[From Bruce Abbott (2017.11.28.1310 EST)]
I have just acquired a “selection of papers, essays, and other writings by the late Kenneth J. W. Craik” that were published in 1966 under the title “The Nature of Psychology.” Here is a quote from Chapter 1 of what was to be a book tentatively entitled “The Mechanism of Human Action.” ( The book was never completed owing to Craik’s untimely accidental death in 1945.)
Thus McDougall [10] rightly emphasizes that human behavior is caused from in front, rather than from behind. But I do not think that he analyzes this notion clearly. Again, Haldane, in his book Respiration [11], seems to imagine that the regulation of breathing by the energy requirements of the body lifts its functioning to a higher level, and indicates a life, or physis, unlike that of any machine. The difference, in my view, comes back to the very simple one between a mechanical device involving feedback, and one not involving feedback – notions which are well known in the fields of amplifier and servo-mechanism design, and to which we shall frequently refer. The movements of a leaf are explicable in terms directly of the wind which blows and of its own visible shape; we do not need to consider the leaf itself as a source of energy. Living creatures, and machines such as amplifiers and guns, on the other hand, liberate energy when suitably stimulated and behave in ways in which cannot be explained without taking their stored-up energy into account. Further, machines like automatic regulators and servo-mechanisms show behavior which is determined not just by the external disturbance acting on them and their internal store of energy, but by the relation between their disturbed state and some assigned state of equilibrium, for example, by the departure from the correct temperature which has occurred. This notion, again, we shall discuss in greater detail; at this stage I only want to suggest that such mechanisms do show a simple form of purposiveness or of being actuated by requirements.
For the correct temperature, or the correct course in the case of an aircraft controlled by an automatic pilot, is not a physical cause in the ordinary sense; it is a requirement to be fulfilled, and it is due to the special construction of the machine that the machine can show a wide variety of behavior directed toward the end of restoring the correct temperature or course and ceasing only when that end has been attained. In other words, the indeterminists are quite right in asserting that purposive behavior introduces some new principle over and above that of straight causation from behind, and a principle which is shown very little, or not at all, in inorganic nature apart from man-made machines; but it is not a principle which is peculiar to living organisms or conscious minds – it is the principle of feedback or cyclical action, as it is also called , which is manifested in many man-made devices and which might well arise in the course of nature in sufficiently complex systems. (Pp. 12-13)
Sherwood, Stephen L. (Ed.). (1966). The nature of psychology: A selection of papers, essays and other writings by the late Kenneth J. W. Craik. London: Cambridge University Press.
Bruce