[From Rick Marken (931208.1130)]
Osmo Eerola (931208) --
Well, I would not give PCT the honour of "a new science".
If you just give PCT your attention that is honor enough.
But I have to admit that either
I am stupid or have not realized the unique idea of PCT from the
discussion
The new idea is that behavior is an observable side effect of
the control of perceptual variables. This is a unique idea because
you will find nothing like it in the recent (last 100 years) literature
of psychology, sociology, neurophysiology, biology, control engineering,
robotics,
AI, or any other science that has anything at all to do with the
behavior of living organisms.
(maybe I have to read the PCT bible at first).
I think it might be worthwhile, though, of course, I recommend
that you keep a copy of "Mind Readings" nearby at all times as
well. If "Behavior: The control of perception" is the bible,
"Mind Readings" is the book of miracles.
Dag wrote:
We act in
order to affect what we experience.
We grow up and learn how to affect
experience to make it come closer to what we want it to be, and as
long as that is what we want, to keep it that way.
Osmo Eerola replies:
Any undergraduate control engineer can generalize the classical control
theory to that level as applied to human behaviour:
Maybe so. But none did -- except for one named William T. Powers.
i.e. one has a reference
value (target, goal experience), towards which the system (human being)
aims by correcting the behavioural acts as far as the difference of
the reference and result is small enough.
This is exactly what most control engineers have come up with as a
generalization of "classical control theory...to human behaviour".
Unfortunately, it is, at best, incomplete. First, it does not clearly
specify that the "reference value" is inside the human; this is im-
portant because nearly all treatments of human control in control
theory terms place the reference outside of the human, in the environ-
ment. Second, it does not clearly specify that it is a perception (an
aspect of the human's own experience) that is being brought to the
reference value. The phrase "correcting behavioral acts" suggests that
it is the behavioral acts that are being controlled (made to match
the reference). Non-PCT control theorists have spent a hugh amount of
time modelling human control as the control of "behavioral acts", in
the process producing overly complex models that work only in
"predictable" environments (see Powers [931207.0920 MST]). Control
engineers build machines that "behave properly" (from the engineers
point of view) so it is natural for them to look at human control as
the control of "behavioral acts". Unfortunately, these engineers seem
to be unable or unwilling to see that "proper behavior" in human
control can only refer to the behavior of the human's own private
experience -- not to the appearance of the human's behavior from the
point of view of an observer (like the control engineer).
So your undergraduate has not clearly articulated the two
features of PCT that give it the distinction of being a "new
science":1) reference levels inside of (and set by) the human
and 2) reference levels that specify the intended state of per-
ceptual, not an externally observable behavioral, variables.
The new science of PCT is oriented toward discovering the
perceptual variables that organisms control, how they control
them and why. Perhaps this approach to understanding humans
is old hat in Finland; but its newer than springtime out here
in the ol' US of A.
Best
Rick