[From Rick Marken (2016.05.20.0930)]
RM: This is a reply to Lynndal Daniels’ post to Tim Carey’s MOL discussion group but I think my reply might be of interest to everyone interested in PCT so I’m posting it to both the MOL and CSGNet discussion groups. Lynndal asks:
PowersSystemsConsciousness.pdf (1.41 MB)
···
LD: I recently saw some conversation on the CSG group going on in regards to âFree Willâ? and whether it was an illusion or not. So, I know there are some fairly strong opinions out there.  Did Powers opine on the existence or non-existence of Free Will or was that something that wasnât part of PCT. Â
RM: This reminded me that I had seen a mention of free will in one of Bill’s papers that I had read way back when I was first getting into PCT, in about 1979 (turns out it actually had to be about 1980). I remember finding a chapter by Bill in book on consciousness in which he said something like “free will is the last chapter of a book that hasn’t been written yet”. So I went looking for that chapter and found a reference to it in LCS I. It was paper entitled “A systems approach to consciousness” and it was a chapter in a collection of papers edited by R. J and J. M Davidson. The title of the book was listed in LCS I as “The Psychology of Consciousness” but after some futile searching for the book under that title I somehow learned that the actual title of the book is “The Psychobiology of Consciousness”.Â
RM: I was unable to get a copy of Bill’s chapter directly from the net but fortunately I am able to get articles using a library service provided by Antioch University, where I teach part time, so I managed to get a copy that way. It’s attached to this message. After reading it several times I finally managed to find the section where Bill mentions free will; it’s in section 3.4 but I’ll save you the trouble of trying to find it; it is at the end of the following paragraph:Â
RM: It was surprisingly difficult for me to find this mention of free will because, as you can see, my memory of what Bill said was somewhat different that what he actually said. I was remembering the meaning, not the exact words (which is interesting in itself; what I stored was a higher level perception of meaning rather than the lower level perception of the text). The “intellectual debates” Bill is referring to are debates about “determinism versus free will”. So I clearly replaced “intellectual debates” with its meaning – “determinism versus free will” – in memory and came up with the remembered perception “free will is the last chapter of a book that hasn’t been written yet”.Â
RM: To understand what Bill means in the paragraph quoted above you have to read the whole chapter, particularly that last section where he discusses “point of view” as the aspect of us that is outside the inner determinism of the control of input structure of behavior and thought. The fact that we are able to vary our point of view on our hierarchical structure of perception (as we do in MOL) is an aspect of human nature that is not yet explained by PCT; what varies our point of view is, as Bill says just before the Conclusion section, i"Something that is not yet represented in the model". It is this “something” that is the last chapter of a book that hasn’t been written yet. Actually, the book has been written – it’s Behavior: The Control of Perception – it’s just that few people working to understand consciousness have read it, much less understood it.
RM: I thank Lynndal for jogging my memory of this paper. I haven’t read it in over 30 years and for some reason it didn’t make the cut to be reprinted in LCS I or II. But re-reading it reminded me of how brilliant, lucid and straightforward Bill was. This paper is really a masterpiece that anyone interested in PCT should read. And re-read because there is much gold to be mined in it. Â
BestÂ
Rick
PS. I sure hope it’s in the Powers archive at Northwestern.Â
–
Richard S. MarkenÂ
Author, with Timothy A. Carey, of  Controlling People: The Paradoxical Nature of Being Human.Â
