[Chad Green (2016.09.22.1153 EST)]
Fred, youâre also a participant on the EVALTALK listserv. A little over a week ago you posted this: âMy favorite tagline is âBe sure you measure what you want.
Be sure you want what you measure.ââ?
Did you notice Bob Williamsâ reply to my post on Sept. 7 (Re: Complexity) concerning the implications of the paradigm wars in the systems science community? Toward
the end he wrote:
âBecause the management field failed to keep track of the important developments in the systems field in the 1970âs and 1980âs we now have a confusion of terminology.
So for instance, nobody I know in the systems field talks about âat the systems levelâ when talking about very large management processes. That comes straight out of the management field, but creates enormous problems for evaluators who believe that âsystemsâ
is solely about âbig stuffâ.â?
Now take a look at your levels of HPCT example here:
http://www.nickols.us/LevelsofHPCT.pdf . Doesnât level 11 also appear to reflect this outdated âat the systems levelâ? construct to which Williams was referring? In other words, has PCT also failed to keep
track of the significant developments in the systems field?
Maturanaâs notion of the self as a dynamic relation rather than a persistent object may be a good replacement candidate for HPCTâs Level 11. Hereâs a relevant
passage from Maturanaâs (1995) excellent paper Biology of Self-consciousness:
“As the self arises as an experience in the experience of self-consciousness, self-consciousness and self take place as dynamic relations in the flow of languaging,
and cannot be talked about without living them as experiences in the flow of language. The result of this situation is that all explanatory propositions that do not propose to treat the self as an entity (that can be ‘experienced’) seem off the mark. Strictly,
however, that is not the problem for the explanation, which as a generative mechanism only proposes a process that if it were to take place would give as a result the experience to be explained, and does not replace the explained experience as an experience.
But that the explanation should show that the self, self-consciousness and consciousness are but relational dynamics in the flow of our living as human beings, seems difficult to accept because we exist for ourselves as entities.”
Source: http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/archive/fulltexts/639.html
Best,
Chad
···
Chad T. Green, PMP
Research Office
Loudoun County Public Schools
21000 Education Court
Ashburn, VA 20148
Voice: 571-252-1486
Fax: 571-252-1575
âWe are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.â? - Mary Catherine Bateson
From: Fred Nickols [mailto:fred@nickols.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 5:53 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: PCT robotics paper
[From Fred Nickols (2016.09.21.1752 ET)]
Yea! Congratulations, Rupert. Hard won and well deserved!
Fred Nickols, CPT
Writer & Consultant
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CONSULTING LLC
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On Sep 21, 2016, at 5:41 PM, Rupert Young rupert@perceptualrobots.com wrote:
[From Rupert Young (2016.09.21 22.40)]
“A General Architecture for Robotics Systems: A Perception-based Approach to Arti
ficial Life”
I am pleased to say that my paper has been accepted for publication in the
Arti
ficial Life journal. It is basically applying the PCT architecture to robotics, but also positioning perceptual control as the missing ‘stuff’ of AI/AL (see attached).
It’s a fairly long paper at 48 (book) pages (72 with refs and appendices) with a fair bit of background of putting PCT into the context of AI/AL, and a basic robotic experimental system.
Arti
ficial Life is a major journal in the field so it will be interesting to see the exposure and feedback it receives. However, there’ll be a bit of a wait. I was going to annouce this soon, when they sent out the contents for the Winter edition, but, for
some reason, it has now been bumped to the Summer edition next year. So, I thought I’d let you know now, and I’ll send an update nearer the time, along with pre-publication copies.
It’s been a long road; by the time the paper is published it would have been over three years since first submitted, but at least it has now been accepted.
Regards,
Rupert
<nature.pdf>