How is control prioritised across the whole system?

[Kuba]

Control loops operate simultaneously. Higher-level systems set goals for lower-level systems. Ongoing corrections happen at different levels without conscious supervision.

What determines which control processes are maintained, and which become less effective?
For example, when we experience interference/distraction e.g. tired, sleep deprived, distracted, sick or multitasking, our ability to control some variables deteriorates, yet we are able to continue controlling others.

I can, for example, see survival being prioritised over conserving energy (fight or flight uses resources in the moment, as survival is more important than having energy later in the day).

But in a wider context, the PCT hierarchy doesn’t seem sufficient to explain prioritisation. Higher in the hierarchy can mean a more abstract kind of perception, not necessarily greater importance.

Warren’s work on consciousness can provide some insight. Most prioritisation happens automatically and consciousness may become relevant when errors persist. Which errors enter awareness may depend partly on how large they are and partly on how close they are to the current goal within the hierarchy. But even conscious prioritisation is problematic, as we are not that good at taking care of the most important thing first…

Regardless of consciousness being involved, I’d like to understand what drives prioritisation at the automatic level. Is there some kind of order of priority we could capture?

Is what the system prioritises necessarily the same as what survives interference?
If one process is preserved while another is disrupted, does that indicate priority, or simply that one is less vulnerable to that particular interference?

It would be interesting to hear people’s perspectives.

[Lukasz20]

Hi Kuba,

Welcome to the forum. You have raised a fundamental question that cuts straight to one of the most frequently conflated assumptions in orthodox PCT.

The short answer is: **you are completely right**. The PCT hierarchy as formalized in *B:CP* is a hierarchy of **perceptual abstraction**, not an **operational priority queue or resource scheduler**.

Here is why that distinction matters:

**1. Abstraction Is Not Operational Urgency**

In the classical 11-level hierarchy, a system-concept or principle-level loop sits “higher” purely because its input function constructs perceptions out of signals fed from lower levels. However, high informational abstraction confers zero intrinsic physical priority. Consider a person with a 40°C fever. Principle- and program-level loops (e.g., philosophical reflection, complex professional work) deteriorate immediately, while deep autonomic and somatic loops commandeer the entire system. A high-level loop does not possess some magic operational override if the physical machinery executing it cannot maintain gain.

**2. The Shared Physical Substrate Bottleneck ($C_{max}$)**

In orthodox block diagrams, control loops are treated as if they operate in a frictionless mathematical ether with infinite capacity. In any real biological organism, all control loops physically share a **finite physical and metabolic substrate**: ATP availability, blood glucose, neural bandwidth, and muscular actuation.

When systemic demand approaches the capacity limit of that shared substrate ($S \to C_{max}$):

* Loops that require extensive distributed neural tissue, long effector chains, and high transport delays ($\tau$) experience a collapse in local loop gain:

$$\frac{\partial p}{\partial q_o} \to 0$$

* Control authority is lost not because the reference signal changed, but because the physical pathway implementing loop closure was starved of throughput.

**3. Answering Your Closing Question: Priority vs. Vulnerability**

You asked: *“If one process is preserved while another is disrupted, does that indicate priority, or simply that one is less vulnerable to that particular interference?”*

It is an interaction of both, mediated by physical wiring:

* **Structural Vulnerability:** High-level cognitive programs are topologically deep and fragile. A small reduction in metabolic throughput disrupts the entire cascading chain.

* **Metabolic Gating (Hardwired Priority):** Somatosensory and brainstem loops have literal physiological priority over the fuel line (vascular shunting, autonomic gating). Under acute stress or exhaustion, peripheral and prefrontal substrates are deprioritized by physical design.

Powers attempted to anchor biological survival via the “intrinsic system” (Chapter 14 of *B:CP*), which initiates reorganization when essential physiological variables deviate from their intrinsic references. But reorganization is a slow, trial-and-error adaptive mechanism; it is **not a real-time dynamic scheduler**.

Your intuition is entirely spot-on: explaining which control processes survive under interference requires PCT to look beyond the perceptual hierarchy alone, and model the capacity and resource allocation of the physical substrate through which those loops must close.

Exce

llent first post.

Best,

Luk

[wmansell]

Hi Kuba,
Great prompt!

Just start with a correction - what you’ve described about consciousness was in Bill’s original 1960 paper. It was the majority of get I put across in my 2024 article because it was already fit for purpose and I wanted to share it with the academic community as a theory of consciousness to fair alongside the many others.

My contribution was only to speculate that an additional intrinsic system could be controlling the rate at which novel perceptual inputs are integrated to form or modify the functions that specify a perceptual variable. This system becomes the ‘priority’ driving reorganisation only when other intrinsic systems are not in error and managed fine through physiological mechanisms or ongoing actions. This manifests itself as our conscious mind drifting towards what interests us both internally and externally when our biological needs to being automatically met. But this doesn’t answer your question about the content that is prioritised at any one moment.

I believe Bill was clear that perceptual variables currently in error will attract attention spontaneously. So your question relates to what happens when multiple variables are in error. Arguably consciousness is literally the cockpit from which this prioritisation occurs and it is probably the main raison d’être of consciousness. A bunch of dials are firing off - which one to attend to and adjust action to restore?

In my 2023 book chapter I suggested that perceptual variables will vary in their strength of covariation with certain intrinsic variables. I would expect that those with a closer covariation with stronger biologically weighted intrinsic variables will attract attention more readily. However, we also have some voluntary control and I would expect this to be partly based upon how the immediate salience of the error (maybe what leaks into consciousness has a certain spikey profile that is novel?) and partly based upon our stored plans (at the program level) for how to habitually deal with these (e.g. ignore or attend) which are guided at a higher level by our principles (e.g. be strong; be sensitive) which in turn are guided by our self system concept. Our cockpit of consciousness is literally this sandpit of balancing which error to use as an index of improvement in the adjustments we make to our actions (and that automatically occur through reorganisation as awareness is sustained).

I think Rupert’s theory of consciousness is control of quality fits in nicely here too.

I think the job is translating my ramblings (which Rick will help by finding extensive inaccuracies and various holes in) into a testable precise model!

Kind regards,
Warren