[From Bill Powers (930826.0800 MDT)]
Avery Andrews (930826.1508) --
Not to beat a dead horse, but I still claim that there is an
essential difference between the way components inside an
organism relate to each other and the way whole organisms relate
to other whole organisms -- particularly in social organizations.
Not all analogies are valid.
Inside an organism, one level of organization (according to HPCT)
sets the goals for lower levels: the lower levels have no other
source of goals and have no means of setting their own goals.
Furthermore, the control systems at one level are complete
specialists: they know NOTHING about processes taking place at
other levels. The perceptions peculiar to one level are also
unique to that level; no other level perceives in those terms.
The actions taken by one level consist only of setting reference
signals for the next level down; a high-level system can never
act by producing muscle tensions, because that would simply
disturb the systems directly controlling sensed muscle tension
and the level-skipping output would be canceled as all
disturbances are.
None of this applies in a social hierarchy of human beings. Human
beings all have the same number of levels of perception. They all
act by producing motor outputs, and they all know of the external
world only through the lowest level of sensory perception. No
person has any way of arbitrarily setting reference levels for a
control system inside another person. See Martin Taylor's
"layered protocol" scheme. Communication of one person with
another, at a given level of organization, is "virtual." The
actual communication all takes place at the lowest level, through
the physical environment.
That isn't how the components inside an organism relate to each
other, not at all. The only way whole people could be involved in
the same sort of relationship would be for some superordinate
being to exist, of which we know nothing and perceive nothing,
which arbitrarily supplies to us our highest level of reference
signals. You can construct a theology like that if you like, but
by the very nature of things there would be no way for a human
being to perceive what is being controlled by this superordinate
being, or to grasp the nature of the organization in which this
being is a higher level.
Whatever you think of that possibility, it's clear that our
relationship to such a superordinate being is completely
different from our relationship to each other -- no matter how we
group together to play organizational games.
Best,
Bill P.