PCT: what is the difference between organisms and machines?

CSGnet Archive CSG2018
21

[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-04-05_09:40:53 UTC]

AG-M: �Purposiveness in living beings and a sub group of machines: would you grant intentionality too to those?�

MT: “If the human-initiated design of a machine includes intentionality, and the design is good, then the machine has
intentionality.�

I have been thinking about this in background and now I got an idea. A human being designs and uses machines as tools.
But there is a specialty in control devices: they are used as (new lowest) part of our control hierarchy. Perhaps this is self-evident (or not correct at all)? Higher control units set – as their output – the reference of the nextt lower units. In the lowest
level our effector organs set the reerence level to the thermostat or any other control device. And these devices effect the environmental variables which cause the perception we are controlling. So the device has an intention as much as our hand has.

···

Eetu

From: Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net
Sent: 28. maaliskuuta 2018 18:37
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: PCT: what is the difference between organisms and machines?

[Martin Taylor 2018.03.28.11.19]

On 2018/03/28 3:53 AM, Alex Gomez-Marin wrote:

Very interesting responses indeed. Let me pick up on three of them:

  1. “the shift in viewpoint from outside the organism to
    inside it to solve and simplify a lot of issues that had been nagging.” Indeed, towards the realisation that organisms have their Umwelt.

I can’t tell from this whether you understood my answer very well or hardly at all. Let me abstract it in short form. Machines owe their structural form to intentions of humans. Organisms owe their structure to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”
that they and their ancestors have been lucky enough to survive. If and when machines evolve through reproduction and differential survival of errors of reproduction, their descendants may come to deserve the word “living”.

  1. “control by organisms could be computed and modelled
    as if the organism was a machine”. Indeed “as if”… Yet, are they the same or not?

Is my iPad Air 2 the same as my wife’s iPad Air? Would it be the same as an iPad Air 2 she might buy? Is it the same as it was yesterday? Is it the same as an elephant? After all, an elephant is made up of atoms and molecules, and has parts that depend on other
parts, just as does my iPad. My iPad has gained and lost some atoms since yesterday, has changed the state of some of its memory chips, and is sitting in a different place. What do you mean by “the same?” Machines and living things are the same in some respects,
and different in others, just as are any two entities to which you could refer by using words.

Namely, Weiner made some effort at the beginning of his main book to emphasise that one would need need Bergsonian time.

  1. Purposiveness in living beings and a sub group of machines: would you grant
    intentionality too to those? And, also, what about experience?

If the human-initiated design of a machine includes intentionality, and the design is good, then the machine has intentionality. In other words, if you want a sensible answer, you should define your question. “What about experience” indeed. What about it would
you like to investigate? Do you consider “experience” to be passive? Or is the “experience” of control success and failure that according to PCT participates in and partially drives reorganization and evolutionary survival included in the question?

More to the point, what is the point toward which your questions are attempting to lead the answers you receive? Are you wanting to learn, to teach, to learn by teaching, or to teach by the Socratic method of making your respondents question their assumptions
so that they change their assumptions to match yours?

Martin

Alex Gomez-Marin, PhD

Research Group Leader

Instituto de Neurociencias

behavior-of-organisms.org

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 8:45 AM, Eetu Pikkarainen eetu.pikkarainen@oulu.fi wrote:

[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-03-28_06:30:08 UTC]

Alex, as far as I know, no theory has any definitive or perhaps even promising answer to that question but only descriptions about how living and artificial entities
are empirically different. So it cannot be a standard for a paradigm-change or any other theory that is must readily have that answer. It would be fine if someone had one, but I suspect that the border line between living and non-living is so permeable and
crooked that it is maybe a vain dream. But instead PCT offers a clear and simple hypothesis on what is common and essential to all living beings and to a sub group of machines. That thing is purposiveness. PCT also has an operative definition of that otherwise
quite indeterminate concept. I think it is fairly good beginning.

Eetu

Please, regard all my statements as questions,

no matter how they are formulated.

From: Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 9:15 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: PCT: what is the difference between organisms and machines?

I know this is a copout answer Alex, but I think Bill would have given you the answer you were looking for! Surely to answer it properly though, one needs to have a definition of
a third category - ‘artificial life’ - to interpose between ‘life’ and ‘machine’?

Warren

On 27 Mar 2018, at 22:31, Alex Gomez-Marin agomezmarin@gmail.com wrote:

That is precisely what I suspected PCT could add which, no matter how one wishes to stress it out, is actually very LITTLE, even barely
nothing, in accounting for What is life?.. which a self-postulated paradigm-change theory for psychology and biology should deliver…

Alex Gomez-Marin, PhD

Research Group Leader

Instituto de Neurociencias

behavior-of-organisms.org

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 10:11 PM, Martin Taylor mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2018.03.27.16.06]

“What is the difference between organisms and machines?” I don’t know if there is any “the” difference, but one critical one seems to me to be the sources of the top level reference
values and of the design of the perceptual functions that produce perceptions to be controlled. In an organism, those sources are inside the organism, whereas (to date) in a machine the sources are outside the machine (humans always, so far as I know).

Martin

On 2018/03/27 11:29 AM, Alex Gomez-Marin wrote:

–

Alex Gomez-Marin, PhD

Research Group Leader

Instituto de Neurociencias

behavior-of-organisms.org

22

[From Erling Jorgensen (2018.04.05 1240 EDT)]

Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-04-05_09:40:53 UTC

[quoting Alex Gomez-Marin, & then Martin Taylor] AG-M: �Purposiveness in living beings and a sub group of machines: would you grant intentionality too to those?�

MT: “If the human-initiated design of a machine includes intentionality, and the design is good, then the machine has intentionality.�

EP: I have been thinking about this in background and now I got an idea. A human being designs and uses machines as tools. But there is a specialty in control devices: they are used as (new lowest) part of our control hierarchy. Perhaps this is self-evident (or not correct at all)? Higher control units set – as their ouutput – the reference of the next lower units. In the lowest level oour effector organs set the reerence level to the thermostat or any other control device. And these devices effect the environmental variables which cause the perception we are controlling. So the device has an intention as much as our hand has.

Hello Eetu,

EJ: I think you are onto a useful idea here. If I understand you correctly, you are noticing that within an organism a higher level control unit operates by setting references for perceptions from a next-lower level, on down through the hierarchy, and realizing how that can continue outside the organism, too, by a person setting references for tools set up as control devices. I think the pattern holds true. As you note, it is as if we have inserted a new lower level of control, below the level of our force-producing extremities.

EJ: And based on that pattern, we can say that the control device being used as a tool does have (a limited range of) intentionality built into it, just as with any elementary control loop within the organism. I make a distinction here between intentionality and autonomy. I would agree with Martin that ‘the design has to be good,’ and actually incorporate some form of perception that gets matched to a reference specification and adjusted as need be. In your example of the thermostat, I believe the temperature near the device gets ‘perceived’ in terms of differential expansion of the bimetallic strip, which leads to turning on or off electrical current for running the furnace. The controlled effect for us organisms who change the setting for the thermostat is that the temperature near us gets regulated as well.

EJ: I have wondered about a slightly different process than the one you raise of inserting lower layers of control. Based on the work of Franz Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt-Plooij, I have viewed development as a process of inserting ever higher layers of control, as an infant or young child develops. The reorganization system would still rise above whatever layers have yet been formed, as a meta-level capable of affecting the structure of the developing perceptual hierarchy. But to my way of thinking, new developmental levels typically get inserted on the top of the existing perceptual capabilities.

EJ: At any rate, thanks for your reflections.

All the best,

Erling

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[Joh Orengo 2018.04.05 859]

To adapt Erling’s quotes to bring two ideas together.

···

Perhaps it is by “insert[ing] a new lower level of control [a control device], below the level of our force-producing extremities…” that we can ‘insert’ “new developmental levels…on the top of the existing perceptual capabilities”.

This reminds me of what Bill talks about in the chapter on ‘Higher Levels’ in B:CP (2nd edition, page, 175) when he says humans are “in the process of [inventing] the capabilities to perceive and control tenth-level entities”. I’m thinking of some tool, in cyberspace perhaps, that augments the 'wisdom of the crowds and let
's people experiment with ‘realities’ new and old in search of things like better forms of government, ways of doing business, etc.

Joh