[From Rick Marken (2005.10.27.1200)]
From Marc Abrams
Rick Marken (2005.10.27.0900)]=
From Marc Abrams
Then why do you have such a difficult time with people who don't share your
world view, or your view on how behavior works?
Why do you?
Good question, care to explore it?
It was a rhetorical question. I answered it myself in the post: you (like
everyone else, myself included, of course) have a difficult time with people
who don't share your world view (or your view on how behavior works) to the
extent that you are controlling for having those people share your world
view (or your view of how behavior works).
Obviously it's because we want other people to agree with us. This is pretty
basic PCT -- and common sense.
I think that may be one of the reasons but not the only one.
What do you believe are some of the other reasons?
And if so, why is it important for others to agree with us?
My guess is that it is important to the extent that higher level systems
increase the gain of the agreement control system in order to control their
own higher level perceptions, like the perception of politeness.
The way to avoid this [back-stabbing and digging] is for one or
both parties to the conflict to either change their goal and start
agreeing with the other party or simply stop participating in
the conflict.
This is certainly one way it may happen. Is it the only the way to 'avoid'
conflict? I don't think so.
What do you believe are some of the other ways to avoid conflict? I think
that's pretty much it: change goals so that the goals are aligned or stop
participating. I suppose being more tolerant (lowering the gain of one or
both parties to the conflict) could be considered another approach, but in
that case the intensity of the conflict (in terms of the "amplitude" of the
outputs) may decrease but the conflict still exists. Conflict-ending
tolerance means that the parties stop participating in the conflict, as, for
example, has happened with the different flavors of Christianity: there are
no more serious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants; they just put
up with each other, avoiding conflict as much as possible.
Tolerance is the degree to which one accepts error in a control
system: the more error one accepts (without reorganizing) the
more tolerant one is.
An interesting claim. Do you have ant evidence for this?
No evidence except the definition of tolerance. As you note, "tolerance"
means (among other things) "acceptance of different views". This is
actually a somewhat poor definition because a tolerant person doesn't
really "accept" different views -- a tolerant Jew doesn't accept the tenets
of Christianity, for example. I think what is meant by "acceptance" in this
definition is something like "puts up with". A tolerant person puts up with
views that they don't accept at all -- indeed, that they consider to be
wrong in certain respects.
A view that is considered wrong is, from a PCT perspective, a perception
that doesn't match a reference for what that perception should be.
Christianity doesn't match a Jew's reference for what a religion should be.
There is a discrepancy between the Jew's reference for religion and the
Jew's perception of the Christian religion. It's a relatively small
discrepancy -- Christianity is basically a sect of Judaism, after all -- but
there is a discrepancy. In PCT this discrepancy is called "error". A
tolerant person puts up with such errors, even when they are fairly large;
the intolerant person works to reduce these errors to zero.
Why would differing views necessarily cause error?
They only cause error to the extent that people are controlling for
different levels of those views.
That is, why would my views or goals necessarily conflict
with your goals?
They don't necessarily. But in fact, many of our views are obviously in
conflict.
> A person can be tolerant with respect to some goals and intolerant
with respect to others.
Why, what is the differences that create this?
I'll take this to be a question about why some systems are tolerant (low
gain) and others are not (high gain). This is an empirical question. My
guess is that we will find that differences in system gain (tolerance) are
produced by higher level systems that are perceiving and controlling
perceptions that are a function of (among other things) error in these lower
level systems.
In PCT terms, this means that a person controls for some perceptions
with low gain and for others with high gain, respectively. I obviously
control for PCT with high gain; I am intolerant of what I perceive to be
incorrect understandings of and false conclusions derived from PCT. I
control for other things -- like the political opinions of some of my
friends (my racquetball partner is a neocon) -- with far lower gain.
Yes, but this does not address why you have a difficult time with others who
do not believe the same way.
I think it does. It says I have a difficult time with others who do not
believe the same way as I do when we are controlling with high gain for
different states of the same perception.
Are your beliefs about PCT any different in kind from any other fundamentalist
beliefs in say Judaism, Islam, or Christianity?
They are different only in the sense that my beliefs about PCT are always
contingent on empirical test of the model.
···
--
Richard S. Marken
MindReadings.com
Home: 310 474 0313
Cell: 310 729 1400
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