Bryan,
To try and show you and others that I can do a great deal more than moan and groan about things I would like to suggest a possible revision to PCT that might provide at least a starting point in helping to move the theory along.
I have often found the definition and concept of a ‘perception’ in PCT to be confusing, ambiguous and of little value in how it is both defined and utilized in PCT and how one actually thinks of perceptions.
I can understand from a modeling standpoint why a signal and nothing more would be considered an ideal representation. Since PCT was intended to represent the workings of the nervous system, all information, including what most in neuroscience would consider ‘perceptions’ would fall under this umbrella.
This of course simplified things considerably and with the hierarchy, provided a way for Bill to show how ‘perceptions’ or at least what most of us think of as perceptions were’ constructed’
I actually thought Bill solved the sensory binding problem that has plagued philosophy for 300 years, but of course I was badly mistaken here.
I think we should have both ‘signals’ and ‘perceptions’. A perception being ANY conscious thought, or idea. A ‘signal’ could and would account for all control done without consciousness.
Of course with this view you would have to include imagination and emotions into the ‘hierarchy’ or whatever structure might turn out to be suitable to be able account for how all of the actual 21 senses we have are utilized in constructing our perceptions.
This I believe would help bring PCT into the current main stream of thought in neuroscience.
Any one interested in discussing this idea? Or am I being contentious and ‘disagreeable’ here as well?
Marc
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known”
Montaigne
“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.”
Richard Hooker (1554? - 1600)
English theologian.
“It’s not what people don’t know that is the problem. It’s what people know that ain’t so, that creates all the fuss.”
Will Rogers
“Knowledge is finite, ignorance is infinite”
Karl Popper