[From Buce Buchanan 941123:115:00 EST]
[Bill Leach 941121.21:17 EST(EDT)] writes:
... I did have an experience today however that had
me thinking of PCT and especially reorganization. ......what fascinated me was Phil's description of how his body "reacted" to
the alteration. . . the effects upon his equalibrium.In the first few hours following the operation, the slightest movement of
his head made him intensely dizzy. By sunday morning only sharp fast
movements had the same effect and by sunday evening even few of those
caused disorientation.Is it likely that this may have been reorganization of a rather critical
function?
This is an interesting account and question. However IMHO the function of
equilibrium is so fundamental that, while it may be affected by the closely
associated neural mechanisms for hearing, it is not likely to be subject to
reorganization. While the sense of balance is involved in hearing as well
as proprioceptive learning, this is mainly a one way street. Of course the
sense of equilibrium can be disturbed by a variety of physical and toxic
agents, etc. But the sense of equilibrium is one of those intrinsic
variables in terms of which we must adapt, and the dominant evidence would
indicate that what happened to Bill's friend was at a lower level
adaptation.
I recall a case from the literature which illustrates this kind of point.
There was a Hungarian,(Takacs by name, I think) who some decades ago won
the world championship for pistol shooting, with his right hand. He then
had an accident in which he lost that hand. He practised and relearned to
shoot with his left hand, and the following year again won the world title.
Whatever the precise facts of the case, the key idea is that very high
level skills and coordination can often be adaptively redeployed (an
important principle, of course, in medical rehabilitation). And the same
notion would likely apply to intrinsic neural signals and criteria.
We seem to need different learning procedures for
changing and unchanging aspects of the world. Adaptation as in adaptive
control is best for getting to know the unchanging "laws" of our environ-
ment, whereas random reorganization is best if those laws keep changing
unpredictably. . . .A world model is, after all, however
implemented, "internal knowledge" (stored as values of variables inside
the system) of how we can use the regularities of the world in the
achievement of our wants. ...
the basics: store for subsequent use those regularities of the
outside world -- or the regularities of your reactions to it, which one
could call an "inverse" world model -- that are important to you, i.e.
that you have discovery and storage mechanisms for.
Perhaps equilibrium and balanced are the inverse of gravity, which is about
as fundamental as we can know.
This may be what reorganization basically is: if you have a
problem that must be solved but you don't know its solution, perform
random actions and hope for the best...
With the proviso, as I recall Polya's heuristics, at least for the higher
levels of human function (as opposed to the tumbling about of simple
creatures) that you define the territory of unknowns so that your random
perturbations occur within the regions of uncertainty and do not randomly
shake up the organizing structures and principles that you can be fairly
sure of. This is a practical point which is also too often overlooked by
action-oriented executives who want the possible benefits of change but do
not want to be bothered by thinking things through in advance, by
discovering the contingencies with which the random actions will be
interacting and having their combined effects.
(Hons writes:)
... in my opinion, conditioning ought not be compared with control, but
with reorganization. In the process of reorganization, the consequences
DO select the resulting behavior.
(Bill Powers writes:)
While I agree with the first sentence, I can't agree with the second
one. At best, you're speaking metaphorically, or synecdochically.
(Hans:)
Is this clearer now? By the way, what is "synecdochically"?
At the risk of responding to what may be a rhetorical exchange
I would suggest that since reorganization, like organization, is
multilevel, and that conditioning ordinarily refers only to the lowest
levels of organization.
At the higher levels, where language processes intervene and complicate
things immeasureably and in highly individualistic ways, one necessarily
speaks metaphorically (i.e. making symbolic comparisons and equations) and
synecdochically (i.e. representing some whole in terms of a selected part
or aspect). And it is really only at these levels of higher symbolic
manipulation that anticipated consequences can play a role in the selection
of behavior.
Anyway, that's the way I see it! Cheers to all.
Bruce Buchanan
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On a related question, [Hans Blom, 941123] writes: