learning PCT

CSGnet Archive CSG1996
1

[From Bill Powers (961017.1800 MDT)]

Bill Benzon (unknown date and time) --

Bill, why are you resisting learning about PCT so insistently? Is it that
you're concentrating so hard on your own agenda (as you put it) that you
have time only for the most cursory survey of anyone else's? Some of the
things you've been saying about inputs and outputs and "motoric circuits"
simply make no sense -- they're gibberish, as far as any relation to PCT is
concerned. You ask the most elementary questions about how PCT says organims
do things, as if you really haven't understood a word I've written. My sense
is that you've simply picked up a few phrases that seem to agree with what
you believe already, without really understanding them, and trashcanned the
rest. If that's unfair, I'm sorry, but that's really how it looks, and not
only to me.

I'm certainly not saying that you have to learn or use anything about PCT if
you don't want to, but it's strange to hear you talking as if you learned
everything about it that's worth learning 20 years ago, and then to read
some of the very odd things you say about it. What's going on here?

Bill P.

2

[From Bill Powers (961017.1800 MDT)]

Bill Benzon (unknown date and time) --

Bill, why are you resisting learning about PCT so insistently? Is it that
you're concentrating so hard on your own agenda (as you put it) that you
have time only for the most cursory survey of anyone else's?

1. That's unfair. If you think I'm lying when I said that Hays and I spent
many hours over 7 or so years dealing with your ideas, then out with it.
We may not have done that work under your direct supervision, we may have
given short-shrift to some important ideas, but it was NOT a cursory
survey. I have spent a great deal more time trying to understand you than
you have spent trying to understand me.

2. As a practical matter, I've got to start a consulting engagement in a
few weeks. Once that starts I won't have much, if any, time for CSGnet.
So this particular source of disturbance will go away fairly soon.

Some of the
things you've been saying about inputs and outputs and "motoric circuits"
simply make no sense -- they're gibberish, as far as any relation to PCT is
concerned.

3. And some of PCT is gibberish as far as any relation to neural evidence
or human language.

Bill B

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3

[Martin Taylor 961018 10:35]

Bill Benzon -- Apparently Fri, 18 Oct 1996 09:44:01

3. And some of PCT is gibberish as far as any relation to neural evidence
or human language.

Sorry, but I find that an unsustainable and offensive statement. I'm
certainly no expert on neural evidence, but I have co-authored three books
relating to language--two psycholinguistics texts and a "Psychology of
Reading." I have found absolutely nothing in PCT that is gibberish with
relation to language, and a lot that clarifies issues in psycholinguistics
that were otherwise obscure.

The _only_ thing that needs to be made clear is that the possibility,
mentioned by Bill Powers, that there could sometimes be recursive connections
within the set of perceptual input functions at a level, is actually
needed to permit the kinds of quasi-logical operations characterstic of
language. And that's not an amendment to PCT, just a clarification that
one possibility among several is likely to be the case.

2. As a practical matter, I've got to start a consulting engagement in a
few weeks. Once that starts I won't have much, if any, time for CSGnet.
So this particular source of disturbance will go away fairly soon.

Sorry to hear that. Varied disturbances are the way that control systems
are able to reorganize to control in a wider variety of environments. In
other words, the system becomes stronger as we learn in dealing with
criticism, whether it be by being able to discredit the criticism, or by
learning of deficiencies in the thing criticized. Informed criticism is
most welcome--but as Bill P. says, sometimes yours does not seem terribly
well informed.

Personally, I hope that you don't leave, and that you come to produce
criticisms that are taken seriously by the main developers of PCT.

I have spent a great deal more time trying to understand you than
you have spent trying to understand me.

Last night I downloaded from your Web site the two papers you recommended
(natural intelligence, and the evolution of cognition). It ties up the
phone line for too long, trying to read them on-line. But I don't expect
I got the figures. Is there a way I can get them, so that I can read the
papers (especially NatInt) properly, offline? I make this request publicly,
because there may be others in the same situation.

Martin