[From Bill Powers (920501.1430)]
Greg Williams (920430) --
How about this way: DURING ecstasy, one is AWARE OF no reference
signals, whether they are met or not -- perhaps because awareness is
focused above all reference signals. Certainly, homeostasis goes on, >even
during ecstasy!
I don't know about "ecstasy," or even if I've experienced the much
advertised and sought-after states of mind referred to in the mystical
literature. All I know about is what happens when you keep going up levels
and find, finally, that there's no more. I would describe the experience as
observation without judgment or interpretation. But this doesn't mean that
you're unaware of reference signals or perceptual interpretations --
they're all laid out in front of you to examine if that's what you do. But
there's nothing to conclude about them -- they're just there. The whole
system goes right on working. Even your personality goes right on working.
You're just not in it at the moment.
The reference signals (and perceptions) you're aware of are at a lower
level. They aren't a problem. The "attachment" doesn't have to do with
them. Attachment, I think, is the viewpoint(s) you're occuping but are
unaware of occupying. The desires are the reference signals that you
project into the world of experience as values, not realizing that you're
putting them there and that they're not objective. You don't have to get
rid of them; you just have to realize who's creating them.
I feel uncomfortable talking about this because there's an implicit claim
that I've stumbled into enlightenment or know the secret of the great
mysteries. That's not how it is. Insights are the hierarchy being
surprised. The experience I'm talking about, to quote Susan Gulick from an
early CSG meeting, isn't a big "AHA!," but just sort of "oh." All the big
aha stuff is the lower levels thinking "Goody, now I AM perfect."
Of all the people I met who've claimed or implied attainment of some
unusual state of being, the only ones I've believed have been those who
seem to treat the whole thing as sort of amusing. The ones who spin fairy
tales about the experience and embed it into some elaborate mystical system
concept are just commercializing it. I don't think they know what they're
talking about. The basic route is extremely simple. Go up a level. Keep
going up a level, when you remember to try, until there's nowhere left to
go.
···
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I might as well unload what I think of extra-normal experiences. I don't
for a second doubt that they happen, but I don't think they're of much
importance. Before you consider any happening "unusual," you have to get
rid of the desire to make it so. Then you can - unattachedly -- consider
how many unusual happenings there must be every day on a planet with 5
billion people living on it 24 hours a day. Certainly, "ordinary"
explanations of many happenings would require very unusual circumstances to
occur at the same time. If six unusual conditions would have to hold
simultaneously, each one having a probability of occurring on a particular
day of one in a thousand, the probability of all of them happening at once
in one day is one in a billion (10^9). That means that on the average, this
coincidence happens five times a day to someone on the earth -- that's over
1800 times a year.
I don't think that people who enthuse over unusual phenomena try very hard
to distinguish something truly unusual from a merely unlikely but perfectly
ordinary coincidence. Coincidences that can occur and be witnessed on a
given day only one time in million must happen 5000 times a day, somewhere.
And collectors of stories are very likely to hear of them, because nobody
who experiences them believes they could have happend by chance. Why, it's
a million to one against such a coincidence! When you're the one who
experiences it, it doesn't seem rare at all.
My other point is that few people have any model of the brain, or any
conception of what a brain can do to provide itself with imagined
experiences. The imagination connection feeds information into the
perceptual channels, when it's connected, just as if it were coming from
the sensory organs. A person can generate internally any experience and any
reaction to any experience that is -- imagineable.
When most people say "You're imagining things," they mean that you're a
little crazy. But a control theorist would just say, "Of course I am, all
the time. Everybody is." Most of what you think you're experiencing as an
objective world is being filled in by your imagination. The imagined parts
look just as real as the sensed parts.
It's perfectly possible for a person to experience coherent, repeatable,
and extended internal scenarios, and even to learn how to get them started
at will. If the person is unaware of the extent to which a brain can
manufacture experiences for itself, the only logical explanation is that
this person is in contact with something supernatural, beyond the scope of
ordinary experience. Any suggestion that people are internally generating
these experiences, of course, leads to denial and even anger, because it
seems that one is questioning the balance of their minds, or some such old-
fashioned phrase. Not so. One is only questioning their understanding of
what a perfectly normal brain is capable of doing.
Nobody can say that we have exhausted all possible knowledge, or that our
current concepts of perception cover all that will ever be discovered. But
there's a difference between being open-minded to possibilities and being
gullible. There is no trait of gullibility, of course, but there is the
desire to believe something is true. When one desires to believe something,
the brain is admirably equipped to come up with all the evidence (and the
means of interpreting it) that is needed to support the belief. When you
get used to seeing how your own brain handles reference signals at the
higher levels, you will no longer be surprised to find your wishes turning
into realities, even if most of the reality has to be constructed from
inside.
The only way to handle possible instances of paranormal phenomena is to
become acquainted with your own desires before even looking at the
evidence. Do you want it to be true? Do you want it not to be true? If it's
true or if it's not true, will this damage your relationship with someone?
Reinforce or deny something else that matters to you? Support or deviate
from some other belief?
I don't think a person can evaluate a paranormal phenomenon unless that
person simply doesn't care whether it's real or not. I have met very, very
few people who don't care one way or the other. Those whom I have met or
whose works I have read who seem unattached (or know how to get there when
it's called for) feel just as I do: they don't care, either. They don't
think its very important. Most of the stuff that is important is far easier
to check up on, and happens not just a few times in a million, but every
second of every day. And most of it we don't understand any better than we
understand paranormal phenomena. You think ESP is hard to explain? Try
explaining how we recognize a friend's face.
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Yi P. Huang (920430) --
Welcome to CSGnet. Your combined interests in control engineering and the
life sciences will fit in very well. You ask about two ways to go:
1) To continue E.E. studying & try to join control theory with other
realms in my research work.
2) To study other subject,such as socialogy,psychology,history,etc.,
& use control theory to handle.
I would urge you to continue your studies of control engineering, while
accumulating knowledge about the other fields any way you can. As you
become familiar with the basic theoretical position that's popular on
CSGnet, especially as it's used by people in the life sciences, you'll see
that most other disciplines in the life sciences will change greatly once
control theory beomes widely accepted. You could put in a lot of effort
becoming an expert in some existing branch of the life sciences, only to
find ten or fifteen years from now that nothing you were taught is believed
any more. This is not likely to happen (at least to the same extent) in
control engineering. I don't think that modern control engineering courses
give students a very good understanding of control, but the basic methods
of quantitative analysis will always be useful and will provide valuable
background for anything you do to apply control theory in the life
sciences. If you have any choice, I would recommend that you focus on
analog methods of control, not so much digital methods (even though they're
very popular now). And learn all you can about quantitative simulations,
because modeling the brain is going to rest very heavily on testing
theories through simulations.
Also -- a very practical matter -- if you study control engineering you
will be able to find a good job without much trouble, and will then be able
to expand your interests without worrying about how to make a living. If
you start enquiring soon, you should be able to find places in the U.S. to
continue your education in ways that will include both control engineering
and studies of living systems.
I envy your future, young friend. What an exciting time you are going to
have!
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One last comment, about "correcting."
I think that two aspects of control are being confused here. One is the
kind of "correcting" of speech that is done to other people (as Avery
Andrews says, in the most soul-destroying way possible), or that one
consciously does to oneself. The other is the automatic and necessary kind
of error-driven action that is at the basis of all controlled outcomes. The
latter kind happens because of the way the nervous system is organized, and
works as it does whether or not we are consciously attending to it (or even
CAN consciously attend to it).
At a superficial conscious level, we can try to formulate the mechanisms of
speech understanding or production as a verbal or symbolic set of rules and
algorithms. The sentences we speak or the symbol-manipulations we emit or
program into a computer DESCRIBE a way of generating utterances that may or
may not be equivalent to the way that actually exists (even computer
instructions are merely equivalent to the underlying processes in the
computer). But these descriptions are not the neural mechanisms that
actually do the work. They are PRODUCTS OF those neural mechanisms. You
could study those descriptions as instances of the underlying machinery at
work.
If one has studied linguistics for a long time, the descriptions may in
fact be closely related to the underlying processes. They will, of course,
be wrong in some respects, and in some respects are sure to be wrong (the
descriptions are verbal but the mechanisms are neural). If one hasn't
studied linguistics, then one may still know some verbal descriptions or
rote rules expressed as word structures that are somewhat equivalent to the
workings of the actual mechanism. But such casually-acquired verbal
descriptions are quite likely to be different from the rules actually in
effect, and to miss most of the actual rules. So an uninformed person, as
Avery has noted, is probably not a good authority on the organization of
that person's verbal systems, just as that person is probably not a good
authority on how his or her digestive system works, although that person
digests as expertly as anyone else does.
The Test for the Controlled Variable has one nice feature: you don't have
to communicate verbally with the system being tested. Applying the test to
verbal productions may seem self-contradictory in that regard, but it
isn't. What you do is look for actual instances of sentence-correction
while sentences are being produced, if necessary inserting difficulties or
disturbances that make corrections necessary. What you DON'T do is give the
person a questionnaire and ask that person to describe the rules of speech
that the person is capable of putting into words (correctly or not). You
study the actual process of speech production and error correction while it
is going on. This will directly show what is considered an error and what
corrected form is considered OK by the person, no matter how the person
might describe or misdescribe the rules actually in effect. If you then ask
why a person corrected certain errors, the answer in many cases (with non-
linguists) will be that it just sounded wrong, and sounded better the other
way. That's probably the kind of answer you want, because it shows that the
correction was made by the actual machinery and isn't just a guess at a
verbal generalization. I suppose the subjects you want for such experiments
would know nothing about grammar or syntax, but would still speak well.
Anyway, "correction" at a superficial verbal level is not the same as
"error-correction" in an underlying control system. The latter is what will
help us model linguistic control systems.
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The man from the telephone company who brought his big machine in and
finally buried my new telephone line is from Alamosa. Alamosa turned up all
winter on the TV weather reports as the coldest spot in the country. The
man said, "It's not the worst place to live in the world, but you can see
it from there." I hadn't heard that one.
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Best to all,
Bill P.