second-order and third-order beliefs

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2008.03.22.1450)]

Martin Taylor (2008.03.22.14.22)

OK, I misinterpreted you, but that is what I am saying, too. My
question all along has been how that linkage is made, within the HPCT
hierarchy.

I think Bill has given some nice explanations of how that would work.
Basically, uncertainty is a higher level system's perception of
conflict in a lower level system, a particular kind of conflict where
one system wants to say that a lower level perception is X and another
wants to say that it is not-X.

Me:

>Actually, I still have no idea what the perception of uncertainly is.
>I was hoping Martin would give me an example of an experiment to
>demonstrate control of uncertainly.

I guess Bekesy audiometry is the standard one. The subject is asked
to press a button that makes a sound go softer when pressed and
louder when not pressed. The experiment starts with an audible sound,
and the subject is told to press the button until he is just can't be
sure he is hearing it, and then to press again when he is just sure
he can hear it. The frequency of the tone is slowly increased as he
is doing this. The result is a zig-zag trace covering the range of
uncertainty about hearing the tone, between an upper limit of just
sure he can hear it and just sure he can't hear it.

This looks like a perfect example of the "conflict" model of
uncertainty. At some level of tone intensity there is a conflict over
the button press; the system controlling for "tone not there" wants to
push the button to make it go away and the system controlling for
"tone there" wants to not press the button in order to hear it. The
zig-zag trace is a picture of the oscillation created by this
conflict. A higher level system in you experiences this conflict as
"uncertainty" about whether the tone perception is there or not.

There is no uncertainty inherent in the perception of the tone itself;
the experience of uncertainty is is a perception of a conflict that
exists about how to classify any particular perceived intensity of
tone. This conflict exists only when the tone perception is at a value
that could be classed (by higher level systems) as "not there" or
"there".

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2008.03.22.1800 MDT)

Rick Marken (2008.03.22.1450) --

Basically, uncertainty is a higher level system's perception of
conflict in a lower level system, a particular kind of conflict where
one system wants to say that a lower level perception is X and another
wants to say that it is not-X.

I think it can lead to conflict (we don't like to act when we're uncertain because we don't like making mistakes, but must act because if there really is an error we may need to correct it for good reasons). However, the presence of conflict depends on perceptions other than that of uncertainty. Uncertainty is just a perception; we don't necessarily have any goals for it, high or low.

I don't see "uncertainty" as something in the variable being observed, but as something in me, the observer. It is I who am uncertain, not the outside world. So I depart from the Copenhagen convention. I see variability in the world just as everyone else does, and I can compute its degree by conventional means. But as we show by using random disturbances in tracking experiments, that variability is just a way in which variables can vary, and control actions can accurately counteract the variations in the frequency range between zero and some maximum frequency between 2 and 3 Hz. This is one big difference between PCT and so called Modern Control Theory. In MCT, random disturbances are assumed to be uncompensatable since they can't be predicted. They enter the MCT control equations only as means and standard deviations, not as actual physical variations through time.

I don't think we have yet quite defined what it is that we perceive when we say we see or experience uncertainty.

Best.

Bill P.

···

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.21.8/1338 - Release Date: 3/21/2008 5:52 PM

[MartinT]

Re: second-order and third-order
beliefs
[From Martin Taylor 2008.03.22.23.03]

[ Rick Marken
(2008.03.22.1450)]

Martin Taylor (2008.03.22.14.22)

OK, I misinterpreted you, but that is what I am saying,
too. My

question all along has been how that linkage is made,
within the HPCT

hierarchy.

I think Bill has given some nice explanations of how that would
work.

Basically, uncertainty is a higher level system’s perception of

conflict in a lower level system, a particular kind of conflict
where

one system wants to say that a lower level perception is X and
another

wants to say that it is not-X.

That’s nowhere neasr an answer to the question, and even as it
stands, it has nothing to say about the perception of uncertainty
about the value of something blurry.

Me:

Actually, I still have no idea what the perception of
uncertainly is.

I was hoping Martin would give me an example of an
experiment to

demonstrate control of uncertainly.

I guess Bekesy audiometry is the standard one. The subject
is asked

to press a button that makes a sound go softer when pressed
and

louder when not pressed. The experiment starts with an
audible sound,

and the subject is told to press the button until he is
just can’t be

sure he is hearing it, and then to press again when he is
just sure

he can hear it. The frequency of the tone is slowly
increased as he

is doing this. The result is a zig-zag trace covering the
range of

uncertainty about hearing the tone, between an upper limit
of just

sure he can hear it and just sure he can’t hear it.

This looks like a perfect example of the “conflict” model
of

uncertainty. At some level of tone intensity there is a conflict
over

the button press; the system controlling for “tone not there”
wants to

push the button to make it go away and the system controlling for

“tone there” wants to not press the button in order to hear
it. The

zig-zag trace is a picture of the oscillation created by this

conflict. A higher level system in you experiences this conflict
as

“uncertainty” about whether the tone perception is there or
not.

That description of mechanism sounds quite reasonable. Would you
therefore accept Bekesy audiometry as an experiment that demonstrates
the control of uncxertainty?

There is no uncertainty inherent in the
perception of the tone itself;

Really? The subjective experience is that there is a lot of
uncertainty most of the time in the perception of the tone itself.
“Am I hearing it or am I not” is a question that would be
very hard to answer, subjectively, if it were ever asked. It is asked,
in a forced choice experiment, and in some of those experiments the
subject is asked explicitly to give an answer on a continuum scale as
to his level of certainty that the signal was in interval 1 or 2. In
those, you certainly can invoke the conflict mechanism, but you can’t
do that in the continuum case, and I see no reason to look for
different mechanisms.

The two-alternative case can readily be transmuted into a three,
four, … sixty, … seven hundred alternative case, and at some point
it becomes perceptually indistinguishable from the continuum case. The
perception of uncertainty is subjectively in the perception that is
uncertain, not in its attribution. It occurs whether or not you are
using that perception as a component of a perception your are
controlling, which is where the kind conflict you assert as the source
of the “uncertainty” perception can arise.

the experience of uncertainty is is a
perception of a conflict that

exists about how to classify any particular perceived intensity of

tone. This conflict exists only when the tone perception is at a
value

that could be classed (by higher level systems) as “not there”
or
“there”.

And how does the conflict explanation apply to the Lincoln
portrait, for which uncertainty is highly variable as a function of
the degree of blur, and for which I see no obvious competing
perceptions, other than that it becomes a portrait with lessening
blur, then becomes uncertainly a portrait of a particular person, and
then becomes certainly a portrait of that person and then becomes
uncertain again, and finally becomes not a portrait at all?

I include here a rather poor demonstration of the Bouma
handwriting demonstration. I think it kind of works, but Bouma’s
original worked much better.

Martin

[Bill_Powers1]

From Bill Powers (2008.03.23.0130 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2008.03.22.23.03 –

The blurred handwriting is a case not covered by my
“variability” hypothesis. As you say, the
“uncertainty” there is is strictly in the observer, not in the
attribution to a real message. To make this into a conflict per Rick’s
hypothesis, we would have to find some reason for which this
“message” has to be read which would conflict with simply
dismissing the image as unreadable and ignoring it. For conflict to
arise, reading the message has to be important to the person looking at
the blur. It wasn’t important to me so I didn’t even try.

That description of mechanism
sounds quite reasonable. Would you therefore accept Bekesy audiometry as
an experiment that demonstrates the control of
uncertainty?

It does seems to me that control of uncertainty implies a reference level
for uncertainty. In the Bekesy audiometry experiment, the reference level
is suggested by the experimenter, who asks the participant to make the
tone just detectable with 100% certainty, and just undetectable with 100%
certainty of no tone. The experimenter is asking the participant to be
certain that the tone is there or not there, and inferring a region
between those limits where there is uncertainty.

I suppose the same could be done by adjusting the focus in the blurred
handwriting example, so the participant would be asked to make the
message just barely unreadable, and just barely readable. Then one could
infer a region of intermediate focus where there is uncertainty. The
“objective” uncertainty would be shown by correct and incorrect
indentifications – but that would reduce to my “variability”
hypothesis.

In both cases, imagination would play a part, as the person sees little
parts of the experience seeming recognizeable and imagines the rest to
complete the experience. If one is highly aware of imagining and can
refrain from it, recognition would be purely a matter of signal-to-noise
ratio. But with imagination helping to satisfy the reference condition,
there would be a range of blurriness or noise over which frequency of
correct (as opposed to spurious) recognition would vary. Maybe we could
say that objective variability is measured by the proportion of incorrect
claims to certainty.

I think Rick is probably right in suggesting that there is no subjective
uncertainty in the perception itself, whether it is pure or filled in
from imagination. You don’t say you hear a tone if you don’t experience a
tone. You may intermittently experience a tone, so you can perceive
variations in its detectability, but when you’re hearing it or not
hearing it, you don’t report the opposite. You say “Sometimes I hear
it and sometimes I don’t.” I would call that a report about a
correct perception of variability. This would be true even if part of the
variability came from unawaredly imagining more or less tone.

Isn’t all this the very thing that physicists argued about? We can say
that on a small enough scale, measurements of position and momentum
fluctuate unpredictably, so that given one measurement it is not possible
to measure the other reliably. Each measurement, when made, gives a
number that seems 100% certain, but the next measurement is different,
also with 100% certainty. That shows us that we should not feel certain
about any measurement even if we get a definite number from it, because
there are variable influences at work that we can’t predict or take into
account, except statistically.

Of course if one believes that perception is reality itself, then the
uncertainty is projected onto the external world, and we say that a
particle actually has no definite position at any moment, or any definite
momentum. Instead of saying that the measurement is uncertain, we assume
that the measurement is accurate but the source of the phenomenon is
inherently uncertain. So the position of the quantum physicist is
essentially that of the Gibsonian, the naive realist, and the assumption
is that perception is always perfectly transparent.

Best,

Bill P.

···

There is no uncertainty inherent
in the perception of the tone itself;

Really? The subjective experience is that there is a lot of uncertainty
most of the time in the perception of the tone itself. “Am I hearing
it or am I not” is a question that would be very hard to answer,
subjectively, if it were ever asked. It is asked, in a forced choice
experiment, and in some of those experiments the subject is asked
explicitly to give an answer on a continuum scale as to his level of
certainty that the signal was in interval 1 or 2. In those, you certainly
can invoke the conflict mechanism, but you can’t do that in the continuum
case, and I see no reason to look for different mechanisms.

The two-alternative case can readily be transmuted into a three, four,
… sixty, … seven hundred alternative case, and at some point it
becomes perceptually indistinguishable from the continuum case. The
perception of uncertainty is subjectively in the perception that is
uncertain, not in its attribution. It occurs whether or not you are using
that perception as a component of a perception your are controlling,
which is where the kind conflict you assert as the source of the
“uncertainty” perception can arise.

the experience of uncertainty is
is a perception of a conflict that

exists about how to classify any particular perceived intensity of

tone. This conflict exists only when the tone perception is at a
value

that could be classed (by higher level systems) as “not there”
or

“there”.

And how does the conflict explanation apply to the Lincoln portrait, for
which uncertainty is highly variable as a function of the degree of blur,
and for which I see no obvious competing perceptions, other than that it
becomes a portrait with lessening blur, then becomes uncertainly a
portrait of a particular person, and then becomes certainly a portrait of
that person and then becomes uncertain again, and finally becomes not a
portrait at all?

I include here a rather poor demonstration of the Bouma handwriting
demonstration. I think it kind of works, but Bouma’s original worked much
better.

Martin

No virus found in this incoming message.

Checked by AVG.

Version: 7.5.519 / Virus Database: 269.21.8/1338 - Release Date:
3/21/2008 5:52 PM

[MartinT]

[Martin Taylor 2008.03.23.10.09]

From Bill Powers (2008.03.23.0130 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2008.03.22.23.03 --

The blurred handwriting is a case not covered by my "variability" hypothesis..... For conflict to arise, reading the message has to be important to the person looking at the blur. It wasn't important to me so I didn't even try.

Did you wait for the writing to become crisp, or did you just look at the starting blur? Or did the GIF animation not make it through your e-mail processing? My original was animated when I got it from CSGnet, but it wasn't when quoted in your message.

There is a stage in the animation when it is almost as easy to read as a properly handwritten text would be, and you wouldn't really "have to try", any more than you do when you glance at ordinary handwriting. Only when it becomes really crisp does it become clear it isn't handwritten text at all, because there are hardly any letters (just first letters of words).

That description of mechanism sounds quite reasonable. Would you therefore accept Bekesy audiometry as an experiment that demonstrates the control of uncertainty?

It does seems to me that control of uncertainty implies a reference level for uncertainty. In the Bekesy audiometry experiment, the reference level is suggested by the experimenter, who asks the participant to make the tone just detectable with 100% certainty, and just undetectable with 100% certainty of no tone.

Actually, not 100%. I don't know what levels individual subjects might choose for "do hear" and "don't hear", but I can assure you that for me, at least, I would judge the limits to be nearer 20% and 80%. That's not the point, though. The point of the Bekesy audiometry is that it is a tracking study, tracking the trace of maxiumum uncertainty as the tone changes frequency. There is nothing that it tracks except uncertainty, a simple scalar, like a compensatory track of a disturbed cursor.

The experimenter is asking the participant to be certain that the tone is there or not there, and inferring a region between those limits where there is uncertainty.

I suppose in a normal tracking study the experimenter is asking the subject to be certain that the cursor is to the left or right of the target and inferring a region between the limits of the tracking variation within which the subject is uncertain (assuming the action apparatus is sufficiently precise). The question arises there, too. Suppose the visible cursor is severely blurred in a standard tracking task, and instead of asking the subject to track 1 cm to the left of the target, you ask them to track so that they would bet 3:1 that the cursor is to the left, rather than the usual 50-50. Would that seem like a nonsensical task for most subjects? I doubt it.

I suppose the same could be done by adjusting the focus in the blurred handwriting example, so the participant would be asked to make the message just barely unreadable, and just barely readable. Then one could infer a region of intermediate focus where there is uncertainty. The "objective" uncertainty would be shown by correct and incorrect indentifications -- but that would reduce to my "variability" hypothesis.

The 'objective" uncertainty isn't really of much interest, in the same way as "real reality" isn't of much interest when we control an ordinary perception. The interesting question isn't whether someone is convinced (very certain) they will win the next lottery (objectively rather uncertain), but that there is even a perception of uncertainty associated with the perception of anything at all. It's the _association_ of a feeling of uncertainty with any specific perception that led me to my original question.

I think Rick is probably right in suggesting that there is no subjective uncertainty in the perception itself, whether it is pure or filled in from imagination. You don't say you hear a tone if you don't experience a tone.

Have you ever been a subject in a psychoacoustic experiment studying near-threshold effects? I don't think you would make that comment if you had. Most of the time, you simply don't feel sure whether you experienced a tone or not. That's quite different from correctly or incorrectly judging that a tone was really presented.

You may intermittently experience a tone, so you can perceive variations in its detectability, but when you're hearing it or not hearing it, you don't report the opposite. You say "Sometimes I hear it and sometimes I don't."

That's what you do if those are the choices you are allowed to make. Some studies don't limit the choices to "Yes" and "No", as I mentioned in an earlier message. They allow you to say, using a slider or a number from 1 to 10, how sure you are that you heard a tone.

The experimenter analyzing those data assumes that the subject is trying to tell the truth about the experience, based on the fact that the experimenter is usually a subject and does try to tell the truth, with results similar to the results from othe subjects. Then the experiment analyzes the data as though the subject would have said "yes" if the slider was above each possible position, knowing whether there actually was a tone on each occasion. The results uniformly show a smooth curve, which would be unlikely if the subject's self-report of their certainty was some kind of illusion.

Isn't all this the very thing that physicists argued about? We can say that on a small enough scale, measurements of position and momentum fluctuate unpredictably, so that given one measurement it is not possible to measure the other reliably. Each measurement, when made, gives a number that seems 100% certain, but the next measurement is different, also with 100% certainty. That shows us that we should not feel certain about any measurement even if we get a definite number from it, because there are variable influences at work that we can't predict or take into account, except statistically.

This all relates to the mapping of perception onto the real world, an exercise that often seems to be useful. Since we don't believe (there's that word from the subject line -- almost) that we can ever be assured of real reality, the more interesting question is how the perception is produced.

My question is simpler: what are the connections that create a perception of uncertainty and that allow that perception to maintain association with the perception that is felt to be uncertain. I suggested, for no reason other than that it had proved useful in the development of artificial neural nets of a structure similar to the perceptual side of the HPCT structure, that perhaps perceptions are better represented by complex numbers than by real numbers. I made no commitment to that, nor did I guess how it might be implemented biologically. What I am reasonably convinced of is that there must be some fairly tight coupling beteen the value of a perception and the perception of its uncertainty.

Martin

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2008.03.23.0950)]

Martin Taylor (2008.03.23.10.09) --

>From Bill Powers (2008.03.23.0130 MDT)]

>I think Rick is probably right in suggesting that there is no
>subjective uncertainty in the perception itself, whether it is pure
>or filled in from imagination. You don't say you hear a tone if you
>don't experience a tone.

Have you ever been a subject in a psychoacoustic experiment studying
near-threshold effects? I don't think you would make that comment if
you had.

I've been in many psychoacoustic experiments and I would make that
comment! Gee, I guess I _did_ make that comment. Or am I having
boundary issues with Bill?

Anyway, when I am doing, say, a tone detection task I don't experience
the perception as uncertain; I perceive myself as being uncertain
about what to say; either "yes, there is a tone" or "no, there is no
tone". What I am perceiving as uncertainty is, I believe, the
intensity of my internal conflict about what I should say about a
particular perception. I think the intensity of the conflict depends
on the S/N ratio of the tone; if the S/N ratio is high enough, then
error on both sides of the conflict is small and I just say "yes";
same thing if the S/N ratio is low enough.

Most of the time, you simply don't feel sure whether you
experienced a tone or not.

Right. But you are not uncertain about the experience itself; you
heard something, you just don't know if you want to say that the sound
was the result of an added tone or not. It's like the unfocused
handwriting example. There is nothing uncertain about the perception:
I am seeing unfocused writing that becomes more focused. The
perception is what it is; the uncertainty exists only when I treat
that perception as evidence of something else, such as assuming that
it is a fuzzy image of a clearly written statement. I am imagining,
either because someone suggested it or because I am hypothesizing it,
that the perception is to be taken as evidence of some other fact. In
the tone detection experiment, I am asked to take the sound perception
as evidence that a tone was or was not played; in the unfocused
writing example I am asked to take the perception as evidence of
something that is clearly written. But, in fact, variations in the
sound perception may not be a result of addition or non-addition of a
tone just as the apparently unfocused handwriting may be perfectly a
perfectly focused image of blurry writing.

My question is simpler: what are the connections that create a
perception of uncertainty and that allow that perception to maintain
association with the perception that is felt to be uncertain.

I already provided one possible answer but you don't seem to want to
consider it because you are committed to the belief that uncertainty
is inherent in perceptions. At least I think this is where you are
coming from. So far, you have dismissed my proposals about the nature
of uncertainty (that it is the perception of the state of a conflict
about what to conclude about the true state of the world based on the
state of a perception) but have not explained your model. Let me ask
you this: is there any difference in uncertainty for an unfocused
image of clear handwriting versus a perfectly focused image of blurry
handwriting that look exactly the same?

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[MartinT]

[Martin Taylor 2008.03.23.17.40]

[From Rick Marken (2008.03.23.0950)]

Martin Taylor (2008.03.23.10.09) --

  >From Bill Powers (2008.03.23.0130 MDT)]

  >I think Rick is probably right in suggesting that there is no
  >subjective uncertainty in the perception itself, whether it is pure
  >or filled in from imagination. You don't say you hear a tone if you
  >don't experience a tone.

  Have you ever been a subject in a psychoacoustic experiment studying
  near-threshold effects? I don't think you would make that comment if
  you had.

I've been in many psychoacoustic experiments and I would make that
comment! Gee, I guess I _did_ make that comment. Or am I having
boundary issues with Bill?

Anyway, when I am doing, say, a tone detection task I don't experience
the perception as uncertain; I perceive myself as being uncertain
about what to say; either "yes, there is a tone" or "no, there is no
tone". What I am perceiving as uncertainty is, I believe, the
intensity of my internal conflict about what I should say about a
particular perception. I think the intensity of the conflict depends
on the S/N ratio of the tone; if the S/N ratio is high enough, then
error on both sides of the conflict is small and I just say "yes";
same thing if the S/N ratio is low enough.

I think you must be an unusual person. I have never had a subject who was unable to do the task of reporting the level of certainty for each presentation, and do it with no quibbles about what the task meant. Maybe it's a bit like being colour-blind, and being asked to match a coloured patch to a given hue. You can ask someone who isn't colour blind to do that, and they know exactly what you mean, and then they do it (more or less accurately, but that's anothe question). Likewise when you ask someone to judge their uncertainty about their hearing of a tone, they just do it, and nobody before you has questioned what it meant to be asked to do it.

Most of the time, you simply don't feel sure whether you
  experienced a tone or not.

Right. But you are not uncertain about the experience itself; you
heard something, you just don't know if you want to say that the sound
was the result of an added tone or not.

That's only true if, as I said previously, what you are asked to do is to say whether the tone was there or not.

> My question is simpler: what are the connections that create a

  perception of uncertainty and that allow that perception to maintain
  association with the perception that is felt to be uncertain.

I already provided one possible answer but you don't seem to want to
consider it because you are committed to the belief that uncertainty
is inherent in perceptions. At least I think this is where you are
coming from. So far, you have dismissed my proposals about the nature
of uncertainty (that it is the perception of the state of a conflict
about what to conclude about the true state of the world based on the
state of a perception) but have not explained your model.

Firstly, I have not given a model, because I've only been talking about a phenomenon, as you asked me to do when I suggested that it would be prefereable to develop a model to test before designing experiments to test it.

Secondly, I have given reasons why, although I might accept your proposal for the perception of uncertainty in some conditions, it clearly is not acceptable under other conditions that offer a similar subjective experience. That leads me to be skeptical about it for those circumstances in which it would otherwise be plausible.

Thirdly (and this is halfway new), to argue that you are perceiving conflict is not to answer the question about how the perception of uncertainty is linked to a perception of something concrete; it merely moves it to a question of how the perception is linked to a relationship between two perceptions of something more concrete.

Fourthly (also, new). the kind of conflict you (actually Bill, I think) propose is of a kind not hitherto discussed in the context of HPCT. Normally, conflict in HPCT is taken to mean a problem in controlling one perception to two different reference values (or N perceptions to M > N values). Here, we have no such control problem. It's a problem purely with what IS, not about what you can control.

Let me ask
you this: is there any difference in uncertainty for an unfocused
image of clear handwriting versus a perfectly focused image of blurry
handwriting that look exactly the same?

No difference in the uncertainty about what is written. What uncertainty did you have in mind when you asked the question?

What conflict did you have in mind that would apply in this case?

Martin

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2008.03.23.1640 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2008.03.23.17.40 --

[Marken] Anyway, when I am doing, say, a tone detection task I don't experience the perception as uncertain; I perceive myself as being uncertain
about what to say; either "yes, there is a tone" or "no, there is no
tone".

But (to Rick) that can't be independent of how clearly you hear the tone. If you are 100% certain that you recall hearing the tone, you wouldn't be in conflict about whether to say you did, would you? If the conflict was just about the saying, it wouldn't matter what you heard, or thought you heard. And the reason for the conflict wouldn't have anything to do with the tone -- it would be about who is going to hear you say it, and what they're going to think.

The "recall" part may be the critical issue. When I am in a real situation like that (shower running -- is that the phone ringing in the next room?), what I do is replay it in memory and ask, "Did I hear it or didn't I?" Or I just think "Was that the phone?"-- in either case I'm already remembering. As I replay it and compare the memory with what I'm hearing now, I realize that I'm still hearing a sort of high-pitched jingling from the shower noise, which could be what I heard before, so it wasn't the phone. But the phone sounds like that, too, so it could have been the phone. There's some reasoning involved, as well as memory and attention to present perceptions. And there are conflicting conclusions, with evidence pointing both ways. That's how uncertainty appears to me. I suppose I could put a number to it, but I don't have a clear idea of what "50% certain" means, so that wouldn't mean much.

I think you must be an unusual person. I have never had a subject who was unable to do the task of reporting the level of certainty for each presentation, and do it with no quibbles about what the task meant.

You ask the subject to give you a quantitative estimate of the magnitude of a perception, so you get one. I agree that we can make such estimates. The real question, of course, is "How uncertain is 50% certain?" Same problem as with estimating stimulus magnitudes.

[Taylor] Most of the time, you simply don't feel sure whether you
  experienced a tone or not.

[Marken] Right. But you are not uncertain about the experience itself; you
heard something, you just don't know if you want to say that the sound
was the result of an added tone or not.

I notice that you, too, naturally refer to memory.

As I said above, I think Rick is stretching the argument a bit past the elastic limit. A person might be in conflict about what to say if the object is to please or displease the experimenter, but that has nothing to do with estimating how uncertain one feels. A little, some, pretty much, a lot -- (I wouldn't try to get any closer than that, but that is a number scale and I know what it means, sort of). I can make that estimate without saying anything, so a conflict about what to say to somebody doesn't come up.

[Taylor] My question is simpler: what are the connections that create a
  perception of uncertainty and that allow that perception to maintain
  association with the perception that is felt to be uncertain.

That's really what the arguments are about -- which perception are we talking about? If there's a feeling of uncertainty (however a person relates that phrase to some kind of perception), then it can be weak, medium, or strong, even if we don't know what it is we're feeling uncertain about. You can just be in some kind of uncertain mood, and attach it to everything you perceive. Or you can be focused on some particular perception, and wonder if you really experienced it or just imagined it. I agree with Rick that during the moment of perception you're either experiencing something or you aren't -- you can't do both at the same time. But the uncertainty arises in retrospect: did I hear it, see it, smell it, or didn't I? That happens almost immediately. You may have reacted to the smell of something burning by getting alert and sniffing, so you acted just as if you were sure the smell was real. But a moment later you're wondering if there really was a smell, and realizing that you can imagine one or not, faintly, at will. That makes the memory of the experience much less trustworthy. That leaves you uncertain about whether an external event actually occurred.

The whole subject is, appropriately, pretty fuzzy.

Best.

Bill P.

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2008.03.23.1650)]

Martin Taylor (2008.03.23.17.40)--

> Me
>Anyway, when I am doing, say, a tone detection task I don't experience
>the perception as uncertain; I perceive myself as being uncertain
>about what to say; either "yes, there is a tone" or "no, there is no
>tone".

I think you must be an unusual person. I have never had a subject who
was unable to do the task of reporting the level of certainty for
each presentation

I didn't say I had any trouble reporting my level of uncertainty.
Indeed, when I did the tone detection experiments I was often asked to
report uncertainty by rating each noise burst on a 1 to 4 scale, with
1 being very uncertain and 4 being very certain that a tone was
present. What I was not uncertain aboutI was perceiving on each trial.
The uncertainty was about whether the perception was evidence of a
tone having been added to the noise or not.

>Right. But you are not uncertain about the experience itself; you
>heard something, you just don't know if you want to say that the sound
>was the result of an added tone or not.

That's only true if, as I said previously, what you are asked to do
is to say whether the tone was there or not.

What else might one be uncertain about in a tone detection experiment?

> Let me ask
>you this: is there any difference in uncertainty for an unfocused
>image of clear handwriting versus a perfectly focused image of blurry
>handwriting that look exactly the same?

No difference in the uncertainty about what is written. What
uncertainty did you have in mind when you asked the question?

Uncertainty about what is actually written. In your example, what is
actually written is some words in a nice, clean script. I know I am
seeing a blurred image of this text because that is what I am told and
that is what I see as the animation focuses the text. So when I see
the blurred text in your demo I am uncertain about what the unblurred
version of this text looks like. In my example, what is actually
written is blurred, unreadable script that is seen in perfect focus.
So my perfectly focused image of blurred, illegible script looks just
like your unfocused image of clean, legible script. In other words the
perceptions are the same in both cases. The uncertainty, then, is
clearly not a feature of the perception itself. The uncertainty in
your example exists only when you tell me that the perception is a
blurred image of legible text. I think you are trying to say that our
uncertainty about a perception is in the perception itself; that the
blurred image that you posted is an example of an uncertain
perception. I am trying to demonstrate that that is an incorrect view
of the uncertainty of perception.

Best regards

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com

[rsmarken]

[From Rick Marken (2008.03.23.2130)]

Bill Powers (2008.03.23.1640 MDT)--

>>[Marken] Anyway, when I am doing, say, a tone detection task I

>>don't experience the perception as uncertain; I perceive myself as
>>being uncertain
>>about what to say; either "yes, there is a tone" or "no, there is no
>>tone".

But (to Rick) that can't be independent of how clearly you hear the
tone. If you are 100% certain that you recall hearing the tone, you
wouldn't be in conflict about whether to say you did, would you? If
the conflict was just about the saying, it wouldn't matter what you
heard, or thought you heard. And the reason for the conflict wouldn't
have anything to do with the tone -- it would be about who is going
to hear you say it, and what they're going to think.

Ah, this is to me. I didn't notice it at first.

Of course I don't think the conflict is independent of the perception;
I think I mentioned the relevance of perception in an earlier post.
What you get on each trial is a perception, P, and a conflict exists
if the value of P is such that one system corrects it's error by
saying that P represents "tone present" and the other corrects it's
error by saying that P represents "tone not present".

Best

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com