Why did you add the word “conflicted” here? It is counterproductive when we are talking about collective control in general, which mostly does not involve conflict.
The explanations of these “stable social conventions” that I have seen are not very convincing verbal descriptions of how “collective control” (whatever that is) purports to explain them. In my view, a PCT explanation is a model that accounts for data, such as the models of various examples of group behavior described in Chapter 7 of The Study of Living Control Systems, that account for two person cooperation and conflict, human crowd behavior, avian flocking behavior, and geographical differences in how different groups pronounce phonemes.
Actually, this is my view of your view. I think Kent’s demonstration is the model (literally) for what you guys call “collective control”. I think it’s a model that applies to very few significant social behaviors.
Great. So you agree with me that Kent’s 1993 model of stability emerging from conflict in the form of virtual controlled variables cannot account for many social and cultural phenomenon. I am not aware of any other, what you call, “collective control” models besides Kent’s. So could you show me an example of one of these models, and how it explains some of the phenomena that you mention, such as “crosswalks, doorways, money, and phonemic contrasts”. Such an explanation should not only describe the model but also show how it accounts for the data.
Thanks
Best, Rick
Sounds like you buy Kent’s 1993 model of social stability emerging from conflict between members of the collective. I was just told that that model only applies to a very narrow range of social phenomena but here you seem to see it as a general model of the human condition in society. I’m so confused!
No, My criticism is based on the fact that the only output that affects all perceptions in a control hierarchy is the actual output effects on the environment (internal and external). So even if perceptual and output signals are carried as arrays by bundles of neurons they will not individually affect each other; so there is no analogy to collective control models. The entire array of perceptual signals, at all levels in the hierarchy, will be influenced en masse via output effects on the environmental bases of these perceptual signals.
Best, Rick
The only “collective control” model I know of is Kent’s, where stability (the virtual reference state of a collectively controlled variable) emerges from conflict. Actually, I have never seen a PCT model of cooperation. Even the one’s I describe in The Study of Living Control Systems are models of what can be done after the agreement to cooperate has occurred, either tacitly (as in the case of the flocking birds) or explicitly (as in Tom’s demo of two person cooperation).
Well, since you are the best PCT modeller who presents demonstrations of a wide variety of phenomena, you may be the best person to build demos of the six basic non-conflict types of collective control described in PPC III.1.7 “A short taxonomy of collective control”.
[Aside] Since you want me to read your books, which are sold for profit, why don’t you save us some trouble by reading snippets of mine, which are available to you for free?
Here’s a list of the basic types, extracted from that Chapter:
We thus have at least three types of Collective Control in which all the members act on the same CCEV as a means of controlling their own perceptions.
1. Conflicted Control: The participants have independent reference values for perceptions whose CEVs are closely related to the CCEV. The CCEV remains as if it corresponds to a controlled perception, but the outputs of the individual controllers tend to increase as in any conflict. Several people push on a rock, all wanting it in a different place.
2. Collaborative Control: The participants control a higher level set of perceptions of belonging and being seen to belong to “the group”, bringing toward a common value their references for their perceptions of the CEVs that combine to form the CCEV, eliminating the conflict while maintaining strong control. Several people push on a rock trying to move it to a place on which they agree.
3. Coordinated Control: All members who are controlling for being perceived and perceiving themselves as belonging to the group accept reference values provided by an agreed leader. Several people push on a rock trying to get it to a place chosen by the leader.
In addition, there are at least three forms of Collective Control in which the participants act on different aspects of the environment in order to achieve a common higher-level purpose — a reference value for a higher-level CCEV — that all have in common, rather than all trying to influence the common CCEV in the same way. We will consider some of them in more detail later.
4. Guided Control: A plan, with or without a specific planner, determines who does what (I’ll hold the pole if you hammer it into the ground; I’ll get the supplies if you guys get the the tents put up.) The similarity should be clear between this form of collective control and a two-level hierarchy.
5. Giant Real Control Unit: Different people or groups of people use protocols in ways that mean that some play the roles of the different units of a control unit (Sensors, Perceptual Function, Reference Function, Comparator, Output function, Effectors), so that the whole social structure acts as a controller. This concept is elaborated in Chapter IV.1, Chapter IV.2, and Chapter IV.3, especially Section IV.2.1.
6. Hierarchy of Social Control Units: Same as 5, with different levels of controller interacting as in the Powers hierarchy for control units within an organism.
These six forms of collective control are not definitive, but apart from the first form, they all achieve the power of increased loop gain without the cost of conflict, except possibly during the process of selecting a leader or otherwise developing the collective control structure.
I see my Chapter references are out of date in part 5. They should be Chapters IV.3, IV.4, and IV.5.
Sorry about that.
Yes, that is indeed what you think.
- two person cooperation and conflict: Kent’s 1993 model
- human crowd behavior: Bill’s Crowd demo, control of proximity and goal or leader
- avian flocking behavior: an adaptation of the crowd demo based on Reynolds (1987), control of proximity to others, like heading, and avoidance of periphery of flock is probably a better bet than “movement toward the center”. Another perhaps less obvious evolutionary advantage is a predatory raptor’s challenges picking an individual prey from what appears to behave as a single very large organism, and uncertainty how to accomplish it unscathed might be relevant: I have many times seen a few rather small birds harrying a hawk from their territories.
- geographical differences in how different groups pronounce phonemes: a preliminary, partial model with a number of assumptions and results which contradict the data.
This is a preliminary model of a more general tendency of pronunciations to converge which is often resisted for various reasons. It is not a model of Labov’s data. The data are about a previously inexplicable reversal of a sound change in the au diphthong that had been going on in the prior couple of generations, and not only reversed, but that change (the a becoming lower and more open) being generalized to the ai diphthong. The data include information about adolescents’ social identity and future life and work expectations. The change in pronunciation by adolescents was not correlated with who they most associated with, it was correlated with a choice of adult identity, irrespective of time in proximity.
SFAIK there has been no advance since this summary in November 2018:
To this I have added that while change in the community is typically rather slow, change in an individual can be quite rapid, as I witnessed when my oldest daughter lived with us for a relatively short time in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Nothing after that.
Yes, to make a model you need data to model. To get beyond simplified models of simple social phenomena we have to deal with considerably more complex data and higher levels of the hierarchy.
Eetu only said that some error in some control loops is the “human condition”. He did not say that all such error results from the process of social stability emerging from conflict between individuals.
Sometime in the year you have celebrated the birthday of a granddaughter. “Birthday” is a complex collectively controlled variable that you and she have inherited socially. Did the convention of birthdays come into existence out of conflict?
You should be able to edit your post to make the corrections in the text. Click the ‘pencil’ widget at the bottom of a post that you want to edit.
I build models to account for data, not to implement personal imaginings.
I put the references to my books for the sake of others who might be interested in learning PCT as I understand it. I don’t really care whether or not you read my books; I write them for an audience that probably doesn’t exist; people who come to PCT without a pre-existing agenda. After doing this for forty years it’s clear to me that people who come to PCT with an agenda are never going to get it but they are always going to think they do.
No, you just need data! So far the only ones who have used actual data as the basis for building PCT models of collective control are Tom Bourbon, Bill Powers and me.
Actually, the error Eetu was approving of was the error that results from the process of social stability as implemented in Kent’s model. You can see that this is the case by noting that he said it in reply to this little dialog:
RM: Another reason is that the parties to the conflict that results in the appearance of a virtually controlled variable are not themselves in control; for all parties to the conflict, the “virtually controlled variable” is, on average, quite far from their reference specification for it.
MT: Exactly. That’s why one has to accept the virtual controller just as though it were a real one.
RM: Whether that’s true of not, it sure doesn’t help the people in the collective for whom that variable is “out of control”; they are suffering constant error while you enjoy watching you virtually controlled variable behave like a real controlled variable.
I (RM) was explaining that in Kent’s model of a “virtual controller”, which is based on conflict between individuals in a collective, the individuals are experiencing sometimes massive error while the variable in conflict is being kept in a virtual reference state. Martin (MT) seemed to think that was an acceptable price to pay as long as the virtual controller was treated as though it were a real one.
My reply to Martin was expressing my dismay at his willingness to accept the pain in the individuals in the collective who were contributing to the virtual control. It was then that Eetu defended Martin (and, implicitly, Kent’s virtual controller model of collective control) by explaining that error is just part of life and then going on to extol its benefits.
Of course not. My best guess is that the celebration of birthdays came into existence in the same way that different pronunciations of phonemes did; through people imitating what others did to celebrate the birth of their children. What I think is inherited (biologically) is a an intrinsic reference (need) to imitate. I think that my “simple” PCT -based imitation model that explains some of the most interesting aspects of Labov’s phoneme pronunciation data is, like the “simple” PCT control loop model, quite powerful and will go a long way to explaining a great deal of collective controlling.
Best, Rick
That’s a weird evaluative comment on a simple arithmetic effect. Is it good that 2+3=5 when 5 is what you want to see, and bad that 1+6 =7, because for some reason you want to see 5? This “price to pay” is of the same kind. It has nothing to do with what I want. It’s just the way arithmetic works.
Incidentally, why do you keep associating collective control with Ken’t one-dimensional model of conflict? You should be thinking in at least two dimensions, and depending on how many individuals are involved in the collective, one more dimension for each participant. But always at least two, as in the Figure to which I pointed you since I don’t know how to insert figures into my comment.
The figure has no numbering, but it shows how if person A controls a perception of say x+y while person B controls 0.9x+1.1y, the result is the same as it would be if one controller controls 0.95x+1.05y (assuming they are of equal strength). It would be easy for you to simulate this but I guess you won’t because it is “mathematics” and therefore speculative.
In the discourse interface, place your cursor where you want the figure to appear, open a view on your figure files (file explorer or I think it’s finder on a Mac?), select the desired figure file, drag it over the Discourse editing window, and drop it.
Since I don’t have your image files, I create one from a screenshot of the image in the PDF display, and drag that into place.
I just took the liberty of editing your post #19 to include Figure III.1.1 from PCP.
Yes, Rick. You just need data. For simple phenomena, the data are on few dimensions. For more complex phenomena, the data are more complex. I presented data for a slightly complex case. You chose one model dimension, proximity, as a proxy for for several more complex dimensions in the data.
Your model says nothing about imitation. A model of imitation would require at minimum perception of the outputs that are imitated and a perception of one’s own outputs for comparison. You postulate, as a post facto interpretation of your model, that imitation arises from proximity.
Labov’s data say nothing about proximity.
Labov’s data do not say that speakers in these two populations (up Island and down Island) converged on different reference values.
Labov’s data say that adolescents adopted the reference values of one population or the other, depending on their reference values for where they expected to live after graduation, on Island or off Island on the mainland.
Labov’s data show that adolescents who lived in the down Island population made the up Island choice, and vice versa, regardless of who they most frequently spoke with.
Labov’s data also show that the adolescents who adopted the up Island reference value for the initial vowel in the /au/ diphthong anomalously extended that reference value to the initial vowel in the /ai/ diphthong. There was nothing like this in the speech of the up Island population for them to ‘imitate’.
Your ‘model’ models none of these data.
Thanks. I will try that. But I see you placed the image into the relevant post already http://discourse.iapct.org/t/ramifications-of-collective-control/15993/19?u=martint
I think all PCT models I have seen are (hugely) coarse simplifications of the way how things really are, especially in the human conditions, and as such they all are “untrue”. Of course, much of the social stability may be based on agreements. Kent’s model just shows that conflicting references of different actors do not need to lead to instability and chaos. Instead they can lead to familiar situations of compromise where no-one is fully satisfied but no-one can easily change the situation more satisfiable.
In what point do think that those “output effecs on environmental bases” are combined into one single influence, and how that collecting happens? For example in the visual perceptions there are a huge amount of sensory cells which all sense a little bit different aspect of external effects. I these different influences are combined to one single influence in the eye or elsewhere then why should it be sent upward to hierarchy as an array of neurons? One neuron would do.
Eetu
I exceptionally wrote and sent the message below from the discourse.iapct.org web interface and immediately after that the interface stopped working. It only shows these changing colored dots as if it were loading: 
Possibly it still works for others because Eva’s message came later than that happened.
I have tried to delete cookies, restart browser (Firefox) and also another browser (Chrome) but nothing seems to help.
Has this happened to others before?
I have found that restarting Vivaldi (on Mac OS 10.11.6) has often resolved this problem. How well that works for other OSs and browsers is something that may be worth trying.