What an ignorancy…
RM: Reasoning and evidence behind it: PCT is the state of a perceptual variable that, like all perceptual variables, is a function of environmental variables.
HB : What kind of nonsense is this ? PCT is general theory about how organsisms function. About how you function…
Bill P. at all (50th Anniversary, 2011) :
Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) provides a general theory of functioning for organisms
HB : Do you understand what he meant by that…You are a lonng way from understanding the »correct« PCT…
Boris
···
From: Martin Taylor (mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net via csgnet Mailing List) [mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu]
Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2018 3:49 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: MoL and peace work
[Martin Taylor 2018.07.13.18.06]
[Rick Marken 2018-07-08_10:15:13]
[Martin Taylor 2018.07.07.13.51]
MT: Rick, as usual, you didn’t answer the questions I asked…
MT: But I will try to ask one more clear question:
MT: Preamble: You often refer to “the correct understanding of PCT” as what you control for so that people can get it right, while you never refer to “my perception of the correct understanding of PCT”. The implication is that you yourself know the one and only correct understanding of PCT. Question: Do you believe that in the environment there exists an entity or structure called “PCT” of which you have a certifiably correct perception?"
MT: That’s all. A simple “Yes-No” question, but an answer with the reasoning or evidence behind it would be preferable.
RM: Answer: No, I do not believe that in the environment there exists an entity or structure called PCT of which I have a certifiably correct perception.
RM: Reasoning and evidence behind it: PCT is the state of a perceptual variable that, like all perceptual variables, is a function of environmental variables.
Is it not a function of sensory variables?
So what I believe is that there exists a “correct” reference state for that variable – the state that Bill was controlling for as evidenced in his writings, conversations and demonstrations.
“Correct” presumably means a correspondence with something else. You say that the “something else” is a state in Bill Powers’s mind, not an aspect of Nature. You seem to be asserting, as you make clear below, that a “correct understanding of PCT” has nothing to do with science, but is a telepathic knowledge of the mind of a person unfortunately deceased.
And I believe that I have a certifiably correct understanding of what the correct reference state for that variable – the reference state for the PCT variable that Bill called “PCT”.
OK. You are clear in this at least, that you have people agreeing that you correctly perceive what was in another person’s mind. (The other person being, of course, Bill Powers).
RM: The certification is in the form of the Forewords to my three collections of papers describing my work testing PCT. These Forwards were written by three acknowledged experts on PCT: Bill Powers, who wrote the Foreword to MIND READINGS, Phil Runkel, who wrote the Foreword to MORE MIND READINGS, and Henry Yin, who wrote the Foreword to DOING RESEARCH ON PURPOSE. And there is Bill’s inscription to my copy of his book, MAKING SENSE OF BEHAVIOR which reads “Some day all this will be yours”.
Yes, they said nice things. I also have said nice things about your demos and some of your experiments. I have said less nice things about some of your other work, especially when it has used mathematics, and have also said very un-nice things about the way you have distorted on CSGnet the work and ideas about PCT presented by other people, myself included.
But then, these silly benighted people made the mistake of thinking that PCT meant “Perceptual Control Theory”, a framework for scientific enquiry, rather than correctly understanding it to be “PCT”, a Holy Writ accessible only to the initiated, a group so exclusive that there it has only one member. Personally, I am not interested in a “correct understanding of PCT” defined in that way. I am more interested learning in how people and other organisms operate functionally, guided by Bill Powers’s “writings, conversations and demonstrations.”
Parenthetically, Idries Shah, a prominent Sufi, pointed out in various ways that the great prophets such as Christ, Mohammed, Rumi, may well have found great truths, but their followers who tried to follow the same path by performing appropriate rituals almost certainly failed to discover the truths their inspired prophets had laid bare. According to Shah, the Sufi way is use prophet-guides as signposts in seeking truth, not to emulate what the guide has done. That is how I try to use the prophetic insights of Bill Powers.
…
MT: Two unrelated points: …
MT: (2) “When people say the power law of movement is not an example of a illusion then I could just say “right” and then no conflict”. This might be a justified comment, IF anyone had actually suggested that the power law of movement was not an illusion. But since they didn’t, any such conflict is entirely of your own making, substituting something out of your imagination for what was actually written by several people. You have been corrected on this many, many times, but you still make the same false claim. I guess I could ask another simple question: “Why?”
RM: Because all of the rebuttals to my paper were aimed at showing that there actually is a causal relationship between measures of curvature and speed of movement.
Where in the labyrinths of your mind did you get this weird notion? You certainly didn’t get it from reading any of the actual rebuttals.
That is, all the rebuttals to my paper were aimed at showing that the power law was not a behavioral illusion.
That is not true. What is true is that at least my published rebuttal said that your paper shed no light on whether or not it is. Since it concluded before the “Final Comment” with:
" The power law is almost certainly a side effect in any of the experiments that find velocity to have a near power law relationship with the radius of curvature, since it is very unlikely that any human, let alone a fly larva, acts with the intention of producing a power law relationship between travel speed and local curvature. Perhaps, it also creates a behavioural illusion in the minds of some theorist. Marken and Shaffer’s paper sheds no light on that issue.
All in all, the initial simple mistake of taking a visual similarity to be a mathematical identity completely invalidates the rest of Marken and Shaffer’s paper. …"
I therefore would not quibble with anyone who suggested that your statement is a simple falsehood, on a par with much else you have claimed about things I have written.
Martin