[From Rick Marken (950507.1230)]
Bill Powers (950507.0630 MDT) to Joel Judd (950505.0800 CDT) --
This boils down to two dimensions in which we deal with statements:
acceptance-nonacceptance, and supportability-nonsupportability. Most
statements belong somewhere in this space, but not at the extremes.
I like this mapping. It suggests a nice symmetry between religious
statements and PCT statements: religious statements are accepted and
unsupported; PCT statements are unaccepted and supported.
Neither belief nor knowledge reveals to us the nature of the universe;
both are perceptual phenomena, phenomena of the mind. I prefer
knowledge to belief when it is possible to obtain, because relating
ideas to simple experiences seems to me our best hope for learning
something about the reality that lies beyond the senses.
I share your view, of course. But it seems that a large segment of the
population (including many "scientists") is much happier learning
about the reality beyong the senses by relating ideas to other ideas;
"simple experience" is what you hear on talk radio;-)
By the way, Bill, I ran your PCT-based re-write of Hans' model-based
control program. It works like a charm -- the perceptual signal, xt, is
kept _precisely_ matching the sinusoidally varying reference signal,
xopt, despite aribitrarily varying disturbances to the perception. As
Bruce Abbott said "WOW".
I also got the tape of the AERA conference. Everyone (Hugh, Bill, Gary,
Ed and Dag) did a great job; it looks like the talks were well received. I
thought Gary Cziko's talk was particularly interesting; all the demos
were excellent but the reward vs effort demo was sensational. Gary
even managed to get a group of educational researchers to keep
listening while he explained why their IV-DV approach to research was
useless. I was also moved by Bill Powers' response to a question about
Ed's discipline program. Bill's comments reminded me again that the
real value of PCT is not what you do with it but, rather, what it does
with you.
Best
Rick