Bruce, I think we are in fairly good, but not perfect, agreement. I won’t go into any detail about minor disagreements, but there is one big one that derives from my most recent thinking, as expressed in this thread and perhaps a little further developed since my last message. But first I should get out of the way one comment on something else that Rick wrote. Then I will add what might be new here.
I will call this long message my “Message 3”, though it is nothing ike the one I suggested at the end of message 2 that I might send at some future time.
—begin comment—
[RM] . .I remembered that Powers conceived of Real Reality as the world we experience – the world of birds, bees, flowers and trees, etc. …
[MT I think you are mixing up two different memories. The first is Powers’s habit of pointing out that what we perceive is all we can know for sure, with which I agree. The other is his claim that we can know nothing of what is in Real Reality. The environment we perceive contains “birds, bees, flowers and trees, etc.”, but there is neither guarantee nor evidence that Real Reality contains those things or “atoms and molecules” as opposed to there being an omnipotent power that decides exactly what should happen when, or Real Reality containing my huge bureaucracy of message-passing gnomes.
—end comment—
[MT] Bill’s second claim is what my two major messages are intended to dispute. My alternative is that though we cannot know what are the contents of Real Reality, we can create, both through individual reorganization and “scientifically”, perceptual and imagined constructs that mutually influence each other in ways that ever more accurately model the ways influences interact in Real Reality.
[MT] Staying with the “gnomes” fantasy, to represent a tree, a bee, or a molecule would be the job description of a particular gnome, in that it is what the gnome does with incoming messages to turn them into outgoing messages to other gnomes. The messages passed by the bureaucracy are all that we can approximate by individual reorganization and collective science, but we can approximate them very well, given time in which the gnomic organization chart doesn’t change. We would see that lack of change as the tree looking and behaving the same in its responses to externam influences.
[MT] The “tree-gnome’s” Inbox is filled with what we perceive as the forces of the wind on the tree, the forces of a logger’s saw, energy supplied by the sun, the nibbling of caterpillars on the leaves. All of these do change how the tree behaves, changing the tree-gnome’s job description as to how to deal with incoming messages.
[MT]There are myriads of such “gnomic messages” that we perceive as effects on the tree, but they are not reported individually to the tree-gnome. They come in compact packages, perhaps one package from the “north lower tree-branch gnome” another from the “sap-pressure gnome”, another from the “foliage integrity” gnome, and so forth. There are lots of packages, too, each of which contains packages the lower-level sending gnome received from other yet lower-level gnomes.
The “tree-gnome” also sends packages of messages to less senior gnomes whose jobs are to cause effects within their particular domains. For example, perhaps the tree-gnome has received a package from the air-temperature gnome and another from the leaf health monitor gnome. On reading those messages, the tree-gnome sends a package of messages to different “effector” gnomes. For example, the sap-delivery gnome for the leaves gets a message to stop work (we perceive that the season is autumn and the leaves turn red or brown and soon fall off the tree), and so on with messages to other effector gnomes.
Why do I conceive this way the structure of the messages passed in the gnomic message network? It is because we have, by evolution, reorganization, and science, found that just such a message-passing structure has kept us and our ancestors functioning reasonably well. In this community, we call that structure a “Perceptual Control Hierarchy”. This hierarchy is full of “White Boxes” we call “Elementary Control Units”, the individual gnomes. Each ECU “White Box” is built from two other WBs we call perceptual and reference input functions plus two others we call comparator and output function. Each mini-WB corresponds to a gnome. Something in Real Reality performs the functions I ascribe to a “gnome”. Whatever it may be, it is a mini-BB and we cannot know how it works internally unless we can design a set of micro-WBs that together perform the functions of the mini-WB.
We can know what the White Boxes do, and how they do it, because we built them in our theory. When we don’t have a good understanding of the micro internal WBs that we need for a particular WB, we just say that the mini-WB does thus and so, and we will figure out later how it does what it does. “What it does” is a write-up of one gnome’s job description, consisting of the message packages that may arrive in its inbox and how from them it should create a message to send on. If we have a correct understanding, even an incomplete one, of the gnome’s job description, our experiments should give the same or nearly the same results as do our enquiries of Real reality.
None of the above means I think there is a shred of likelihood that Real Reality is filled with gnomes. What it means that if there were such gnomes in Real Reality, we could not possibly tell that they were (or were not) there. But in contrast to the claim that we can know nothing about Real Reality, the PCT construct of “reorganization” suggests we can in principle know to any desired level of precision what influences pass from our effectors to our sensors and how those influences interact in “bundles” to define the “properties” of the entities we perceive to exist in our experienced world.
It is worth observing, however, that the construction of sets of smaller White Boxes within already described WBs describes the progress of Science all the may from imagining the spirits that animate every rock, river, or cloud to imagining the Higgs Field and Boson and computing to exquisite precision its consequences. But at no point in this progress is it possible, or will it ever be possible, to say that the nano-WBs are not implemented by spirits or Gods and Goddesses. Or even by a single omniscient omnipotent God who could turn the whole thing off on the spur of the moment.
Martin