how many other variables
the universe has? If an outside observer had access to the form
of the PIF and could measure the sensory inputs, that observer would
know the CEV objectively. It is a practical matter that prevents this
happening, apart from the fact that the outside observer has to work
through its own PIFs, making the measurements themselves open to question
and subjective (within the outside observer).
We human observers/actors can only construct a plausible
consensus as to what is being controlled, in terms of human
perceptions of types we all share.
Yes, for sure. And we have to allow for the fact that any application
of The Test may be affected by variables orthogonal to those we observe
when applying it. The Tested control system might be controlling within
these orthogonal dimensions as part of the CEV, and we would not see those
aspects of it. We can never know what those variables might be, if they are
there at all. By luck we might find some, but we could never tell whether
there were others.
Martin