Question About Feedback Functions

[rsmarken]

@Lukasz20

You mentioned sharing a “failure to appreciate” why other agents are so important here, and suggested that shared finite capacity simply makes its way into the “Remote Physical Phenomena” box of the standard B:CP diagram.

That is exactly the crux of the debate. Rick’s position relies on keeping that box permanently closed, treating the environment as a stateless scalar ($k_e$) with an additive disturbance ($d$). Treating Scenario B (gridlock of 5,000 agents) as mathematically identical to Scenario D (a broken gas pedal) completely misses the actual mechanics of the failure.

Apparently I am not able to communicate my position clearly since what you say above is not my position. But maybe Bill Powers can give you a better sense of how PCT deals with other agents sharing an environment with “finite capacity”. I recommend to you his paper “Degrees of Freedom in Social Interactions” (1979) which is reprinted in “Living Control Systems”. As the title suggests, PCT views other agents as consumers of the finite degrees of freedom in each others’ perceptual worlds rather than as entities that saturate a substrate.

By the way, you can prove a lot of things with math that don’t correspond to what actually happens in the real world. Why not propose some empirical tests of your ideas?

Best, Rick