[Martin Taylor 950223 14:30]
Bill Powers (950223.0730 MST) to Bruce Buchanan (950220.20:30 EST)
From previous discussions, I know you don't mean the following according
to an interpretation easily put upon it--solipsism. So I hope you won't
mind if I add something that I intend as clarification, not obfuscation.
While one might see a rule simply as measure against which
perceptions are controlled, the higher level question of why THIS
rule can always be asked, until the sources are identified in the
environmental contingencies and their regularities - including
social relationships, as I see it, anyway.But the sources are not in environmental contingencies and regularities;
they are in the brain. It is not the world that forces rules on it; it
is our capacity to invent rules that forces regularities,
generalizations, on the world. Our rules are always approximations; the
world does not depend on whether we invent rules to make it
comprehensible.
Yes, the sources are in the brain, in the same sense that the source of the
wind-blown drift of leaves is the tree, not the wind. But a different
wind would result in a drift in a different place. The environment
(and if you like, the "environmental contingencies and regularities")
validates what the brain proposes. If the brain somehow creates a
perceptual input function that defines something in the world that is
not "contingently and regularly" affected by the body's actions, there
is no control, and reorganization is likely to alter that particular
perceptual function so that we do not see that aspect of the enviroment
any more. We see only those regularities our brain has defined, but we
keep seeing only those that the world supports.
Leaves in a windstorm can be anywhere in the air or on the ground, but
where most of them settle can tell you something about the wind. Likewise,
the kinds of perception created by the brain are but phantasms, labile
and variable, until successful control stabilizes them. And then we are
pretty sure (perhaps quite wrongly) that we are seeing something about
the "real" world. We test the world by pushing it. Just looking can
provide an infinity of possible regularities.
I hope I have paraphrased what I believe Bill to mean by the quoted
paragraph. I know he doesn't mean solipsism, but it could have been read
as if he did. If I'm wrong, I'm sure Bill will let us all know.
Martin
PS. I made an error by a factor of 2 in the value of M used to enter
the tables for the probability that e-coli starts to move in a direction
that could eventually result in an improvement of x%. Rather than giving
you my revised interpolations, I'll await the completion of the simulation
runs, which should be today. Sorry about that.
M.