[from Mary Powers (961010)]
Bill Benzon (961008)
Bill -- your conventions (w/ date & time) are a little too
complex for me...
See above for what we do. It makes it easier to specify the post
you are responding to. Add time only if there are multiple posts
from one person in a day (as below, and if you feel like it).
Bruce G. (961010.1005)
I went to college from '48-'52 and never was given a grade. As
far as I know, they still don't do it. At the end of a semester
we'd get a paragraph from our teachers on how they thought things
were going, which was no news because we saw them at individual
conferences every week or two.
Some teachers were pretty loose, and it was easy to slip through
the cracks and fail to learn essential stuff. But most students
were highly motivated and worked like dogs. I did a bit of both.
The college is Sarah Lawrence.
Bruce A. (961003)
About asthma you say
A good deal of effort is being expended to develop
programs through which seriously asthmatic children and
adults can learn to manage their disease. It's clearly a
problem of establishing and maintaining control over the
symptoms...
Certainly controlling the symptoms is vital, since the
alternative can be death. But what concerns me is that symptom
control is achieved by an indirect approach - blasting steroids
into the asthmatic by pill or inhaler. By indirect I mean that
it wasn't steroid or glucorticoid insufficiency that caused the
asthma in the first place. And the consequences of steroid use
are multiple and negative: weight gain, hair growth, potassium
loss, immunity reduction, slower wound healing, cataract growth,
increased blood clotting, osteoporosis, and, suggested as a
possibility in a recent article in Science (9 Aug. "Why stress is
bad for your brain") atrophy of the hippocampus. What fun.
My point is that the asthma is "controlled" by screwing up
another, major control system big time. And getting out of that
bind is what any reasonably well-controlled asthmatic needs to
aim for, rather than be satisfied with symptom control. An
inhaler is better than prednisone, because the dose goes to the
lungs with minimum effect anywhere else, so theoretically one can
taper off prednisone and let the inhaler do all the work, and
lose the weight and reduce the other effects. But it's still
steroids and it's still introducing (an aiding) disturbance into
a control system I'd rather not be messing with.
Remi (961003)
(I seem to be going backwards in time with all these posts)
[My thought and goal] are determined by their reference
signal. No free choice there!
...But goal[s] are still reference signal[s]. So our
behavior always go[es] in the direction that will reduce
error signal. There is absolutely no choice.
I guess I'd feel malaise too if that's the way I thought about
it. But I don't.
The main problem is that you are thinking of reference signals as
things that you have - or that have you. It's the same sort of
idea that sociobiologists seem to have about DNA. You don't HAVE
these things, you ARE these things. They aren't controlling you,
they are you controlling. Do you say "Oh my god, my brain is
producing all these perceptions and goals and thoughts" - or are
they YOUR perceptions and goals and thoughts?
For most reference signals you should be damned glad you aren't
in there exercising your free choice. You could never keep up
with them all. Who wants to choose their blood clotting time?
Or pick and choose how the immune system goes about its business?
Or decide how much of which enzyme is going to digest that ice
cream you just ate?
At higher levels we choose all the time. We plan, and discard
alternatives. We rank our principles as more or less important,
and at another time rank them somewhat differently and act
accordingly. We do it, by means of an organization that has
various components that we happen to have labelled reference
signal, error, etc., etc. That doesn't put them in charge of us.
Mary P.