Thanks for understanding, Martin. I’ll read your new response carefully and then respond. Right now, I need a drink. (Analyze that in PCT terms.) 
···
From: Martin Taylor [mailto:mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net]
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2017 3:51 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: PCT Dissection of an Example
[Martin Taylor 2017.12.30.14.29]
[From Fred Nickols (2017.12.30.1423 ET)]
Martin:
I am at a loss for words. I don’t even begin to understand and appreciate your analysis although I am sure it is a well thought out one.
Fred Nickols
Sorry to be obscure. I suppose I must have misinterpreted your question. You set up a hypothetical situation, and I thought you wanted to know what questions it raised for a full PCT analysis. I mentioned some that are implied by the first paragraph of your description of the situation, and speculated on possible answers for some. If that wasn’t what you wanted, I apologize.
Here’s another way of saying what I said before, in the hope that it does get at what interested you…
Question 1: Why do you perceive the firewood to be “running low”?
Speculative answer 1: Because you perceive the rate at which it gets depleted, and the amount in your wood pile indoors, and if you extrapolate the rate of depletion until you have no firewood, the time is too short.
Question 2: What does “Too short” mean in that answer?
PCT answer 2: It means that you are controlling a perception of the time with some reference value around which there is a tolerance zone, and your current perception is outside that tolerance zone. This means that the error signal value is non-zero, which causes the output from the “time to zero firewood” control unit to change.
Question: 3 Why does non-zero error signal value cause the output to change?
Answer 3: That’s a general PCT question. Non-zero error signal value means that your perception of the world isn’t what you would like it to be, and you want to fix the problem. Whatever output that control unit is now producing has allowed the perception to go out of whack, so to fix it you must change what you are doing.
Question 4: What change in output – what change in overt behaviour – is needed?
Answer 4: You say in your description that what is needed is “replenish the supply of firewood”.
Question 5: How do you “replenish your supply of firewood”?
Answer 5: you say or imply in your description that you need to control a sequence: (1) Go outside, (2) Chop wood, and (3) Bring the wood in.
Question 6: Why do it now rather than yesterday or tomorrow?
Answer 6: There’s a lot of questions in this simple question, so I’ll speculate on those and answers to them.
Question 6.1: What are you controlling for that leads to the perceptions that together result in “running low”?
Answer 6.1: Perhaps you are controlling for feeling warm when it is cold outside. Perhaps you like the sight of a fire in an open fireplace. I don’t know why, but the answer winds up with controlling for not just perceiving a fire, but for perceiving a fire of a particular intensity.
Question 6.2: How does controlling for perceiving a fire of a particular intensity relate to a perception of “running low”?
Answer 6.2: By itself, it doesn’t. But it does influence (pretty well determine, given the physical structure of your fireplace or stove) the actual rate at which the firewood stack is depleted. That influence is a side-effect of your controlling for perceiving a fire of a particular intensity.
Question 6.3: How does that relate to “running low”?
Answer 6.3: I have speculated that a perception of “running low” is actually a perception that there is a non-zero error signal value for a controlled perception “time to zero firewood”, as discussed in Question 2.
Question 7: How might an independent observer/experimenter determine whether these speculations might be true?
Answer 7: That’s not easy, but the usual PCT answer is “Use the Test for the Controlled Variable” to see whether you are actually controlling the variables I speculate you to be controlling.
Question 8: How would you do that?
Answer 8: Some controlled variables have been proposed, such as fire intensity, size of the firewood pile, time to depletion of the pile, and rate of depletion of the pile. The initial description of the problem suggests that you would be controlling a perception of the size of the pile, and the rest would follow. In Answers 2 and 6 an alternative possibility is hypothesised. Can we propose a Test to distinguish them? If we change the pile size without changing the rate of depletion, we also change the time to zero firewood. We can’t change the rate of depletion, which is determined by the fire intensity, and we speculate that this is a controlled variable. So our Tester can do no better than observe and wait, using the answer to “Why now?” to determine when time-to-zero becomes “too short”.
Answer 8 continued: So long as the controlled fire intensity does not change, the time-to-zero and the size of the firewood pile when you go and chop wood covary. But if the observer waits long enough, the weather will change, or you will change to warmer or more summery clothes, and your reference value for fire intensity will change. That will change the ratio between pile size and time-to-zero-firewood. Whichever one you are actually controlling will be the more stable over these changes at the moments when you decide to go and chop.
Answer 8 continued: The above is all very well, but it relies on getting a lot of statistics in a situation that is inherently noisy, because you will always have a conflict between going out to chop and doing something else, such as staying comfortable, washing the dishes, listening to music, or simply sleeping at night. The weather and the weather forecasts change, so you may go out early and chop more than usual if a storm or a cold snap is forecast, or late if the weather at the “passing threshold” moment is inclement. So the theoretical ability to apply The Test may not exist in practice.
The above is more or less a paraphrase of my previous answer. Is it easier to understand, and does it speak to the question you wanted answered?
Martin
From: Martin Taylor [mailto:mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net]
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2017 1:00 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: PCT Dissection of an Example
[Martin Taylor 2017.12.26.13.39]
Boris et al:
Here is a description of a commonplace incident, namely, chopping firewood. I’d appreciate it if you, Boris, and others who are so inclined, would dissect it in PCT terms as you understand PCT.
Fred, that’s a nice challenge for this pugilistically (
named day. I do not propose to answer your question, except incidentally. Instead, I want to suggest how one might approach an answer.
The firewood supply in my cabin in running low. I conclude I need to chop and bring in some more. I need to replenish my stock of firewood.
I bundle up, go outside, pick up a short log, place it on the chopping block, grab the axe that is leaning against the chopping block, raise it above my head and swing it downward, striking the log in the center with the sharp edge of the axe and splitting the log into two pieces. I continue doing this until I have an adequate supply of firewood, which I then carry back into the cabin.
So what, if anything, are the controlled quantities in that example? What reference signals are involved? What perceptual signals are involved? What errors seem to be producing outputs? What outputs are being produced? What input signals are involved? How are those outputs affecting my perceptions?
Fred Nickols
How would one start to answer this. I think I would start by noting that every control loop has three main questions associated with it: “What?”, “Why?” and “How?”. The first is a question about what perception (not plural) is controlled in that specific control system. The second is a question about the relation of its reference value to higher-level systems, and the third is a question about the way its output is distributed to lower level systems.
Your example posits quite a few “How” answers, so the questions mostly relate to “what” and “why”, the latter almost all being implicitly answered in the “how” prespectifcations. So where do we start? Top, bottom, or middle? Why not start with your first statement.
The firewood supply in my cabin in running low. I conclude I need to chop and bring in some more. I need to replenish my stock of firewood.
Lots of meat here to chew on, without even getting to your next paragraph, which I will not discuss in this message. The questions posed by this one are tricky enough, and in some cases I simply pose the question without doing more than guessing at an answer.
What are the present perceptions that you might be controlling? What are the imagined future perceptions that you (in the cabin) might now be controlling in imagination? How do your current sense-based and imagined future perceptions relate to one another, and how does actual action described in the second “description” paragraph relate to imagined action one might infer from the quoted (“first”) paragraph?
Your question makes clear that you (the message writer) imagine having and controlling a perception of the quantity of firewood in the cabin. I’ll drop the “imagining” at this level of discourse, because we need it later, when we question what might be going on in your imagined mind. So from here on, I will use “you are” instead of “you imagine you are” when we are talking about the “you” in the cabin rather than the “you” who composed the message to CSGnet. I hope we can keep the two versions of “you” straight by adding “cabin” or “writer” when there might be confusion.
There are two more sentences in this short paragraph, which seem to me to be in the wrong order, because “need to replenish” is the “How” of controlling the in-cabin perceived quantity of firewood. “Need to replenish” is a reference value for a “perceive myself replenishing” control loop, whereas “chop and bring in some more” is the How for that loop. “Chop and bring in” presumes that to do this you must be outside, whereas you currently perceive yourself to be inside. Separately, you perceive that your inside stock of firewood is low. So one controlled perception is to bring your self-location perception to a new reference value.
But wait. In this paragraph as it is written, you don’t now have a reference value to perceive yourself outside. You “need to” do something, but are you actually doing it right now? “Need to” suggests otherwise. It suggests that something impedes you. Perhaps you also are controlling something the action output of which would conflict with the action of going out, such as washing the dishes from the lunch you just ate, or just sitting comfortably with a beer in your hand. You are controlling your location perception in imagination but not in actuality. You are planning, and your plan includes the action of going out as part of controlling for perceiving a sufficient stack of firewood inside the cabin.
One question (well many, but one will do) springs to mind: Why do you “need to” replenish your indoor supply just now? Why did you not need to do it yesterday? Why not wait until tomorrow? The quantity of firewood has been being steadily depleted (as you indicate by using the words “running low”), and you are not controlling for a zero rate of depletion, because you are presumably controlling for something that requires you to perceive that a fire is burning, though you may be controlling for not depleting it too quickly. If so, you have a tolerance zone for your perception of the rate of depletion. But maybe the rate of depletion is a side-effect of controlling some perception. Perhaps you perceive the rate of depletion without controlling it. Maybe instead you influence the intensity of the fire as a means of controlling your temperature perception, so that you don’t get too cold or too hot, and that intensity affects the rate of firewood depletion as a side-effect.
It would be difficult for someone else to use The Test for the Controlled Variable on you to determine whether you are controlling a perception of the rate of depletion, because it is impossible to disturb the perceived rate of depletion (e.g. by surreptitiously adding or removing firewood on the pile) without also disturbing the time to zero firewood. Even adding an extra source of heat so that you will reduce the fire intensity to maintain your temperature would influence both of these potentially controlled perceptions. You can’t, as a Tester, disturb the time variable, but it does change, and that allows a weak version of The Test to provide some evidence as to what you might be controlling.
Again, why now? If you had chopped wood yesterday, you would not now need to go out and do it. Why did you not do it then? Did you not perceive the state of your indoor firewood supply yesterday, or did you perceive it and not perceive it as “running low”? If you wait until tomorrow, what do you imagine you would perceive that would then depart from their reference values? What perceptions are related to the perception “running low”? After all, the same questions could have been asked yesterday, when you did not perceive the supply to be “running low”. The rate of depletion hasn’t (we assume) changed, but the time until zero firewood has changed. This suggests that a perception you are controlling is of when, relative to now, the firewood will not be “running low” but will have “run out”.
Let’s assume that yesterday you perceived “running low” as having the value “not running low”, whereas today you perceive it as “yes running low”. Are these binary possibilities? I think not, because you can also perceive “running very low” or “running not very low” and a continuum between. The binary opposition is in respect of your action, to go out and chop versus to stay inside and be comfortable. You can’t do both at once, so if you are controlling independent perceptions of which one requires on action and the other the other action, you have a classic conflict in which the common controlled perception is your location. But this conflict does not result in your being half outside. One possibility or the other wins. Collective control does not result from this kind of conflict.
So looking through PCT glasses, what changed, and would change further if you did not go out and chop today? Your perceived “time to zero firewood” has passed its tolerance threshold, thus producing a non-zero error as input to its output function. By prior reorganization (or by conscious analysis that when repeated would – we speculate – induce reorganization) your action output is to produce a reference value for a sub-hierarchy of control loops whose actions eventually result in the “time to zero firewood” perception returning to some point within its tolerance zone. The answer to “why now” is that yesterday the “time to zero firewood” was within its tolerance zone, whereas now it isn’t.
One perception being controlled to achieve this reduction of error in the “time to zero firewood” perception is the level of firewood in the stack. We deduce this, because although you could achieve the same result by reducing the intensity of the fire, and thus the firewood depletion rate, your planned action is to “chop and bring in some more”, which is a set of action outputs of other control units in a sub-hierarchy that result in a perception of more wood on the stack. Getting more is preferred to rationing (as is often the case in all sorts of circumstances, including dieting).
The second paragraph in your writing seems to describe only present action to control present perceptions, with little overt planning that is not already embodied in the hierarchy as it has reorganized from prior experience. One might tell another just-so story about which variables are being controlled, but to do so would be long, if fairly straightforward, and I think this is far too long already, so I think I will abstain, at least for now. But I hope I offered a reasonable approach to questions that arise from the tricky issues contained in the first of your paragraphs describing the externally observable situation.
Martin
named day. I do not propose to answer your question, except incidentally. Instead, I want to suggest how one might approach an answer.