# PCT is about experience

**URL:** <http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-is-about-experience/8440>\
**Category:** CSG1993\
**Created:** [December 6, 1993, 11:29am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-is-about-experience/8440 "1993-12-06T11:29:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/w/c67d28/32.png) [@William\_T\_Powers2](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/William_T_Powers2)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 1993, 11:29am UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-is-about-experience/8440/1 "1993-12-06T11:29:22Z")

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[From Bill Powers (931206.0200 MST)]

I started a private correspondence on Martin Taylor's  
930512.1230, but had some thoughts that might work better on the  
net.

Mary pointed out the importance of this paragraph of Martin's:

> Let's try a different tack. Early in my acquaintance with PCT,  
> I felt that the notion of "control system" was a metaphor for  
> something, but it was hard for me to see what it might be a  
> metaphor for. Gary, specifically, put me straight, that the  
> PCT "control systems" were exactly normal everyday engineering  
> control systems working in the real world. Now that made  
> everything make sense. One could bring to bear all the tools  
> that apply to control systems operating in the real world.  
> They really have to work. No fancy stuff. Just testing  
> against Boss Reality.

This was also my initial approach to control theory and behavior.  
Everyday engineering, just checking out how living control  
systems work in the real world. It took quite a few years for me  
to see and begin to be able to say what is amiss in this normal  
everyday engineering picture. I'm still searching for a good way  
to say it, but the light began to dawn when I was working on BCP  
and trying to get some definitions of the levels of control  
worked out.

When you consider things like driving a car or pointing to a  
target, the engineering model seems perfectly adequate. But as  
you survey ALL the things that people control, you begin to  
notice some anomalies: people control things that don't exist in  
the environment in a way that an engineer can get hold of them.  
In BCP I used the example of making lemonade. I like mine tart  
and sweet, Mary likes it tart, period. What am I controlling when  
I add lemon juice and sugar to make the lemonade taste right? If  
you analyze the contents of the glass, you won't find any taste.  
You might find correlates of what I'm controlling for, but you  
won't find that single unified thing that I experience when I  
take a sip. I'm controlling something that doesn't exist outside  
me.

When I speak to a friend, I use a pleasant tone of voice. Where  
is the pleasantness? Can you find it in the sound-waves that pass  
from me to my friend? When the retirement checks come in each  
month, I perceive a feeling of modest security that I gave some  
effort to achieving. Where is that security -- is it floating in  
the air in my house? Is it stored in my bank? When I open a door,  
I create a space through which I can walk. Where is "through?"  
You can search inside the doorframe forever, and you won't find  
it there.

Once you begin to notice these physically nonexistent things you  
perceive and control for, more and more of them show up. What,  
exactly, is the "shape" of the person's face you are looking for?  
What is the form of the "movement" with which you fill a spoon  
with soup and convey it to your face? Where is the "sameness"  
that you perceive between your checkbook balance and the bank's  
balance (or the difference?). Where on the wallpaper is the  
"pattern"? At what point in its trajectory, exactly, does a ball  
"bounce"? Where, exactly, does the hill end and the valley begin?  
What, exactly, is the relationship between where your car is in  
its lane and what you actually see in the windshield? And where,  
exactly, is that "relationship?"

These are not philosophical questions, but very practical ones,  
because we can actually control all these kinds of experiences.  
We can act so as to bring them into existence and maintain them  
there; if we choose, we can alter them at will, by changing our  
actions. Unless we pause to wonder, we are perfectly comfortable  
in taking them as given aspects of the world that affects us and  
on which we act. It's only when we try to make an engineering  
model that controls those things that it beomes evident that  
something is wrong. The engineer can control the measured  
position of the car in its lane, but not the apparent position  
that the driver experiences and controls.

The first temptation when thoughts like these crop up is to  
divide the world into two parts: things that actually exist  
outside of us, and things that we clearly make up through  
perceptual interpretations: the objective aspects of the world,  
and the subjective aspects. But that division can hold up only  
for a while. The more carefully you look at the objective aspects  
of the world, the clearer it becomes that there are none.

This is a concept that can't be communicated unless the listener  
has independently discovered it, or takes time to search out  
possible meanings for the words and is thus led to discover it.  
It's all perception, the whole shebang, even the parts that seem  
objective.

The point, before I stray too far off the subject, is that  
control theory is really not about engineering or physics; it's  
about a phenomenon of experience, the central aspect of our  
relationship to the world. We act in order to affect what we  
experience. We learn how to affect experience to make it come  
closer to what we want it to be, and as long as that is what we  
want, to keep it in that form. This is a simple and direct  
observation about reality itself, which is the world of  
experience, not the world of science or mathematics.

Science and mathematics are simply tools we have invented in our  
attempts to describe order in the world of experience. But there  
is nothing for those tools to work with unless we first notice  
orderliness without their aid. PCT must first be grasped as a  
real phenomenon of experience, \_one's own\_ experience. Reducing  
it immediately to a mathematical representation and a physical  
model, and then confining one's reasoning to the mathematics and  
the model, is to turn away from the very phenomenon that PCT is  
about. It is giving contemplation of the tools priority over  
using them to explain phenomena.

PCT is not about controlling a plant in the external world. It is  
about how we eat, walk, drive cars, find our way to a restaurant,  
kiss our loved ones, argue with our colleagues, scratch an itch,  
build our confidence, comb our hair, earn money. It's about  
everything we do, every waking moment. That's the level where PCT  
must first be understood, before there's any point in trying to  
make a simplified idealized engineering or mathematical model of  
control. It's a world view of behavior that can be checked  
directly against experience, by anyone, without even drawing a  
block diagram. When you grasp that world view, you then have  
something to explain.

> **···**
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------  
> Best,
> 
> Bill P.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Marken\_Richard\_S1](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@Marken\_Richard\_S1](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/Marken_Richard_S1)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 1993, 4:59pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-is-about-experience/8440/2 "1993-12-06T16:59:23Z")

</div>

[From Rick Marken (931206.0830)]

Bill Powers (931206.0200 MST) --

WOW!

> You might find correlates of what I'm controlling for, but you  
> won't find that single unified thing that I experience when I  
> take a sip. I'm controlling something that doesn't exist outside  
> me.

Beautifully put.

> What, exactly, is the relationship between where your car is in  
> its lane and what you actually see in the windshield? And where,  
> exactly, is that "relationship?"

Why, it's in the information in perception, of course. But only  
some people can find it (information in perception seems to be  
a bit like a boojum -- those of us who can't find it seem to be  
stuck with the snarks of our experience)\>

Martin Taylor (931205 12:30) --

Me:

> If I'm wrong, I'm happy to be corrected.

Martin:

> Oh, would that it were true!

Test it out! Show me where I'm wrong. There are several possibilities.  
You could correct me be providing evidence of any of the following:

1) That there IS information in the perceptual signal.

2) That when you have two or more interacting control systems without  
a hierarchic relationship, you DO have to use dynamical analysis  
beyond simple control.

3) That purpose arises ONLY in a negative feedback system with a  
changeable reference.

Best

Rick

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![\_Martin\_Taylor](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/_/a9adbd/32.png) [@\_Martin\_Taylor](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/_Martin_Taylor)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 1993, 8:35pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-is-about-experience/8440/3 "1993-12-06T20:35:30Z")

</div>

[Martin Taylor 931206 15:00]  
(Bill Powers 931206.0200)

I'm not sure if you are trying to say that PCT control systems are NOT  
physical control systems. I hope not, but some of your wording seems to  
have that connotation. Take away the connotation, and there's an awful  
lot to like in your posting (as usual). I'd like to build on it, if you  
don't mind.

> When you consider things like driving a car or pointing to a  
> target, the engineering model seems perfectly adequate. But as  
> you survey ALL the things that people control, you begin to  
> notice some anomalies: people control things that don't exist in  
> the environment in a way that an engineer can get hold of them.

Yes, this is a point that I have tried to make on quite a few occasions,  
in dealing with the nature of a CEV. (Remember how strongly I tried to  
make that point in Durango, in the context of communication?).

Unless the situation is tightly constrained, as in Rick's Mind-Reading  
demo(s), no external observer can be sure of discovering ANY CEV  
corresponding to another's controlled perception. Even in the M-R demo,  
the computer could not determine that the subject is trying to keep  
the "3" directly above the "5" (there's no action that would allow the  
user to do that), though it might be able to determine that the subject  
is trying to keep the "3" centred vertically and the "5" centred  
horizontally.

Since all CEVs of interest to the subject are defined entirely by the  
subject's PIFs, the engineer can "get hold of them" only by determining  
those PIFs. This is impossible in detail. The Test determines  
only that the CEV influenced by the tester is positively connected with  
(I was going to say "correlated with") the CEV controlled by the testee.  
It can never show that the tester's CEV precisely corresponds to a  
perception controlled by the subject.

However, this fact does not, I think, justify:

> > ...PCT "control systems" were exactly normal everyday engineering  
> > control systems working in the real world. Now that made  
> > everything make sense. One could bring to bear all the tools  
> > that apply to control systems operating in the real world.  
> > They really have to work. No fancy stuff. Just testing  
> > against Boss Reality.
> 
> This was also my initial approach to control theory and behavior.  
> Everyday engineering, just checking out how living control  
> systems work in the real world. It took quite a few years for me  
> to see and begin to be able to say what is amiss in this normal  
> everyday engineering picture.

I don't see the connection between, on the one hand, the agreed  
position that the world of the CEVs is a mirror world defined by  
the interconnection of PIFs, and, on the other, that normal science  
and engineering methods do not apply. In other words, I don't see  
what is amiss.

> What am I controlling when  
> I add lemon juice and sugar to make the lemonade taste right? If  
> you analyze the contents of the glass, you won't find any taste.  
> You might find correlates of what I'm controlling for, but you  
> won't find that single unified thing that I experience when I  
> take a sip. I'm controlling something that doesn't exist outside  
> me.

This is true of every single instance of control, not only in humans,  
but also in machine control.

> ... Where on the wallpaper is the  
> "pattern"? At what point in its trajectory, exactly, does a ball  
> "bounce"? Where, exactly, does the hill end and the valley begin?  
> What, exactly, is the relationship between where your car is in  
> its lane and what you actually see in the windshield? And where,  
> exactly, is that "relationship?"
> 
> These are not philosophical questions, but very practical ones,  
> because we can actually control all these kinds of experiences.

Yes, indeed. How better can one describe the mirror world?

> It's only when we try to make an engineering  
> model that controls those things that it beomes evident that  
> something is wrong. The engineer can control the measured  
> position of the car in its lane, but not the apparent position  
> that the driver experiences and controls.

This is where you begin to lose me. Isn't the "measured position"  
the very "apparent position" for the mechanical system that acts on the  
car to affect its perceived position in the lane? Of course it isn't  
the "apparent position" that the driver experiences. Are you saying any  
more than that one person's CEV is not available to another except by  
an outrageous fluke, and that in any case neither would know if the fluke  
had occurred?

> The first temptation when thoughts like these crop up is to  
> divide the world into two parts: things that actually exist  
> outside of us, and things that we clearly make up through  
> perceptual interpretations: the objective aspects of the world,  
> and the subjective aspects.

Doesn't tempt me. I don't think it has ever tempted me since I first  
appreciated what PCT was about. Might have done, once upon a time, long  
ago in fairy-tale days. Not now.

> The point, before I stray too far off the subject, is that  
> control theory is really not about engineering or physics; it's  
> about a phenomenon of experience, the central aspect of our  
> relationship to the world.

Isn't that precisely what engineering and physics and the rest of  
science is about? I wouldn't say that control theory is ABOUT engineering,  
but it is an aspect of engineering, and of physics. It deals with the  
world as the world is perceived to be in the mind of the theorist. No  
science can do otherwise.

> Science and mathematics are simply tools we have invented in our  
> attempts to describe order in the world of experience. But there  
> is nothing for those tools to work with unless we first notice  
> orderliness without their aid.

Sure. We build on what we \_and others\_ have observed to be the regularities  
of nature. I don't know when this started, but it must be at least as  
old as writing. Nobody creates the entire edifice of science anew from  
their own individual observation. Some people tear down and rebuild parts  
of the edifice based on what they have observed, but they don't start  
from scratch.

> PCT must first be grasped as a  
> real phenomenon of experience, \_one's own\_ experience. Reducing  
> it immediately to a mathematical representation and a physical  
> model, and then confining one's reasoning to the mathematics and  
> the model, is to turn away from the very phenomenon that PCT is  
> about. It is giving contemplation of the tools priority over  
> using them to explain phenomena.

"Priority?" There's nothing to stop one thinking about how to make a  
more effective hammer while one is driving in nails. In fact, it's  
the best time for such thoughts. Leaving the analogy, the best way  
to see how the mathematics and fundamental physics work is to think  
of them \_while\_ dealing with one's own perceptual control experience.

> PCT is not about controlling a plant in the external world. It is  
> about how we eat, walk, drive cars, find our way to a restaurant,  
> kiss our loved ones, argue with our colleagues, scratch an itch,  
> build our confidence, comb our hair, earn money. It's about  
> everything we do, every waking moment.

Yes. It's hard to get people to believe that this is the claim, let  
alone that it must be so. But it is so, provided you don't conflate  
"PCT" with a specific design of the control hierarchy.

> When you grasp that world view, you then have something to explain.

Which you started to do some 40 years ago, and have continued to do,  
with the help or hindrance of others with whom you communicate so ably.  
And whatever explanations there may be, they must always be consistent  
with whatever else we think we "know," such as the laws of thermodynamics  
and the rest of physics. We are not explaining magical systems. We  
are explaining everyday phenomena, phenomena of that amusing complex, life.

Thanks for that posting.

Martin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![\_Martin\_Taylor](http://discourse.iapct.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/_/a9adbd/32.png) [@\_Martin\_Taylor](http://discourse.iapct.org/u/_Martin_Taylor)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 1993, 11:09pm UTC](http://discourse.iapct.org/t/pct-is-about-experience/8440/4 "1993-12-06T23:09:09Z")

</div>

[Martin Taylor 931206 17:55]  
(Rick Marken 931206.0830)

You knew I wouldn't resist, didn't you, you old S-R conniver, you!

> > What, exactly, is the relationship between where your car is in  
> > its lane and what you actually see in the windshield? And where,  
> > exactly, is that "relationship?"
> 
> Why, it's in the information in perception, of course. But only  
> some people can find it (information in perception seems to be  
> a bit like a boojum -- those of us who can't find it seem to be  
> stuck with the snarks of our experience)\>

Are you really and truly offering to vanish if you ever get information  
from your perception?

> Test it out! Show me where I'm wrong. There are several possibilities.  
> You could correct me be providing evidence of any of the following:
> 
> 1) That there IS information in the perceptual signal.
> 
> 2) That when you have two or more interacting control systems without  
> a hierarchic relationship, you DO have to use dynamical analysis  
> beyond simple control.
> 
> 3) That purpose arises ONLY in a negative feedback system with a  
> changeable reference.

(1) I did, but you refused to accept the direct demonstration. I am at  
present preparing what I hope will be a demonstration that even you  
will accept.

But PLEASE, read enough of my stuff to understand that there never is  
information IN a signal. The information measure is a measure of  
uncertainty reduction, and is ordinarily information available FROM  
a signal ABOUT a situation. The concept of information IN a signal  
is meaningless.

(2) As well you know, I retracted that one immediately, and noted my  
stupidity in ever having said it, as soon as Tom mentioned his work.

(3) You are going further out on a limb here than you have before.  
What are you proposing as an alternative to control systems as  
purposive? That vortices in a stream have purpose? or that there  
are other purposive systems than negative feedback systems? What  
do you mean by "purpose"? In the past, you have argued that the  
purpose of a control system is in its reference signal. That's  
what I think is the case, but I can't prove it to be true.

I can't tell what I am supposed to show. If you want to argue that there  
are structures other than control systems that have purpose, I guess it is  
up to you to show it. For me it is partly a matter of faith, and  
partly a matter of verbal definition, as to whether purpose implies  
control. I believe in PCT, but I can't prove I'm right.

Sorry. I have to decline number 3 unless you want to define purpose in a way  
that allows your sentence to be tested for correctness.

Martin