[From: Bruce Nevin (Fri 930217 13:49:05 EST)]
I'm sending this despite misgivings about the time put into this,
misgivings because experiences like that recounted below suggest it
may be time wasted ...
[Beginning on Thursday 950209]
( [Martin Taylor 950209 11:00] to Bill Powers ) --
I don't think you are arguing in opposition to me at all,
but are using my posting to get at what you see as a common viewpoint. Right?I was dealing with the point that <mumble>.
I pointed out that <mumble>.
In your reply, you did not
even touch on either of these points, but treated at some length matters
with which I am in fairly close agreement. . . .
This is very much like my experience.
( Bill Powers (950206.1600 MST) ) --
In the first part of this I'll try one more time to be understood. Just
a quirky compulsion of mine.
In my (Tue 93027 16:41:29 EST) post, I quoted what I called Statement A
and Statement B from an earlier post:
Statement A:
The importance that mammals, at least, evidently attach to having
reliable relationships with their fellows suggests strongly that
intrinsic values of some reference perceptions are involved here.
Statement B:
It is worth thinking through carefully how perceptions of social
responsibility, reliability, interdependence, dependability, and so
on might arise. (Testing might be difficult.)
I repeated these two statements this because it seemed to me that you
(950206.1600 MST) misunderstood the connection between them. You
evidently thought I claimed that (B) "perceptions of social
responsibility, reliability, interdependence, dependability, and so on"
are examples of (A) reference perceptions with intrinsic values.
I restated the intended relation between these statements as follows
(93027 16:41, labels A and B added now for clarity):
I said (B) it is worth thinking through carefully how such perceptions
might arise, given that (A) something about "having reliable
relationships" appears to be intrinsic.
I then went on to concede your point that (A) "[t]he importance that
mammals, at least, evidently attach to having reliable relationships with
their fellows" might very well be a byproduct of controlling other kinds
of perceptions. With this concession, I had moved away from statement
(A).
But in your (950207.2145 MST) you singled out the A portion of my
restatement of the intended connection between the two statements A and
B. You ignored the point about the relation of A to B, you ignored the
concession regarding (A), and you ignored much else. You argued at
length against (A) as though I were still claiming it. It seemed to me
that you were not really replying to me, but were "using my posting to
get at what you see as a common[ly held] viewpoint." I had the choice of
two interpretations, being ignored or being used, and I liked neither.
ยทยทยท
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I can only agree with statements like this:
I don't think people are born with any reference level for having
reliable relationships.
Of course. That would require perceiving relationships as such, and
perceiving their reliability as such. Not likely to be intrinsic, I
agree, and not what I intended. You're taking my words far too
literally, despite my indications that they are not to be taken
literally--that's why in my restatement of (A, B) I used the phrase
"something about" and put the phrase "having reliable relationships" in
distancing quotes.
I suggested farther on that secretion of endorphins (endogenous
morphines, I am told among the most powerful opiates known) could well be
an innate mechanism involved here. I understand (can't cite sources)
that endorphins are released e.g. when one animal grooms another and when
animals play, two obvious ways of affirming reliable relationships. In
play, animals do things that could be perceived as attack and fighting,
but refrain from injuring; the effect is to communicate "I could attack
you, I could be your enemy, but I am not". (Without language, refraining
is the only way to express negation, i.e. do steps ABC of program ABCD
and pointedly refrain from step D or modify it so as to thwart its usual
effect.) But this possibly innate mechanism does not amount to innate
reference values for perceptions of reliable social relationships.
I don't disagree with anything in this rebuttal of what you thought I
said. It appears to me that you underestimate the importance of what we
observe/presume/learn/imagine to be shared social norms. I believe that
you think I underestimate the unpredictability of reorganization and the
capacity of individuals for idiosyncratic differences at every level of
the hierarchy. Am I wrong in the former? You are wrong in the latter.
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( Joel Judd (950208.0800CST) ) --
With the recent discussion of respect for the nature of individual
control systems, I get the impression that in fact perceptual
control systems (i.e., human beings) are NOT particularly social
beings; in fact, we would be better off having LESS contact with
other in many cases, especially after we mature--after puberty.
( Bill Powers (950208.1640 MST) ) --
I think we all know the advantages of
forming social systems -- every word I write in the manner and for the
purpose I write here is an example -- but nobody in this discussion has
mentioned the disadvantages before.Living with other people is a problem of collision avoidance in
hyperspace. You not only have to avoid physically bumping into others,
but you have to avoid using means of control that create serious
disturbances of many controlled variables maintained by all others in
your vicinity. There's a conflict involved: you need the other people to
make your own control easier, yet the other people start to snap and
growl when you start encroaching on their sets of controlled variables
(and you snap and growl right back when they do it to you). The more
people you have to interact with, the greater the conflict gets.
The use of snapping and growling varies a lot from one culture to
another. Ruth Benedict (anthropologist) introduced the term synergy,
borrowed from medicine, as a descriptive term for this. At one extreme,
in a high-synergy culture there are no words and evidently no contrastive
concept of selfishness vs. altruism. In such a culture, it is
self-evident that one cannot benefit another without corollary benefit to
oneself, and that one cannot injure another without corollary injury to
oneself. At the other extreme, in a low-synergy culture, talk of such a
way of being human together seems an impossible fairy tale. Selfishness
and altruism are in strong and self-evident contrast. In a low-synergy
culture, individuals may very well conduct themselves in altruistic ways,
but they are commonly perceived as saintly, naive, impractical, suckers
who have only themselves to blame if they are exploited, and so on.
Societies with high-synergy cultures have in historical time been
aggressively exploited by technologically more advanced low-synergy
cultures.
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This account refers to cultural norms, and should be interpreted in
respect to how individual control systems might learn and participate in
and thereby recreate and modify cultural norms. We have had some
discussion of how to account for this in PCT.
This is NOT a claim that norms or cultural values are superorganic
entities that control individuals or that determine their reference
perceptions or the values that their reference perceptions have. Talk of
cultural values and norms and the like provides us a way of discussing
these outcomes of individual learning and control.
But that is not all. Talk of cultural values and norms and the like also
refers to perceptions that people have, perceptions which people imagine
to be real attributes of the world in which they live.
It gets messier. People try to make these shared perceptions. They do
this sometimes by affirming their own reference values of such
perceptions publicly, sometimes by resetting their own reference values
of such perceptions to conform to what they perceive (or imagine) to be
expected or normal for their fellows. It is by their continual testing
and renegotiating of what we call norms, cultural values, and so on that
individuals participate in recreating and, over time, changing their
social reality.
It looks to me as though, as social beings, we very often interpret the
actions and inactions of others as though they were results of the Test,
imagining what perceptions the others are controlling, imagining what
their expectations might be, especially their expectations of us, then
controlling our perceptions in a way that is consistent with these
imagined properties of our social environment, including of course our
continuing perceptions of the actions and inactions of others.
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(Friday 950217)
I had an interesting discussion with a colleague last week. In our
conversation, he had mentioned being distressed when he watched
television and realized that the creators of the program had assumed
their audience held certain opinions or values that in fact he did not
share. He said this distressed him because he felt alienated, and he
didn't like that. He is I think 62 years old.
After a couple of turns of the conversation, he told me something that
startled me. He said that his first reaction when he encounters another
man is, "can I kill him?" Can I overpower him. Fight or flight, as he
later put it. He claimed that, based on conversations with other men, he
thought this was universal.
Holding in mind both of these disclosures at once, I said that perhaps I
was not as aware as he was of having this reaction. But less tactfully I
would have to have said that I don't have that reaction at all.
In this instance, I chose not to disturb his perception of what is normal
for all men, and I chose not to disturb his (stated, presumed) control of
a perception of not feeling alienated. If he knew this, he might say
that my choices in the matter, avoiding conflict, reflect my recognition
that I could not kill him. Perhaps my tactful reply to him was truthful,
and I'm just not as aware of the relevant perceptions that I am
controlling as he is of the ones he is controlling.
Such perceptions do not accord with other perceptions I am controlling,
of what kind of person I am. Those perceptions might be "true" or my
control of them might account for my not being aware of controlling the
"can I kill him?" perceptions. Determining which is the case does not
seem to be an easy task.
Bruce