# Overview: Forms of Collective Control in Social Life

**URL:** http://discourse.iapct.org/t/overview-forms-of-collective-control-in-social-life/178
**Category:** Collective Control
**Created:** [January 30, 2020, 6:43pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/overview-forms-of-collective-control-in-social-life/178 "2020-01-30T18:43:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 16

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### Author: ![bnhpct](http://discourse.iapct.org/user_avatar/discourse.iapct.org/bnhpct/32/34_2.png) [@bnhpct](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/bnhpct)
#### Post date: [May 6, 2020, 2:53pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/overview-forms-of-collective-control-in-social-life/178/16 "2020-05-06T14:53:01Z")

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Kent, this is an excellent and important re-assessment of Tom’s pioneering work. The hierarchical context of control cannot be neglected. Bill often omitted to mention explicitly e.g. compliance with the experimenter among the controlled variables specified in an experiment, but I doubt he ever forgot it.

> [@Kent](#):
>
> In the second run of Tom’s experiment, where a single subject takes a handle in each hand, the subject is actually controlling three perceptions, not two: the perception of the right-hand cursor staying on target, the perception of the left-hand cursor staying on target, and the perception of both cursors staying on target at the same time, a higher-level perception constructed from the other two. Subjects are able to complete this complex task because the hierarchical organization of the perceptual control systems in their brain allows them to control different perceptions simultaneously at more than one level of perception. According to HPCT, the hierarchical organization of the brain implies that control of a perception at a high level depends on the simultaneous control of the cascade of lower perceptions from which it has been constructed.

If alignment of cursor with target is a relationship perception, then this seems to be a perception of relationship between relationships. Rick and maybe Tom I think would argue that this is a perception in an observer, but that in the subject controlling both cursors simultaneously this is an emergent result from controlling each cursor independently–i.e. that the dependency is in the environmental feedback function, not in the subject. This would be exactly parallel to the emergence of rings and arcs and other phenomena in the CROWD demo. What data can show which analysis is correct? We know that the subject is instructed to control that perception of both cursors relative to the target, and the subject is demonstrably compliant, that is, has adopted the prescribed reference value for the described perception. We do not argue that taking a sip of tea is an epiphenomenon emergent from the lower-level perceptual control that brings it about, because we do not deny the higher-level perception and its reference. Is there something different about this case that authorizes us to deny the higher-level perception and reference?

Is the alignment of cursor to target a relationship? Then this higher-level perception appears to be a relationship between relationships.

The subject could as easily control the situation so that the left-hand cursor is above the mark and the right-hand cursor is below it by a certain distance. The subject could control a configuration such that cursor-l, mark, and cursor-r form a diagonal at an angle of 30 degrees. Reflecting on this awakens the observation that in the actual case the subject might be controlling a configuration such that cursor-l, mark, and cursor-r form a horizontal line. Whatever the facts for a given subject (and this might be testable), reviewing these possibilities may help a reader to appreciate with more immediacy what that higher-level perception might be, and maybe even open ways to demonstrate experimentally that it is not just the observer’s perception based on the experimental instruction, it is the subject’s perception based on the experimental instruction, and a perception ‘shared’ by subject, experimenter, observer, and reader.

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