[Avery Andrews 940907.1632]
(Bill Powers (940902.0845 MDT) (reply to Martin Taylor))
>We agree that while CEVs are arbitrarily defined and that perceptions
>have no knowable relationship to what is really out there (as far as we
>have carried the argument, anyway), we also agree that there IS
Thinking about this I find that I don't agree with it at all.
Fundamentally, I find it deeply incoherent to accept PCT but to reject the
current accounts provided by the scientific community about the nature
of perception (what are the chances that Bill is right about control,
but everybody is wrong about the nature of light and its relationship
to visual perception? Pretty slim, I'd say). So we know that the
photoneurons (or whatever they're called) in the retina, under normal
conditions respond mostly to light energy, and we also know that the
pattern of energy impinging at the retina can be described as a very
fine 2D array where at each point there is a element from an infinite-
dimensional vector space. And we also know that the visual system
coarsens up the array a lot (so that we can't see paramecia with the
naked eye, even though the pattern is there in the light energy), and
reduces the spectrum from its infinite-dimensional glory to a measly
three.
I guess I'd call this position of mine `naive scientific realism',
though I'm sure other people have used this name, maybe even for this
very position. The point is basically that if we aren't confident
about the truth of basic psychophysics, we're not going to be right
about anything, so we should stop messing around with PCT & do something
else (like party party party ?).
In general, it seems to me that what we perceive is mostly there, and
there as we perceive it - it's just that an infinite amount of stuff
is left out - an infinite amount that we can find out more about by
means scientific instrumentation, and maybe even more that is in
principle hidden from us.
>The organism, through its reorganizing capabilities, determines what
>functions of external variables shall become perceptions. But once those
>functions are chosen, the behavior of the external world determines how
>the perceptions will behave both individually and in relation to each
>other. This is why we must learn what acts to produce in order to
I do agree with this. And whether or not reorganization & evolutionary
processes can force organinisms to perceive certain specific variables,
I think it is pretty clear that the requirement that some perceptions be
controllable via the control of others puts a very strong constraint
on the structure of the system. In fact, I'll venture the conjecture
that this is the basic reason why young mammals are playful: play is
basically trying to control something for no reason other than
the simple desire to control it. So I'd suggest that mammals have
managed to shift a lot of responsibility for their behavioral
development onto the environment (as opposed to genetically determined
hard-wiring) by exploiting the fact that you can't learn to control
anything without learning to control (some of) the right things.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au