Picking up from the topic “Controlled Variables are Perceptual Variables”:
What is “the knowing subject” but that which is aware? PCT has nothing to say about awareness. (The correlation of attention with error doesn’t count because attention is not the same as awareness. Attention is somatic-branch control of our limited-capacity sensory input functions directing them toward aspects of the environment that have become controlled variables. They might be controlled under ‘conscious’ cortical functions or under much faster ‘subconscious’ limbic functions, or perhaps most frequently by an interaction of both. Cue here the cortical processes we label ‘rationalization’.)
Buddhism says that subject and object bring each other into being, diverging from and reflecting back to what we call awareness. That seems to be a recurrent message from all those who have experimentally investigated the matter. Qabalah says the same (the appearance of duality at the top of the Tree of Life). Even G. Spencer Brown in Laws of form (in a space, draw a distinction). PCT can’t bridge the gulf between perception as signal p and perception as experience. Experience as simple awareness after an MoL session has been mentioned a few times.
Yes, we can agree with Rick that p is a function of variables {v1, v2, …, vn}, and we can say that (in principle) those variables are specified by the physical sciences, but we cannot legitimately punt the question of reality over the wall to those epistemically prior sciences. That is mere evasion of the question. Physicists, chemists, cosmologists, and so on are doing the best they can, but their models are still controlled perceptions. And just as Newtonian physics is perfectly adequate for virtually all engineering applications, not all the variables {v1, v2, …, vn} that are posited by a given physical science are pertinent to the perceptions studied in PCT. In any PCT experiment that has been envisioned so far, quarks, pi mesons, and gravitons have nothing to do with the case, tra la. Nor do chemical bonds and molecular structures. And unless one proposes to conduct The Test on physicists by somehow disturbing their control of such variables it’s hard to see their relevance to future PCT experiments. PCT is concerned with the structure and function of living organisms in their experienced environment. This appeal to primitives of the physical sciences is no more than a way to encapsulate the controversy as to what is controlled. With apologies to Shakespeare,
O where is that which is controlled
Or in the head or in the world?
Your body, from embryonic growth
til now, says “Hey, wake up! It’s both!”
Subject and object bring each other into being, diverging from and reflecting back to what we call awareness.
Eetu, you did not touch on the basis that we do have for imputing reality to our perceptions. We cannot compare perceptions to reality, but we do judge the accuracy of our perceptions by how reliably we control them. The purpose of scientific experiment is to test our control of the perceptions posited in our models. If the model works reliably, we project it back onto the experience that is modeled and attribute reality to it.
PCT counsels us to pragmatism: what works is as good as it gets, until in some respect it doesn’t work and we come up with something different that works there too. We keep discovering that some things are not true that we thought were true, and we keep replacing them with things that are not untrue so far as we can tell, but it does not follow that we are looking for absolute Truth.
But no model is ‘real’ in science until it is collectively controlled. When a model and the observations of phenomena that it explains are collectively controlled in the community of workers in a field of science, those workers regard the phenomena, the observations, and the model as objective facts of their field. This comports with C.S. Peirce’s proposal that objectivity is a function of intersubjective agreement, whence the heading of this topic.