[from Mary Powers 9505.08]
Ron Blue 9505.05 -
...perception/learning/cognition may be viewed as an effort
to assimilate and accomodate all experience into neuro-
energy-efficient eigenfunctional equivalence or quasi-
holographic correlational opponent processing recordings...
You don't say!
I see some Piaget here, some von Foerster, some Pribram. But is
your model the integration of the ideas of various people or a
model of how it all works? You say "neuroscience is a mixture of
many approaches trying to understand how the brain works". We're
trying to take AN approach, which demonstrates high predictivity,
generates plausible simulations, solves the problem of producing
consistent ends by variable means in a changing environment, etc.
One thing we have found is that integrating or mixing PCT with
other approaches is a disaster for PCT, because it's a different
"how" entirely. The little details that the neurosciences are
lost in aren't even "hows", they are "whats". Generally, all
those approaches collect and interpret the "what" data using the
same "how" - except PCT. "How" is way up there in interpretation
land already. Current procedures of data collection are not the
problem; the problem is the mental model that guides the data
collection.
It's also top-down, not bottom-up, when considering the
relationship between why and how. PCT is built on an
extraordinarily simple "why": organisms are control systems.
This is not clustering the hows into a why theory; rather, the
"why" theory generates the "how".
* * *
Joel Judd 9505.05 -
On knowledge and belief. Knowledge is awareness or recognition
of the truth of something, and belief is the confident conviction
of the truth, according to the dictionary I'm looking at, which
begs a lot of questions. I wondered for a while whether these
were two points (or segments) along a continuum involving more or
less actual experience - now I'm leaning towards thinking them
hierarchical, with belief on top, and knowledge occupying various
levels below, depending on how much processing through the levels
there is.
There is a strong emotional component to belief that knowledge
lacks. I liked Avery's Uncle Fred, who inspires belief because
he has survived as long as he has, and does know where the
antelope go in the springtime. Sticking with Uncle Fred, and
believing what he says, is a good way to keep important errors
(like hunger) small (even if he is wrong about some less
important things). And all important errors involve one
physiologically - emotionally. Uncle Fred, of course, is a
metaphor for 100,000 years or more of human evolution; belief is
valuable or there wouldn't be so much of it around.
There's a quote in the May 1 New Yorker (an article called
"Explaining Hitler") from another Uncle Fred - Nietzsche.
Men believe in the truth of all that is seen to be strongly
believed.
He then goes on to talk about "deceivers" [like Hitler] who begin
cynically, and end up believing themselves, and that it is the
intensity of that belief as it develops [rather than its content]
that is so convincing to followers.
So the interesting question is why is belief important, i.e. have
a large emotional component? Why do most people have a need, a
reference signal, for a strong belief in something? Why is an
intense belief so desirable and so easily adopted? This is about
religion, and it is also about things like the scientific method,
and political arrangements, ethics and morality in general - the
idea of having an ethic at all. Hard to think of Hitler and his
buddies as having an ethic, but no one ever said an ethic has to
be nice, and there was a belief there which made a program of
getting rid of Jews and Gypsies and so on seem like a good thing
to do. Which is equivalent to believing, say, in PCT and
therefore thinking that replicating conditioning experiments is a
good thing to do too.
I certainly don't have any answers. Beliefs in general may be
essential, perhaps to having a coherent personality, or a
consistent and integrated group of reference signals, or, come to
think of it, because people who go through life with a confident
conviction (as the dictionary said) do better than those who
don't), one of the beliefs we usually have is that some beliefs
are better than others. So I'd better stop here, because this is
beginning to look a bit recursive, and the next thing you know,
I'll be talking about the cybernetics of cybernetics 
Mary P.
