More Questions

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2011.06.16.0940)]

Bill Powers (2011.0.6.16.0925 MDT)–

Here it is in more detail. I’ve labeled the two control loops. The
middle part of the diagram is in the environment. Each person perceives
both his own and the other person’s spoken sentences. Each person varies
the sentence he is emitting so as to maintain the desired relationship
between the meaning he perceives in his output sentences and the meaning
he perceives in the sentences the other person is emitting. Only the
highest level in each person is shown, with lower levels and their
control loops being hidden. The reference input is the desired or
intended relationship.

Note that still a higher level would be needed to control for
“understanding” on the part of the other person, which would be
perceived in many instances of (remembered) relationships between one’s
own sentences and the other person’s.

Beautiful. I was considering doing this myself but I didn’t get there in time. I think another thing you might mention is that the spoken sentence inputs to the input functions are not necessarily simultaneous. The input functions must be integrating over a pretty long period of time. The computation of the state of he relationship between the meanings of the two sentences wouldn’t proceed until two spoken sentence (as meanings) have entered the input function that evaluates the relationship between the meanings.

Best

Rick

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–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

[Bob_Hintz]

bob hintz 2011.6.16

I would like to suggest that the controlled variable is the relationship between the participants in the conversation and that the relationship between the speech acts is the method of controlling this relationship. If I want to know something and I think you might know the information that I want, I can ask you a question. If I do, I am proposing that you are a person who will provide that information to me, if you know it. If you are my spouse and I ask, “What’s for dinner?”, and you say “meatloaf”, I will know something about my possible future. If you are my neighbor is this situation, I will only know something about your possible future, unless you invite me to dinner. If you are my spouse and say, “none of your business”, I will know that I have a different problem than the one I was attempting to solve with my prior question. I might begin to wonder if there will be anything at all for dinner and try to figure out if I have done something wrong or failed to do something right in the recent past from my spouse’s point of view.

bob

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On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2011.06.16.0940)]

Bill Powers (2011.0.6.16.0925 MDT)–

Here it is in more detail. I’ve labeled the two control loops. The
middle part of the diagram is in the environment. Each person perceives
both his own and the other person’s spoken sentences. Each person varies
the sentence he is emitting so as to maintain the desired relationship
between the meaning he perceives in his output sentences and the meaning
he perceives in the sentences the other person is emitting. Only the
highest level in each person is shown, with lower levels and their
control loops being hidden. The reference input is the desired or
intended relationship.

Note that still a higher level would be needed to control for
“understanding” on the part of the other person, which would be
perceived in many instances of (remembered) relationships between one’s
own sentences and the other person’s.

Beautiful. I was considering doing this myself but I didn’t get there in time. I think another thing you might mention is that the spoken sentence inputs to the input functions are not necessarily simultaneous. The input functions must be integrating over a pretty long period of time. The computation of the state of he relationship between the meanings of the two sentences wouldn’t proceed until two spoken sentence (as meanings) have entered the input function that evaluates the relationship between the meanings.

Best

Rick

–
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

[Bill_Powers1]

(Gavin
Ritz 2011.06.17.10.14NZT)

[From Bill Powers
(2011.0.6.16.0925 MDT)]

Gavin Ritz 2011.06.16.18.04NZT

GR: I can
only see it working like this if it is to be consistent with your Control
System. They way you have it below confuses me because the feedback is
severed, like that.

BP earlier: Note that still a higher level would be needed to control for
“understanding” on the part of the other person, which would be
perceived in many instances of (remembered) relationships between one’s
own sentences and the other person’s.

GR: Bill
there is something that I still can’t understand you have two arrows
going into the input on person A and person B, and a separate arrow for
the feedback loop of each person. So the second arrow circumvents the
feedback loop. That is not consistent with your control system. Because
you can’t have two arrows going into the input only one and it must going
into the controlled variable for it be a control system. If you have
another input from somewhere else then that’s outside your feedback loop,
that breaks the integrity of the control system.

Below is the diagram from chapter 2 of LCS III. Note that the output of
the control system feeds back to affect the input quantity, which is also
affected by a disturbance. So the perceptual signal is affected by two
inputs, one caused by the system itself and the other caused by some
independent variable that we call the disturbance.

In general, the input quantity is a collection of environmental
variables, not just a single variable. There are really multiple inputs
to the perceptual input function (think of the retina of the eye with
millions of sensory receptors), and the disturbance could affect some of
them while the action of the system affects others. The sets of inputs
may overlap partially, completely, or not at all.

The input quantity corresponds to the “spoken sentences” in my
posted diagram. Note that what affects the other person is NOT the
variable shown as the output quantity. The output quantity is the set of
actions that produce the spoken sentences, not the sentences themselves.
If we were looking at a multi-level diagram, it would be clear that the
output function for spoken outputs operates through a feedback function
made up of tongue, jaw, lips, vocal cords, and diaphragm. What comes out
of that feedback function affects not only the input function of the
speaker, but the input function of the listener as well.

Representing higher-order control systems with a single diagram is
difficult. What is shown as the feedback function really includes
multiple levels of perceptual input functions and also output functions
below the level being diagrammed The so-called input quantity is really a
hierarchy of perceptions at levels below the one being diagrammed. And if
we want to speak of “sentences” being passed back and forth, we
really have to imagine that the lower-level systems in both speakers are
organized identically. In truth, all that is really passed back and forth
are waves of air compression affecting intensity-level perceptions in
each person. It takes numerous levels of perceptual processing to
construct from those sound-waves the things we call pitch and timbre,
phonemes, morphemes, words, and finally sentences, meanings, and
relationships among meanings. There is no guarantee that these levels are
organized the same way in any two speakers. Communication is somewhat of
a miracle, even when the two speakers have similar degrees of skill in
using the same language.

Martin Taylor dealt with these problems in a somewhat different way, but
the same difficulties arise and require showing “virtual”
variables and pathways that represent higher-order levels of the two
hierarchies of control. Those virtual pathways don’t really exist; they
assume that the two speakers have similar internal organization, a
simplification made for obvious practical reasons, but in truth nothing
passes between the speakers but those raw sound waves.

See my drawing
below. The only model that looks consistent with your control system
looks like to me the hexagon, any other shape destroys the integrity of
your control system.

I’m trying to keep in mind your strict definitions of a control
system. So the basic shape of the control system must stay as per your
diagram in B:CP. Change that and its something else not a strict feedback
system.

You loose the controlled variable in that diagram above???, they
are controlling the disturbance as per that drawing.

You
are showing the CV as a single variable, outside the input function, that
provides a place for the two effects on the input function to be added
together. That’s OK, but remember that it’s the input function which is
defining the CV as some particular function of a set of physical
variables or lower-order perceptions. Inside the circle where you wrote
CV should really be a swarm of N environmental variables called qi[n].
Different input functions can actually detect different CVs within the
same set of qi’s.

All I did with my diagram was to include the CV inside the input
function, showing just the two effects on it, the system’s own feedback
effect and the independent disturbing effect. Your way of diagramming it
is just as good, but it does raise the question of how spoken sentences
can affect something physical in the environment, when only sound waves
are really there. “Really”, that is, according to our physics
models.

Best,

Bill P.

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At 10:35 AM 6/17/2011 +1200, you wrote:

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2011.06.18.0725 MDT)]

Gavin Ritz
2011.06.18.14.57NZT

I have created
a drawing to communicate (I agree
Bill there is no
better way), what I’m a trying to do. I have shown potentially as many
environmental disturbances I can think of.

I would love
to get Bruce’s
narrowed down versions so I can match it up to this diagram.

For multiple individuals just imagine layers connected back on to each
other (maybe like a doughnut) with the outputs going to multiple
individual potential disturbances and back through the cycle again.
Pretty complicated and difficult to picture (I will make a drawing). That
is individual output variables can only connect to multiple individual
disturbances.

I don’t think this diagram is right, but you’re making me think about
some things that have just slipped past before.
In my diagram I have shown one person’s sentences as disturbances of the
other person’s inputs. In yours, however, you have shown a wide variety
of disturbances other than the sentences, and in fact you’ve left out the
connection from one person’s controlled variable to the other one’s
perceptions. I can see the reason for this: I have drawn diagrams that
are quite similar to this (I mistyped that as “disagrams,” but
that’s not a bad word for a disfunctional diagram).
Here’s the problem. A sentence, for its utterer, is a controlled
variable. We monitor the written or spoken sentences we’re producing,
often editing them by saying them again with better wording or
organization, sometimes seeing bad interpretations and adding more
sentences to rule them out. There are lots of environmental variables
acting as disturbances, just as you have drawn them, but we make
corrections as we go to keep those disturbances from affecting the
overall communication that we perceive and that goes to the other person.
So a sentence acting as a disturbance to another person’s perceptions is
more than that: it’s a controlled disturbance. The sentence itself
is protected against most disturbances, so it arrives at the other
person’s ears in the same form in which it left the speaker’s mouth, or
reasonably so.
At the same time, of course, there can be uncontrolled disturbances
reaching the listener’s ears – a jackhammer starts pounding on concrete
nearby drowns out the sentences, earwax in the listener’s ears attenuates
the sound, echos in a bare room jumble the sound-waves before they get to
the ear. These disturbances are not affected by the speaker or the
listener.
There can also be disturbances at different levels. The tone of voice in
which the sentence is uttered can be perceived as insulting or mocking,
the meaning
of the sentence can itself be a disturbance to some other systems:
“Do I smell smoke?”
And of course there are many disturbances that affect other variables the
listener is controlling, such as balance, nutrition, brightness, wealth,
the ecology, and so forth. But in analyzing communication itself, we
aren’t talking about those other control systems.
Now the missing connection, from the controlled variable of the speaker
to the input function of the listener. Look at my diagram, here with some
added detail:
This diagram shows two amorphous clouds of other environmental variables
affected by the speaker and affecting inputs to the listener at some
level, going both ways between communicators. These are
uncontrolled effects of the speech and uncontrolled causes
of effects on the listener – uncontrolled by either party shown in the
diagram, that is. These other disturbances have to be removed for the
communication to be “pure”.

I’ve also moved the “cv” designation to the perceptual signal.
Now the little circles in the environment indicate some group of input
quantities (like sound waves or printed characters) involved in control
of the CV and which affect both the speaker and the listener. The little
circles can also represent groups of lower-level perceptions, the
environment then including the lower-level systems below the ones shown.
Now the CV can be defined at any level with less confusion. I have not
shown any direct connection from one speaker’s output to the other’s
input, though that could be one case. It would still be uncontrolled
because the speaker does not perceive the effect.

With these additions, we can see that each little circle is a set of
variables involved in controlling a CV, and that if the input functions
of the two parties are organized the same way, the circles will each be
perceived as the same CV by both parties. Of course great confusion
arises when the two input functions are not organized the same
way.

What is new about this diagram is mainly that the communication goes not
from the output of one system to the input of the other, but from the
input quantities of one system to the input functions of both systems. As
Bob Hintz noted, the two inputs to each system are really sequential,
with memory being involved so they can be compared: what I’m hearing now
in relation to what I said before. Children soon learn that if they speak
while someone else is talking, they aren’t heard. That’s a lower-level
kind of disturbance.

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