You’re on the right track. The underlying assumption in Cognitive™ psych and in Generative™ linguistics is that the brain creates an abstract symbolic representation of the world, melds sensory input into this ‘map’, computes plans for actions within the ‘map’, and issues commands through motor systems. Notions of feedback are limited to updating the map and fixing the plans.
Bill was unfortunately hampered by prevalent notions about language and consequently thought there must be abstract symbols beginning with his postulated Category level. As he himself said this should all be open to question.
Rules governing the parsing of strings of abstract symbols are something that cognitive psych avidly adopted from Chomskyan linguistics even as the Chomskyites got legitimation from CogPsych, two vines twining up on each other, their tensegrity however vacuous supporting thousands of careers as money flooded in for the old promise of the behaviorists, “prediction and control of behavior”, and for “command and control” in the military (“Computah! What is the disposition of enemy troops in quadrant four!”). Neuroscientists have a growing sense of being stuck in a specious cosmology and are trying to wrestle free of a tarbaby they can’t yet quite see as something separable.
I have advocated starting at the Sequence level observationally. When we have a good grasp of how to model sequence control within a hierarchical context, and how a sequence can be interrupted by another sequence and then resume, only then will will we have a basis for talking about conditional branching. How is the input function for initiating a sequence different from a condition for taking a branch?
I found it illuminating to observe my own planning process as I was working out how to repair an outdoor shower. That experience, and the attempt to document it, is why I think of the level above sequence control as the Planning level rather than a Program level.
the computational metaphor has been most beguiling, but the brain is not a digital computer.