Thanks. See below
···
On 02/05/2018, 16:15, “Martin Taylor” mmt-csg@mmtaylor.net wrote:
[Martin Taylor 2018.05.02.09.30]
Angus Jenkinson: 2.5.18: 10:36
Eetu
First, thank you, in your remark about the engineer version, I believe you are affirming the point that I made. We are aligned.
Then, on the question of consciousness of intention, which Richard brings, I would also like to comment on both your remarks. This will lead to a further
remark about reference.
The question is whether intention is always conscious. Richard thought it was and Eetu is not sure. This is a field I’ve studied for some decades in various
contexts. The primary insight lies in the polarity between the consciousness of thinking and the unconsciousness of the will.
Angus, although I do not know for sure how Powers arrived at his hierarchic perceptual control theory (HPCT), what you write here very much follows the track of what, reading between the lines of his work, he thought. The words are different, but the ideas
seem very consistent. Your “will” seems to represent the reference signal paths and values in the control hierarchy, while your “intention” refers to conscious processes that I would associate with Bill’s “control in imagination”. The operations of the control
hierarchy are assumed to be non-conscious (a term I prefer here to “unconscious”). The conscious processes serve as “thinking”. Later, you diverge from his thought, but that’s OK. I’ll deal with that when we come to it.
I appreciate that amongst various engineering scientists, there may be some difficulty with the concept of the will, but it has a good deal of usage in
the history of philosophy and psychology and it works for everyday conversation. We think with our thinking and we do with our will. Intention represents what the will ‘intends’ to bring about. Thus you can think about picking up a cup of coffee as long as
you like but the cup of coffee will stay on the table. But when your will activates in your body directed towards picking it up, it does indeed end up off the table and hopefully directed towards your mouth successfully. and the surprising little secret of
this is that at the moment of flipping from the thought to the action, the normal situation is to lose consciousness of how and what happens. That is, we can observe the hand and fingers and body in motion both externally and internally (as mentioned in various
posts) but exactly what is going on becomes unconscious. While we can follow step-by-step all the details of thought, maybe write them down, we cannot go through the same details of action in ordinary consciousness.
Bill was never clear about specific relationships between the conscious process and the control hierarchy. He argued that we can consciously perceive only whatever is already the output of a perceptual function in the control hierarchy, in other words a non-consciously
controllable “perception”. To me, this seems wrong, in that it seems to me that conscious perceptions (and especially “dreaming”) are rich combinations of perceptions produced in the hierarchy, but let that pass for now.
It is clear that Bill thought that conscious processes could access at least some parts of the control hierarchy, both perceptual signals and reference values among them. You can consciously move a particular finger in a particular way, but when you are picking
up a glass or playing the piano, the reference values for moving that finger are not consciously produced. According to HPCT, they come from higher levels in the hierarchy, in the form of outputs from higher level elementary control units (ECUs). Eventually,
there is a “top-level” in the hierarchy, but to me it seems very reasonable that there is always the possibility of conscious processes firing over-riding reference values into the hierarchy at arbitrary places. That is, at least, the premise on which MoL
is based.
This leads to the conclusion that there is most definitely an element of unconsciousness associated with will and intention. I will come back to the distinction.
Moreover, there are vast hordes of activities within the body that are performing innumerable actions “for their own purposes� that sustain and maintain the body in its wholeness and integrity. The clustering of white blood cells to deal with foreign bodies,
for example. Of most of this, we are unconscious. Indeed I would argue that the so-called unconscious is nothing more than the will. Whether that is true is not necessary for the purposes of this argument.
Whether that is true depends on how you define “will”. If you define it as the unconscious processes that implement conscious intention, then you don’t have to argue the case.
AJ: I tend to want to avoid defining, because will is such an existential part of our being. And I am rather alerting the reader to the fact of normal un/non-consciousness as the
polarity of consciousness in thinking. If I were defining it, it might be as the active element that performs the mobilization of behaviour. I do not reduce it to a function of the neurons, but rather the brain activity as one of the means of getting feedback.
But I am also saying that it belongs to a cell as well as a human.
What matters is simply that there is a portion involved in behaviour of which we are unconscious except in its outcomes and the original goal or intention.
There is a goal of drinking some coffee which requires the achievement — succeeding — of br bringing the cup to the mouth and drinking. In our experience we discover whether we are spilling the coffee or keeping it balanced and in control. This (negative) feedback
loop of observation is how we manage the action and to the extent that it comes into consciousness, it involves our thinking.
Yes, That describes the control hierarchy, except that what you say implies the need for consciousness (“thinking”) in everything we do. Bill’s hierarchy involved conscious thinking in a less obligatory way. But your words “manage the action” in context seems
to refer to ongoing control within the hierarchy. All the “management” of action in the hierarchy is done, according to my understanding of PCT, by prior reorganization. Future reorganization may be speeded by failure of control, but on-line control involves
no “management of action” as I understand the words.
AJ: See my emboldened text.
But a very good deal of the learning process of growing up involves acquiring bodily skills that were once conscious and no longer need to be conscious.
We do not have to remember how to walk and it’s perfectly possible to walk for miles without even noticing how or what you are doing.
The question is not therefore whether it is unconscious or conscious but rather when it is unconscious and when it is conscious.
Yes. There have been several periods in my nearly three decades on CSGnet when this question has been discussed, never coming to any testable or agreed conclusion – but the discussions did (I think) lead to MoL, which depends on the application of consciousness
to the operation of the control hierarchy.
Let me now offer three names.
Perceptual control theory is a term that emphasises the process of observation by some party or parties that have sufficient consciousness of their perception/experience
to manage the ensuing actions.
No. Here’s where we come to a fundamental disagreement.
AJ: Bear in mind I am not defining PCT. I am giving a characterization of the impression it gives, after all that was how this conversation started. One might not want it and might
disagree, but it is my impression.
It is basically the opposite. Substitute “experience” for “consciousness” in that sentence and I might contemplate (consciously think about) agreeing with you. Perceptual Control Theory is a term invented by Kent McClelland (or so I understand) to describe
Bill Powers’s hierarchical control theory of input as opposed to output control. Then, for “sufficient consciousness” I would substitute “sufficiently reorganized”, which is a technical term within PCT, and I would also want to substitute for “observation”
some term that has less of a connotation that the “observation” is conscious.
AJ: I did not know that!
Finally, and this is really the nub of “opposite” in my first sentence of the previous paragraph,
your statement is basically a “stimulus-response” concept , based in John Watson’s Behaviourism. PCT was developed because Bill recognized the inadequacy of the S-R approach, and because he recognized that although the only things that an organism could
actually control were inside the body, what mattered for survival was that things outside the body should be in conditions suited to continued life. Hence, there must be signals inside the body that correspond to properties of the external environment, so
that actions controlling those internal signals would, at least to some extent, also control states of the environment. One could say (and on CSGnet it is often said) that PCT is in direct opposition to the S-R approach you espouse in your statement.
AJ: Not all the case. I am equally opposed to stimulus response, as my whole argument is about autonomous intentionality. I am discussing language, maybe controversially, but it
is how it started
This could be, for example, the heart (unconscious to the person), or the person (e.g. consciously picking out the keys on a keyboard or watching the
characters appear on the screen to ensure they are correct without needing to pay attention to the fingers). It emphasises how the observation and adjustment of what is being perceived/experienced is the means whereby behaviour is directed towards goals.
Not within the hierarchic control system. Possibly and even probably within consciousness when thinking about how to achieve some purpose for which the reorganized hierarchy is not succeeding in bringing some perception to its reference value.
AJ: Of course
These goals are referenced or denoted as references. To me, that would be something that you look up, check against. That is obviously, in a sense true.
My only worry is that it loses the immediacy of what takes place in action. That is the comment I promised on “reference�.
This is a lexicographical issue.
AJ: Exactly
What I would ask is whether you can think of any word in English that cannot be used with at least two meanings in different syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic contexts. In the context of HPCT, the “immediacy of
what takes place in action” depends on whether the perception in question is being actively controlled. The immediacy of the results of action, however, depends on the nature of the environment between the muscular-chemical output of the body and the sensory
equipment of the body through the environmental variable that corresponds to the perception being controlled.
That “immediacy” may have a time-scale of years.
AJ: curious about the text in bold. I don’t think we are close to bottoming out all the processes of awareness/feedback, e.g. fields. But what I was getting at is that it seems
to me that there is a “continuous� stream of adjustment taking place in say walking along the pavement and “how walking should be for a walker� “flows along with it�. I would like teenagers to be able to understand how they behave to do things not just mathematicians
referencing the reference models. So again it is a communication question that my or may not have a technical counterpart according to how any one references their theory.
Intentional control theory would be a term that emphasises the process of end directed purposeful activity that includes an immediate all learned conscious
ability. In a sentence like, ‘PCT describes how human and animal intentional control enables directed actions that achieve what is wanted’, it emphasises the revolutionary aspect of PCT.
Will control theory would be a rather difficult term that arguably would not mean very much to most people,
and would be opposed to the main thesis of PCT.
or anyone, except those few who initiated the capacity to control and observe their own will in action, perhaps some yogis.
PCT does not at all deny that the actual processes concerned in controlling one variable V might be the environmental correlate of a perception X that is also being controlled (learning to control V). Likewise, PCT does not deny that the process of controlling
X might be the environmental correlate of another perception Y (learning to learn). In classical HPCT controlling X and controlling Y are both in the domain of reorganization, but they need not be.
AJ: True!
Nevertheless it could represent a human aspiration. Certainly children are encouraged toward self-mastery and groups such as the SAS or Marine Corps go
through specialist training. Nevertheless it’s probably digressing into some other area from what we are interested in and of little use, now.
The first is obviously the name that Bill picked. Any choice of name for a new domain has a tendency to mark the territory and shape it according to the
name. I’m not asking anyone to change the name. But for me there are two intertwined and immensely significant features of this theory, world changing features, that is, literally changing the world that scientists and human beings in general believe that
they participate in. The first is that action is autonomously directed towards purposeful goals.
That’s not a property of action in PCT, if you are being careful about words . The action just is. It’s not directed anywhere. If it influences a controlled perception toward a reference value, well and good. E-coli reorganization will tend not to change
it. If it influences a controlled perception away from its reference value, e-coli reorganization will tend to change it. The “learning” and “learning to learn” processes, which seem consciously to exist, work presumably in conjunction with e-coli reorganization.
Indeed, they seem to form the basis of MoL.
AJ: are you saying that I need to say it more carefully or that you do not agree with the fundamental aspect of the assertion? If so I would disagree.
It is not causally determined. That invalidates a host of scientific paradise. The second
[name] opens up the possibility of freedom, not merely autonomy. This is because in the human (as opposed to the animal, which is so constrained by its instinctual life and organismic structure) there is the
possibility of attaining (ethical) freedom of choice of gold independent of biological and cultural constraint and the means of self-observing, activity observing and learning both towards that possibility and in its activation.
A moot point, I think. It depends on an arbitrary isolation of evolutionary processes from the functioning of the organism in its current environment. But that issue is worth a book-length discussion that would probably lead nowhere, and seems to me to be irrelevant
to naming Bill’s theory, for which the emphasis is on perception, not action, being controlled, as a contrast to the then-prevailing theories in psychology.
AJ: see above. Looking at the CSGnet conversation it looks like several book length discussions.
The technical implications in terms of both research and the possibilities of human action and development are immense. But that would take us into another
round of conversation.
I do appreciate that I have taken us off – at least those who have read so far – on a carousel that hhas flown up and away from where it first started
Personally, despite my pointed disagreement with the S-R ideas on which your carousel Pegasi ride, I like this as a way to offer a kind of trellis on which the vines of other ideas might flourish.
AJ: Thank you, especially as I do not adopt S-R ideas and if I seemed to do so it was either a failure or my communication or an invalid reading. Either way we have even less to
disagree about
and I hope that I have in some way not lost sight of the original question and interest in my own interest. But my very first remark as a comment to Philip
suggested that the way that we go about describing our own theories will have the tendency not only to constrain who becomes interested in them and understands them but also our own very understanding of what we have discovered. I have no doubt that I have
in all the above suffered from this as well.
We all do, except those who prefer to stay on a raft in the middle of an unexplored ocean full of unexplored continents of possibility.
I don’t think an emoji would do justice to my amused appreciation! And I like the Newtonian reference
Martin
Angus
Best wishes! !!
On 02/05/2018, 10:13, “Eetu Pikkarainen” eetu.pikkarainen@oulu.fi wrote:
[Eetu Pikkarainen 2018-05-02_07:59:37 UTC]
wow, that grew a mighty thread with interesting language political discussion!
But I want just shortly comment this original question.
First, you use an engineer version of the loop diagram and that seems for me like there is a device which produces something, for example it transforms the input current (marked as “perception� here) to a certain kind
of output current (marked as “behaviorâ€?) and there is the engineer’s “intentionâ€? what kind of end product she want to produce. Then there is that feedback control of the product which changes the input if needed – if the product is not likke the engineer /
controller / user wants. So for me this seems totally something else than the action of a living being which is tried to model with PCT.
Secondly I also first thought like Richard that “intention� is always conscious, but I am not sure. There could be and actually I believe there often are un- or subconscious intentions. But what is the important difference
between “reference� and “intention� is that intention is always a plan to do something specific. (According to my dictionary it means: “what a person plans or intents to do�.) This is not what reference means. It means a goal, standard, model etc. how you
think that things should be – in practice what you want to perceiive.
So first you must have a reference (goal, standard…) how something should be and then you must have a perception (report, representation, measure…) how that something is. If they do not match then you will have an error
(problem, need…) and only then you will have an intention (plan, intent, design…) tto do something.
Probably I could not manage to convince you?
I don’t think it is so much about language and words but about thinking and concepts. They are all that we have – we have only maps, we can never compare maps with territory – so we should use them carefullly.
Eetu
- Please, regard all my statements as questions,
no matter how they are formulated.
From: PHILIP JERAIR YERANOSIAN
pyeranos@ucla.edu
Sent: Tuesday, May 1, 2018 4:15 AM
To: csgnet csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Please convince me why I should use the word reference instead of intention.
time 17:44
I feel better when i see the word intention replace the word reference. Intention is an everyday word, and I would have preferred that the first book on PCT I read
used the word intention instead of reference. Please convince me why I should use the word reference instead of intention.
