[From Bill Powers (950927.0530 MDT)]
Bruce Abbott (950926.1230 EST) --
Random thoughts on self-control --
When speaking of control systems inside an organism it's easy to forget
that they are not, themselves, complete organisms. Each control system
is an idiot savant, concerned only with the one variable it can perceive
and affect. It knows nothing of other control systems -- in fact, it
doesn't "know" anything. Only the whole brain "knows."
When we speak of what a control system can know, all we can mean is what
its perceptual signal represents. This way of speaking comes from
engineering design, where you can say things like "The garage door
opener has to know when the door has reached its upper limit." This
doesn't mean that the garage door opener has congitive functions; it
means only that a signal must be provided to the controlling circuit
when the upper limit has been reached.
Something similar holds when we talk about levels of control systems.
One level of control "knows" only the type of variable it senses. A
perceptual function at the logical or program level can receive signals
A and B, and it can compute the value of the logical function "A and not
B or B and not A." It does not know what A and B mean, any more than a
silicon logic gate knows the origins of the signals at its input pins.
It does not know that "A" stands for "the red light is on" and B stands
for "the green light is on." Such identifications are the business of
lower levels of perception. What goes on at the (supposed) 9th level is
_pure mathematics_, the manipulation of signals as meaningless symbols
according to arbitrary but mutually consistent rules, the signals being
differentiated from each other only by the fact that they exist in
physically different pathways. The logic level is an idiot savant as
much as any other level.
All this is to introduce a comment on your comment:
O.K., I "go up a level" and see that there is a conflict between
wanting to eat high-calorie foods and wanting to lose weight. I
can see that clearly, but for some reason the conflict is not
dissolving.
At some level, your brain can generate two sentences: "I want to eat the
cake" and "I want to lose weight." You can see these two sentences
clearly, for they exist as thoughts, signals in your brain. But those
sentence-generators are not intelligent human beings; they are just
sentence-generators, components of a whole human being. It is perfectly
possible to think both sentences at once, in the same way you can think
"I am sitting in a chair" and "My head is two feet below a hanging
planter pot." If all you do is think those two sentences, when the
President of the United States enters the room where you are waiting you
will leap to your feet and hit your head on the pot. It is quite
possible to think different thoughts without seeing their implications.
The basic implication you have to see in the case of dieting is that you
want to gain weight and you want to lose weight at the same time, or
that you want to eat the cake and not to eat it at the same time. You
have to see the conflict in terms of one variable that would have to be
in two different states at the same moment. When you manage to see that,
the conflict is likely to dissolve because you can't set a goal to two
different levels at the same time.
One outcome of conflict-chasing that can easily happen is that you can
discover that it is only a theoretical conflict. I shouldn't eat that
piece of cake because the Surgeon General says I should lose weight.
What you are likely to discover is that you don't believe the Surgeon
General, unthinkable though that may be. You, yourself, have no actual
desire to lose weight, so there is actually no conflict inside yourself
about weight loss and eating cake. The only real conflict concerns what
you will tell the Health Police when they come to your door and find you
standing fatly there with cake crumbs on your chin (and smell cigarettes
on your breath and see egg-stains on your shirt).
···
---------------------------------
Wow, I've asked a lot of questions.
We have a lot more questions than answers at these levels of
organization. It's fun to conjecture about what some of the answers
might be, but while we're waiting for someone to provide guesses, we
might as well be working on what we have a better chance of
understanding right now. How is the rat setup coming along?
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Best,
Bill P.