[From Bill Powers (2010.01.22.1013 MST)]
Bruce Gregory (2010.01.22.1150 UT) --
BG: I would never have thought of a reference level as an intention, but's fine. Since we cannot perceive reference signals, does that not imply that we cannot be aware of our intentions?
BP: The imagination mode allows us to perceive reference signals instead of sending them to lower systems. The reference signals enter the perceptual function in place of the perceptual signals from the lower system. The effect is as if the lower system had received a reference signal and made its perception match it perfectly while sending a copy of the perceptual signal as usual to the higher system. Perception still occurs as a perceptual signal, but its source is the short-circuited signal normally sent as a reference signal for the lower systems. All this was my attempt to account for the phenomena of remembering and imagining.
If you didn't think of a reference signal as an intention, how did you account for intentions?
> BP earlier: I'm having great difficulty figuring out when you are serious. But there is enough difference between what you say and what I would say that I have to ask further, at the risk of appearing naive. Are you saying you are always surprised to find yourself "doing" something -- that is, pursuing a goal?
BG: No, I am not usually surprised by finding myself doing something, but I may be unaware of reasons that I am doing it.
BP: The reasons may explain why your intention is to accomplish some specific goal, but they are not the same as the intention itself, are they? Of course in HPCT the reasons are higher-level goals or reference signals, so they are intentions too, at a different level. If you're not surprised by finding yourself controlling some perception, the implication is that you knew beforehand that you were going to do that. This suggests the imagination scenario above.
BG: If pressed, I can always make up a story, but the establishment of a reference level is not something I can perceive.
BP: I think you can when your attention is on a higher level and you are imagining how you would accomplish the higher-level goal. When I plan a trip, I might imagine taking highway 285 as a way of getting to my destination. When I actually start the trip, my intention is to get onto 285, and remains in imagination, and awareness, until I actually reach 285, when the real perception of driving on it replaces the imagined picture. I trust and hope that I am not the only person on earth who does things that way.
BG: It is the work of a higher level control system or reorganization, neither of which I can perceive. I don't agree with Skinner who had no idea of control or how it works.
BP: You can perceive the higher level if you look for it. My best example of this is finding yourself standing in front of an open refrigerator and wondering why you're there (you've been thinking about something else). Then you realize you were on the way to getting some lunch, and proceed.
> BP: That's the story I currently tell, and I believe there is as much evidence to support it as there is for any other story about emotion. I believe it fits the same observations that are used to justify other theories, and is at the same time far simpler.
BG: You'll get no argument from me.
BP: Hmm. A nicely ambiguous statement. Like "I can't tell you how much your painting appeals to me," meaning "If I told you, you'd probably get mad."
>BP earlier: So when does a story, in your view, become a scientific theory that is worth adopting? Is any story as worthless as any other story, as you seem to imply, or are you merely reminding us that all hypotheses need to be tested before being accepted?
BG: The hallmark of a scientific story is that it is consistent with all the other stories that we call facts. It is a story that we are prepared to give up when new facts are inconsistent with it. I never meant to imply that any story is worthless, but some stories are clearly worth more than others.
BP: If everything we say is a story, then that dimension of description doesn't distinguish anything in particular. I suppose it just expresses a sort of irreducible minimum of skepticism about what anyone says about anything. Of course I'm in favor of skepticism, but at some point don't we have to put skepticism aside, settle for practical assumptions, and accept them for the time being? The "willing suspension of disbelief" that makes fiction, especially science-fiction, possible.
There are, however, some facts about which we can't be skeptical and can't disbelieve. If I am having an experience of a hippopotamus in the living room, it doesn't make any difference whether the hippopotamus is really there or I'm hallucinating it. Either way, I'm experiencing it. If I deny to myself that I'm experiencing it, the denial joins the hippopotamus as another item that is undoubtably being experienced. Our thoughts about things can be wrong, but the thoughts themselves are without doubt being thought.
This is how I approach the exploration of control phenomena in myself. If I'm imagining something I'm about to do, there is no way to deny that I'm imagining it. So the theory has to account for imagination. I'm always amused when a psychologist dismisses something a person reports as being imaginary, as if that immediately removed it from discussion. That's why you find so little in textbooks on the subject of how we imagine.
Best,
Bill P.