[From Bill Powers (920521.0800)]
We cut the trip a day short because it turns out that Southeastern Utah is
cold and rainy. So is Durango, so maybe we'd better move.
Bryce Canyon is worth an extended look in any weather. It's an amazing
example of what nature will do when left in the hands of ordinary physical
processes for a few tens of millions of years. Of course they have fences
and rules to keep purposive systems from wrecking the place in a couple of
years.
···
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Rick Marken --
Actually, THREE LEFTS make a right.
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RE: Free Will:
Greg Williams (920517) --
[Cziko] How could an individual's control structure be
anything but a "function of its past history?"
Anyone who buys into state-determined dynamical models won't argue. >Some
who don't, will.
Some of the latter postulate "miraculous" (non-
history- determined) alterations in organismic physiology due to a >"self"
and/or "God," among other (non-physical?) things.
But as Gary said, Chaos ought to make us pause and ask what we mean by
"determined." When the behavior of a system for which all parameters and
initial conditions are known to 6 decimal places can't be predicted for
more than a few hours, the idea of determinism begins to look like an
illusion. You can explain present events on the basis of past conditions,
but given those past conditions you couldn't have predicted the present
events.
I think we can now distinguish between closed-loop determinism and open-
loop determinism.
Open-loop determinism is the kind physicists think about. Open-loop
determinism can't be demonstrated without introducing multiple chains of
integrations that have to remain accurate for long periods of time, and in
which the system may encounter chaos-type bifurcations.
Closed-loop determinism is forgiving of changes in initial conditions and
in at least some parameters. It can work in the presence of Chaos. We can
predict that a normal driver can keep the car within 2 feet of the intended
path and 2 degrees of the intended direction, and that the errors at the
end of the trip will be comparable to those at the beginning (that is, if
the position is in error by two feet and the direction by two degrees one
minute after a trip starts, an hour later the position will still be in
error by no more than about two feet and the direction by no more than
about two degrees). The systems that determine future conditions the most
reliably are closed-loop deterministic systems, systems containing purposes
and the means of implementing them.
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Some of the latter [who don't buy into a deterministic system concept]
postulate "miraculous" (non-history- determined) alterations in
organismic physiology due to a "self" and/or "God," among other (non-
physical?) things.
If normal determinism doesn't really work (at least predictively), then to
speak of "history-determined" alterations in organismic physiology is
almost meaningless. Concepts like "Self" and "God" are no more miraculous
in nature than concepts like "input function." They are labels for black
boxes whose properties are defined only in terms of what they are
understood to accomplish.
After the fact of a purposive action, you can always explain the outcome in
terms of antecent events. You can't explain just why just those antecedent
events occurred, often in a very long chain involving incidental and
unpredicted perturbations and accompany actions that countered their
effects.
In order for a Self to create purposeful outcomes of physical processes, it
would (according to traditional scientific interpretations) have to forsee
the future and adjust the present until the future result matched the
intended result. A person using this traditional way of rejecting the Self
as a determining entity is thinking, of course, in terms of open-loop
determinism. One of the traditional clever ways of "disproving" intention
is to say something like "Yeah, but what if a meteorite fell and killed you
before you could carry out the intention of opening the door?" This sort of
objection assumes open-loop determinism, and makes an intention into a
(claimed) infallible prediction. But with closed-loop determinism,
intention means only reference level, and does not imply prediction.
Accidents of nature don't disprove intention, because a correct
understanding of intention does not imply infallible prediction of future
disturbances -- or even the ability to resist the effects of every possible
disturbance.
The Self can bring about preselected future conditions in spite of normal
physical variations that by themselves would lead to a wide range of
different future conditions. So the Self acts in a way that is, in
traditional terms, miraculous or supernatural.
The traditional notion of open-loop determinism is no longer defensible. So
the motivation for rejecting black boxes like the Self or God can no longer
be the traditional one.
Gene Boggess (920518) --
Greg William's critique of your proposed CT ethic led you to reframe it,
but I think your whole line of thinking and the exposition of it are
admirable and clear. I agree with you that the ethics in question comes
down to an analysis of human nature. It isn't that we OUGHT TO avoid
conflict; it's that we DO avoid conflict, and the reason we do is simple:
those who didn't are no longer with us. Darwin's Hammer. Jesus said that
those who live by conflict die by conflict. Smart fellow. Of course he
didn't say that ONLY those who live by the sword die by the sword; there's
a considerable motive for those who would rather not live by the sword to
get rid of the jerks who seem to enjoy it. Maybe it's a good idea to offer
the other cheek to be smitten, in case the smiter can be shamed out of
violence. But if he smites anyway, the smitee is probably best off,
evolution-wise, to say "OK, that's two." Meaning, the third time is going
to come out differently. The third time, having been given a chance to
prepare, a friend stabs the offender in the back. Unsporting? Dishonorable?
No more than insecticide is. Violent? Certainly. You can push any control
system too far.
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Chris Love (920518) --
I will use my version of *transport lag* at each level because it is >not
difficult to implement and it appears to be useful. This means a >running
average of the signals.
A running average isn't a transport lag; it's more like an integration lag.
While the output may change more slowly than the input, it starts changing
at the same moment the input changes. In a true transport lag, NOTHING AT
ALL happens at the output for some time, the lag, after the change in
input. A transport lag is observed in listening to a band play 300 feet
away in a stadium. You see the conductor's baton going up and down with a
transport lag of a few hundred nanoseconds. You hear the music with a
transport lag of 1/3 second. If you applied a 1/3-second running average of
the music you wouldn't hear much.
To implement a true transport lag, you need to store consecutive values of
input in a buffer. At each dt, the contents of the buffer are shifted and
the new input is inserted at the beginning. The output is taken from the
last (oldest) entry in the buffer. Suppose you want a transport lag of 0.1
second, accurate to 0.01 second. This implies a buffer 10 elements long,
and a dt of 0.01 seconds. In practice you wouldn't actually shift the
values in the buffer; you'd just use two pointers (one for input, one for
output) 10 elements apart, incrementing them modulo 10.
If there is a transport lag in a closed-loop system, negative feedback will
become positive at frequencies where half a wavelength is equal to the lag.
To prevent the oscillations and still maintain high loop gain, you have to
use a smoothing filter (running average) that keeps the feedback from
having a loop gain of 1 or greater at frequencies at or above the critical
frequency where the 180-degree phase shift occurs.
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Bruce Nevin (920519) --
I didn't make my point (discussed later in your post) very well. I was
trying to say that where we use "frozen expressions," the machinery for
producing language isn't rule driven, but is simply playing back recordings
-- low-level control. But the frozen expressions may AT ONE TIME have been
produced by higher-level systems. Certainly, we don't often say or hear
"every man for himself." I was just using that as an example of a frozen
expression but didn't know what to call it.
In fact I think you make by point better than I did (and I failed to pick
up on it), by saying
This is possible whenever there is "free" variability that is not
constrained by the contingencies of control--more than one form of
behavioral outputs can accomplish the same controlled perception. Then
choice among alternatives (or in the range of free variability) itself
is exploited as an aspect of self image, or social standing, or
relationship to others involved in the transaction, etc.
It's precisely when there is more than one way to accomplish the same
communication that active control ought to be considered as the model,
rather than output generation. The CT model would VARY the choices of
output (in imagination or through on-line editing) to produce conformity of
the product to reference regularities or rules. When the output can be
produced by a fixed rule and permits of only one output format, we should
suspect that the forms have become frozen and are being controlled at a
lower level. Aren't large parts of even the most creative sentences
actually frozen chunks?
I agree with you that we have to tackle simple phenomena first. Along those
lines, it would be nice to have some demonstrations of principle as simple
as the rubber band demo. Can you (linguists) think of any demonstrations
that a CT model could handle but a traditional open-loop model couldn't?
The demo could be exceedingly simple and obvious and still serve the
purpose of showing the principle -- in fact, the simpler and more obvious
the better.
You say
What I am trying to put forward is a way of thinking about the
complexity of social transactions, including communication and the use
of language, in PCT terms.
Every time you do put forward another try at doing this, the result makes
more sense and settles nearer to inevitability. All this repetition and
going around in circles isn't a waste of time. Often when I come up with an
objection, it's not so much an objection to what you mean as to what you
can be read as saying, especially by a non-expert in linguistics. When you
come back with further explanation, usually the unwanted meanings are gone.
This is your reward for being so patient with me -- you're saying what you
mean (and I presume refining what you mean) in a more and more lucid way
every time we go around. So I can excuse my obtuseness by saying I'm only
testing you. Heh heh.
When I examine words closely, they seem to be just familiar chunks of
sound or objects on paper. The meanings they seem to have (for those
words that can individually designate meanings) turn out to be >>ordinary
perceptions. So both words and their meanings are ordinary >>perceptions.
Let's be careful here. What about those words that cannot >"individually
designate meanings?" And of those that can, I have >provided evidence in
prior posts indicating that the association of >words to nonverbal
perceptions is not a simple matter, but is "dirtied" >by all sorts of
historically contingent social conventionalization. >For example, what is
the nonverbal perception associated with "on" or >"by"? Is there just one?
I was avoiding words that mean structures of words like relationships among
words -- higher levels. My point wasn't that a given word has a given
meaning. I was trying to get out of the realm of words and into the more
general realm of perceptions, of which words are a subset. By seeing the
rules of language as rules of types that we can apply to any perceptions,
we can make a try at seeing language as the brain behaving in its natural
way, with language as just one outcome. I think there is (in some quarters)
too much emphasis on language as something that starts with phonemes and
builds up to sentences, and so on. So if a primitive hominid didn't have
certain vocal tract structures, it couldn't have had and used language,
according to some people. And of course a bird, which can't even say
"mama," can't possibly have language.
I think I'm agreeing with you. You apparently think I'm not. One of >us
is missing something.
No doubt. But we don't do too badly at this.
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Best to all,
Bill P.