Real and Perceived Realities

(Message 4) The Simple Observer

Links to Message 1, 2, and 3, so that I don’t have to repeat what is already there.

1: Real and Perceived Realities
2: Real and Perceived Realities
3. Real and Perceived Realities

By using the term Simple (or Pure) Observer, I am contrasting one who is observing and perceiving, but not controlling the perceptions of interest.

Sometimes we talk as though every perception that exists in the control hierarchy is necessarily controlled and built as an aspet of the reorganization of the control hierarchy. This segment of my contributions to this thread offers arguments that suggest that reorganization incorporates into the control hierarchy not only perceptual functions that produce controlled perceptions, but also perceptual functions that produce uncontrolled perceptions and even uncontrollable perceptions.

Here I am asking what an observer who cannot influence what is perceived — such as a newborn baby, a paralyzed person or an astronomer studying distant galaxies — can learn about Real Reality from the properties of the Observer’s sensory input alone. How can such an Observer build new perceptual functions when the perceptions cannot be tested by being used in control?

The answer is that our Observer, who we might as well name “Oona”, can do as Norbert Wiener’s builder of White Boxes did: look for correlations in the data from two or more unitary “terminal” signals (our sensor inputs), when the input terminals were fed with uncorrelated noise signals. If the Black Box output terminals output could be observed to exhibit positive or negative correlations of any form, linear or non-linear, Weiner’s engineer knew that he had to include a White Box or series of WBs that would produce such correlations when its inputs were uncorrelated.

Wiener introduced random signals at the input terminals to seek his correlations. Oona cannot do that. She, however, is not observing what comes out of a Black Box with well-defined input and output terminals. Oona is observing what Real Reality’s “output terminals” (Oona’s sensory inputs) present when she has no knowledge of the sources of the signals that they produce. From her viewpoint, they are quite random, and any correlations she observed in her sensory data are created by something in RR (which could be an “external input” to Real Reality (one might ask what that could possibly be).

Oona can do what Wiener did, even though she cannot influence the “input terminals” of RR. Since Wiener did not fee back the outputs from RR back to its inputs, his engineer-observer has the same kind of information as does Oona. The Engineer, like Oona, does not take advantge of any feedback, as we have assumed reorganization on the control hierarchy would do.

Oona can build a WB that would produce from uncorrelated inputs the correlation she observes. Since, however, Oona is not emulating a Black Box, but Real Reality, we should not use the term “White Box” to describe what she perceives (in PCT terms: “builds as a Perceptual Input Function” in her brain. For Oona, the equivalent to Wiener’s WB is an entity in her Perceptual Reality (PR) that performs the same correlation-producing functions as does an entity in RR, though the way it performs those functions may be entirely different.

Wiener built as many WB’s as he could find correlational patterns among the BB’s output signals. Oona can do the equivalent (just as Powers described in his Perceptual Control Hierarchy), apart from the fact that none of Oona’s PR entities (which we could call PREs) produce controlled perceptions. She could build Perceptual Functions from correlations among the outputs of the Perceptual Functions she has already built from her sensor signal correlations. She constructs Layers, or Levels of Perceptual functions, each of which exists as a PRE, an entity in her Perceptual reality.

If Oona is an astronomer, she can do no more than observe the starts, noting patterns among them that she calls by various names, such as globular clusters, planetary nebulae, galaxies — or, in times long gone, constellations. Using tools such as telescopes and spectroscopes, she can observe more about the stars and planets, but she is still observing. She can never manipulate what she observes.

On the other hand, if Oona is a newborn baby, the movements, sounds, and scents she produces do influence parts of Real Reality. She can perceive her own movements and correlate those perceptions with others she gets through her various sense organs, to create new perceived entities in her Perceptual Reality.

These new entities are different from those created by correlations among the world facing sense organs, in that they incorporate parts of herself into a single perceptual entity. If she feels “thus” from her arm, what she receives from some other sense organ will change “so” more probably than if she did not feel “thus” from her arm. Oona has perceived a cause-effect relationship, but not a simple one, because it depends on what she can perceive from kinaesthetic input from the arm, which is not in the world outside her skin. Nevertheless, there will be correlations that she might detect in the same way that she might detect the correlations among the world-facing sense organs. We are talking about the beginnings of control.

One of Powers’s talking points was that there’s no reson to take a model seriously unless the model has a plausible mechanism. In this Section on the Observer, I used “probability” in the form of “correlation” as a fundamental determiner of what patterns become manifest as Perceptual Functions, and thus as PRE’s (entities in the Perceptual Reality of the observer). But what calculates a “probability” or a “correlation” in the brain of a newborn? The word “calculates” presupposes the presence of a calculator, which we presume the newborn does not have. So what mechanism might implement a model that says a newborn builds perceptual functions from correlations and probabilities. One possible answer is Hebbian and anti-Hebbian synaptic modification.

Hebbian learning is encapsulated in the motto: “Nerves tha fire together wire together,” and anti-Hebbian by a similar mantra: “Nerves that don’t fire together wire separately”.In practice “wire together” implies an increase in the synaptic strength of interconnecting synapses, while “wire separately” implies s reduction of the strength of interconnecting synapses. Both effects have been observed in many parts of the brain. If nerves from two separate sensors tend to increase and decrease their firing rates together more often than not, the strengthening effect will predominate. If they tend to fire at unrelated times, the interconnecting synapses will weaken.

The effect is to produce strong outputs for correlated events in Real Reality, and less than average output if either of two anti-correlated events occurs. It is as though some calculator computed correlations and adjusted the synapses appropriately, to produce a perceptual function that reports the co-existence when it occurs.

We usually think of reorganization as being based on control of perceptions, and just as an experimental science can be more assured of a pattern that is the observed result of an experiment than of a pattern detected only by observation, so also is reorganization by way of perceptual control a more reliable way of understanding Real Reality than is reorganization by observation. Nevertheless, what I have just described is a plausible but by no means proven mechanism for a constructive form of reorganization that can be performed by a pure observer.

We address reorganization as the matching of Perceptual Reality to Real Reality in my next numbered contribution to the discussion.

Martin

(Message 5) Reorganization and programming Objects

Links to Message 1, through 4, so that I don’t have to repeat what is already there.

1: Real and Perceived Realities
2: Real and Perceived Realities
3. Real and Perceived Realities
4. Real and Perceived Realities

[Preliminary Note: In this message, I start using “coordination patterns” where previously I used “correlation patterns”, because I think the connotation of “coordination” is a bit more general than “correlation”. This matters when the patterns increase in complexity, as they will.]

When Wiener described his investigation of the properties of his Black Box (BB) by means of designing a network of white boxes (WBs), mini-WBs. micro-WBs, nano-WBs in a descending hierarchy, he was wearing his electrical engineer hat. Every signal in his WB network was an electrical current, just as in our current thinking about control by the brain, every signal is an impulse on a neural axon.

The mechanism of communication is important in practical terms, but not for a functional examination of what is going on. So long as we deal only with Observers like his Engineer and our newborn baby Oona, we can treat their problems as being identical. But when Oona’s random actions start modifying her perceptions, things change. But before discussing how they change, I need a word about a change in metaphor.

In message 3, I used a hierarchic bureaucracy of gnomes as a metaphor for the unknown processes of Real Reality or of Wiener’s BB. Perhaps for some readers, a different metaphor might be more congenial. In this message, I recast all the gnome-based arguments in terms of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Although I suppose most readers will be familiar with OOP, there are many variants, so I want to describe very simply the basic form I use as a metaphor.

An Object-Oriented program consists on its surface of only two kinds of entity, Objects and Messages between Objects (including a “terminal” as a kind of Object that does nothing except connect its input to its output). An Object has input ports or terminals that can accept messages of specific formats. It also has output ports or terminals that can emit messages of distinct formats. The Object is completely defined by specifying the relationships between the contents of incoming messages and the resulting output message or messages.

To begin the previous paragraph I used the term “on its surface”. What did that mean? It meant that the programming of the internals of an Object can be anything that performes the specified functions of the object, producing the right messages at the right time when the incoming messages have a given pattern.

The programming inside an Object may be Object-Oriented in whole or part, but it need not be. If it is, that fact cannot be determined from outside the Object, but what might be possible to determine is that the Object behaves as it would if it was constructed of “mini-Objects”, each as inscrutable as the larger Object of which it is a component. The programming mystery would remain, but it would be within those mini-Objects, not within the message-passing structure that relates them.

What would “Reorganization” mean for a Black Box simulation using White Boxes created with networks of Objects at all scales? One way might be to change the selection of mini-Objects internal to an Object of any scale. Such a change would imply a corresponding change in the message-passing network within the Object, because each Object, mini- or otherwise, has terminals that accept messages of specific types and terminals that emit messages of specific types. Sending a message representing weight in ounces will produce an answer when submitted to a terminal that expects weights to be represented in kilograms, but the answer would be wrong. The type “weight” would be as expected, but not the unique American unit of weight.

“Reorganization” among the White Boxes might also mean changing the network structure among the mini-Objects within an Object. This entails changing some of the mini-Objects. Apparently, “Reorganization” implies changing both the mini-objects and the network structure within the Object.

As we observed previously, Wiener’s Engineer, who does all this reconfiguration of Objects within Objects, is a pure Observer of the behaviour of the Black Box. Our analogous Oona remains, so far, a pure Observer of Real Reality, which means that every White Box Object is analogous only to a Perceptual Function, with inputs and outputs from and to Perceptual Functions. The Black Box output terminal that the Engineer observes are analogous to Oona’s sensory inputs. From the viewpoint of any higher-level Perceptual Function, its inputs are messages from selected other Objects, and its functioning is inscrutable, it being itself an Object.

Weiner’s Engineer builds his encompassing or “global” White Box by starting at the output terminals and seeking coordination patterns among their output signals, and then looking for second-level coordination patterns among the outputs of the mini-WBs whose existence is implied by his first coordinations. “Looking for coordination patterns” implies the existence of some sort of operator function.

In Message 4 I suggested that the neural-level operator might be whatever process strengthens synaptic connections in the Hebbian way, “Nerves that usually fire together wire together” paired with its ant-Hebbian counterpart “Nerves that seldom fire together wire apart”. The latter process may be the more important for an immature human, since we know that much of the initial change in the neural system is the severing of many of the initially rife synaptic connections, leaving mainly those that are used relatively frequently.

Wiener’s White Boxes were built from the bottom up, based on repeated patterns of coordination among the signals at the output terminals of the Black Box. Powers likewise suggested that reorganization built living control systems and loops from the bottom up, the more complex using the already constructed simpler ones all the way up to the eleventh level.

So what might we expect of our baby Oona? We already talked about building small Objects that created signals made from coordinations among the outputs of Real Reality to her sensors. What we did not emphasize was that some of these sensors are within her own body, reporting, among other things, tensions of her muscles or muscle fibres, and joint angles. They, too, may show coordination patterns among themselves that produce signals related more to the pattern than to the signal from any single fibre.

Such and such a pattern, as viewed by an external Analyst, corresponds to that movement of a limb, whereas this other pattern corresponds to emitting a cry. Oona knows none of this, but Oona does experience an acoustic event when the Analyst would say she cried, and that acoustic even would coordinate strongly with “this other pattern”, creating a new pattern output for “feeling so and hearing thus”. Likewise Oon might be able to see her arm and relate its visual changes to particular muscle/joint feelings.

Oona’s new perception of a pattern of throat muscle tensions and hearing the various sensations evoked by the cry is fairly complex, but can be divided into two generic sets, an internal set that Oona can influence directly, and an external set based on what comes from her peripheral sensors. These latter she cannot influence directly, but she can influence them by influencing the internal set of sensations appropriately. She can create the acoustic effect everyone nearby would call a cry.

Oona may find that often when she issues a cry, another, rather unpleasant, sensation goes away soon afterward. We adults would call that unpleasant sensation “hunger”. Oona’s mother hears the cry and feeds her. Oona now has a feedback loop that by providing energy to various cells in her body by a multitude of biochemical processes, indirectly affects intrinsic variables that Oona neither senses nor perceives. She is doing what Powers suggested would be the primary driver of reorganization — keeping her intrinsic variables under control. She is using a control loop that uses her mother as a real reality component, and that helps maintain, for example, her blood sugar, and perceptibly, her energy level.

At this stage, Oona may not perceive her mother as an entity distinct from herself or from the rest of her sensory/perceptual world. Whether she does or not is immaterial. What matters is that there is a state to be avoided (hunger) or a reference state to be achieved (a feeling of satiety), and that to perceive satiety rather than hunger, the mechanism is to cry. How the cry achieves Oona’s goal is not something Oona perceives. It “just happens”. Oona has started on the road to building a control hierarchy.

In July, 2018, Bruce Abbott wrote a post to CSGnet titled
The Brain’s Model
Rick Marken’s reply can be seen at that same location.

I don’t know why these turned up in my CSGnet mailbox today, but I replied to them this morning as follows:

Yes, within PCT the “so what” question comes up empty.

However, outside PCT there’s a “so what” question about PCT itself. And one of the differences that PCT can make is an understanding of how perceptions that are chimerical for me and thee can have an obdurate reality for someone else that is as compelling as a closed door is for my colliding body and limbs. And understanding of how a significant number of people see George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Bernie Sanders as co-conspirators subverting even the ‘deep state’ to the purposes of the Illuminati. They’re all Jews, after all. The perceptions that people’s brains gin up for fears that they experience are compelling realities to them. As the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies, to which I add that paranoia is as efficient at creating enemies as the e coli algorithm is at reorganizing the locomotion of a microbe or the connectivity of neurons.

A good hypnotic subject, amenable to certain suggestions, might illustrate Bruce Abbott’s point about walking through a closed door, and have a bruise or two to show for it–while as we could plainly see they were hallucinating a door that was not actually there.

So I think we should turn Bruce Abbott’s exercise on its head. Instead of talking about how the constructivist epistemology of PCT can lead us into uncertainty about the reality of our perceptions, we can perhaps more helpfully talk about how imagined perceptions can have the compelling reference-setting power of things that we comfortably take to be real.

   /Bruce N

Not realizing this was email from 2.5 years ago that mysteriously was among the current email in my inbox this morning, I suggested that it be copied to Discourse. Martin concurred, suggested associating it with this present “Real and Perceived Realities” topic, and I agreed to do it.

[Process note for future reference: Since this was all quoted on CSGNet, I obtained this URL by clicking the hyperlink button above the Discourse topic-editing window and entering Bruce’s datestamp 2018.06.21.1010 EDT as a search string. Rick’s datestamp produces the same URL.]

I thank Bruce N for posting this and the links here. However, I think the thread would be easier to follow if the source messages from June 2018 were available right here, so I am taking the liberty of copying them into this and my next message. I hope neither Bruce A nor Rick object. The ability to reach back in time and continue an old thread is, after all, one of the primary ways in which a Forum is better than a mailing list!
--------Bruce Abbott’s initial message---------------
[From Bruce Abbott (2018.06.21.1010 EDT)]

Open your eyes and look around you. If you have reasonably normal vision, you see a world of objects, objects located at various positions in three dimensional space and imbued with numerous properties, among which are shape, texture, and color. Having become familiar with these objects, you almost instantly recognize them: I’m in the kitchen, that’s the counter top and sink, and here is my coffee cup. I walk toward the counter and as I do so, my viewpoint changes. The cup appears closer to me, and I can now see the handle that a moment ago was obscured by the body of the cup. I reach for the cup. As I do so, I can feel the muscles in my arm and shoulder tense up and see (and feel) my arm rising and extending, my hand moving smoothly toward the cup. As my hand reaches the cup, I close my fingers around the handle and begin to lift the cup. I see my fingers tighten around the handle, feel the pressure and hardness of the handle against the skin of my fingers, and feel the handle’s coldness. As I lift, I experience an increase in downward pressure on my arm as the cup rises off the counter.

I move the cup toward my lips. I see the cup approaching, notice the steam rising from the coffee it contains, and smell the aroma. As the cup reaches my lips, I feel its rim against my lower lip. I tip the cup and some of the coffee enters my mouth, giving rise to sensations of wetness, a slightly bitter taste, and heat (among others).

In a sense, none of this is real.

I am not experiencing the real world, but only my perceptions. For all I know, I could be hallucinating all of it.

Yet most of us behave as if the reality of our perceptions is reality. Why? Because by doing so, we seem to get along well in that world of our perceptions.

My visual perceptions tell me that I am walking toward a closed door. If I assume that the door is “only a perception” and try to walk right through it, I will soon experience a sudden arrest of my forward motion and pain in various body parts as my toes, knees, chest, and face forcefully contact what I perceive to be the surface of the door. Unless I am hallucinating the door, I won’t experience myself moving right through the door like a ghost. If I still want to exit the room, I am going to have to open the door first before stepping through.

It is possible that nature has arranged things such that we experience certain perceptions in consistent ways (e.g., that trying to walk through an apparently solid door will result in pain and bruises) without there being any “real reality” behind them, but then, what is arranging our perceptions so consistently that our various senses generally agree on what is happening? Why is the visual perception of a cup full of coffee so consistently associated with particular attributes, such as the feel of the cup – its tactile shape, hardness, and heft – and the smell and warmth of hot coffee as the cup is brought to the mouth? Is there a kind of Maxwell’s Demon out there, making sure that our perceptions almost always produce a self-consistent picture? A far simpler explanation is that there is a physical reality outside our perceptions that enforces these correlations.

This view also explains why I can’t perceive the world in my imagination with nearly the detail that is present when I seem actually to be experiencing reality. Reality seems far better at “remembering” those details than I am. I put a new K-cup in the coffee maker and start the process of rendering a fresh cup of coffee. I get distracted and forget that I have done so, but Reality doesn’t forget – the cup is still there in the coffee maker, holding a now cool cup of coffee that I discover the next time I’m in the kitchen.

In general, we don’t experience our perceptions passively. From the time we are infants, we learn how our perceptions change as we move about and do various things. Such experiences help us build a perceptual model of that underlying reality. We learn how appearances change under different lighting conditions, distances, and angles of regard. We learn how different sensory experiences will change together as we do things like lift a cup or take a sip of coffee. We learn that once put in motion, heavy objects are harder to stop than lighter ones, that objects thrown into the air will soon slow in the vertical dimension and then accelerate as then fall back toward earth. What we learn, together with what we come into the world already “knowing,” becomes our model of the world and our interactions with it.

Perception, however, is not reality. Our biological inheritance has equipped us with the sensory and analytic machinery to render those perceptions, but our equipment has limitations. We are unable to sense every property of “real reality,” but must make do with sensory systems that sample only a portion of that reality and use analytic methods that may include heuristic “tricks” – methods that yield generally “good enough” approximations with a minimum of processing, thus saving both brain power and time. These usually work well but under certain circumstances yield an incorrect or misleading perception. The various perceptual illusions to which we are subject are the result. Bees can see colors in the ultraviolet range and the polarization of light; sharks can perceive electrical disturbances produced by other fish and pressure waves along their body surfaces that signal the presence of prey. Bats and dolphins can generate perceptions of objects through echolocation. We humans are blind to such experiences – our experience of “reality” and those of other species are different (Von Uexkull coined the term “umwelt” to refer to the sensory world that a particular species or individual inhabits.)

So what we have is a perceptual apparatus that renders a version of reality, one that in general has served the members of our species well enough that most of us are able to survive and even prosper, often living long enough to produce offspring and raise them to the age at which they can care for themselves. It is not “real reality” in all its detail, but a representation that usually works well enough for practical purposes. It is a kind of model of reality and like all models, it is selective and simplified relative to the thing modeled.

In PCT, we often refer to perceptions as scalar neural signals that encode the level of some variable such as the intensity of light or a person’s degree of honesty. Yet our perceptual world is far richer than a set of scalar variables. True, we can pick out some perceived characteristic and follow its changes over time, as when in a tracking study we attempt to keep a cursor aligned with a moving target. But let us not forget that our perceptual apparatus is far more capable. It produces not merely a large set of scalar perceptual signals but a complex, multidimensional array of interlocking perceptions whose status and dynamic changes provide us with a highly functional perceptual model of reality that includes ourselves and the effects of our actions on it.

Comments?

Bruce

p.s. Happy Summer Solstice!

Rick’s commentary the same summer solstice day. Sorry you have to scroll sideways tto read the excerpts quoted from Bruce A.

--------------Rick’s Message---------

[Rick Marken 2018-06-21_15:45:39]

[From Bruce Abbott (2018.06.21.1010 EDT)]

BA: Open your eyes and look around you...

BA: In a sense, none of this is real...

BA: I am not experiencing the real world, but only my perceptions.  For all I know, I could be hallucinating all of it...

BA: A far simpler explanation is that there is a physical reality outside our perceptions that enforces these correlations...

BA: Perception, however, is not reality...

BA: So what we have is a perceptual apparatus that renders a version of reality, one that in general has served the members of our species well enough that most of us are able to survive and even prosper... 

BA: Comments? 

RM: I think this is excellent, perhaps because it is completely consistent with my way of looking at things (which, of course, I think is the PCT way). But this discussion of the relationship between perception and reality (the “environment” in PCT diagrams) has led me to ask myself: “so what”? Or, to put it another way: “What’s epistemology got to do, got to do with it”! “It”, of course, being PCT. And I think the answer is “not that much”.

RM: Of course, we do have to assume that there is a real world out there on the “other side” of our perceptions because, as Bruce notes in his treatise, that is what puts constraints on what we can control and how we can control it, in both actual behavior and in our models of it. But in PCT there is less interest in determining the relationship between perception and reality than in characterizing the nature of the perceptions themselves, particularly the perceptions that are being controlled.

RM: So, for example, in the object interception research, the goal was to determine what perceptual variables are being controlled when an agent carries out this task. One of the perceptual variables that is controlled is vertical optical velocity, which is defined in terms of the optical angle of the pursued object relative to some fixed point in the optic array. What is being done here is that a perceptual variable (optical velocity) is being defined in terms of another perceptual variable (optical angle). Optical angle is itself defined in terms of perceptions – of the distance between points in the optical array. And this distance is defined in terms of still other perceptions-- of the points between which the distance is measured.

RM: The points are perceptions that would be defined in terms of physical variables. But we didn’t have to go all the way down to that level to get a good definition of the perception of optical velocity. The definition of optical velocity in terms of the perception of optical angle told us what type of perception was being controlled (a transition) and, more importantly, that it was a better definition of the perception being controlled that other definitions – such as optical acceleration and optical trajectory – what are also defined in terms of optical angle.

RM: So I would say that epistemology – at least the aspect of it that deals with the question of the relationship between perception and reality – is relevant mainly to the lowest level perceptions, which Powers called the “intensity” perceptions. These are perceptions that must be defined in terms of physical variables – variables that represent the reality defined by the models of the physical sciences. But all other perceptual variables can presumably be defined in terms of other perceptual variables. And that, I think, is the goal of research on living control systems: to find the best definitions of the perceptual variables that organisms are controlling when they can be seen to be performing various behaviors. And these definitions will be in terms of other perceptual variables, except for the lowest level “intensity” perceptions.

Best

Rick

Richard S. Marken

"Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you
have nothing left to take away.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery