[Martin Taylor 940622 18:30]
Bill Leach 940621.18:55 940621.19:09 940621.19:44 and related messages
There's been some prolonged discussion about the concept of "society,"
including the following quotes from the listed postings:
Given just the idea that a human being able to control well is a
fundamental good, then possible an entire structure of ethics and
morality could be constructed using PCT principles to guide decisions in
the "building".
OK, you are assuming you are "society" -- or at least a part of
"society."Indeed, that is a partial problem with such a question or any discussion
of "society". "We all know what the term means" but it does not even
mean the same thing to any one of us in different context much less among
different people at different time.
<chuckle> I could help this one: Many PCTers might be anarchists (and
of course might not be) but they sure as hell aren't Socialists!
I feel comfortable with the idea that Rick does not deny the existence of
societies and their goals. Only that "societies and their goals" only
exist because individuals perceive "societies" and the "goals of society"
and INDIVIDUALLY set references based upon these beliefs.
The socialist/communists believe that "society" itself is a thing
independent of the people that make up society. Thus, they approach the
"problem" from a point of view that totally ignores the individual.
There's a mixture here of prejudice (literally: judging before gathering
evidence) and an attempt to see where PCT leads.
PCT, in one sense, is an engineering discipline. At its heart is the
core notion that each living organism is based on a hierarchy of simple
control systems, each stabilizing a particular internal variable that is
labelled "perception." When two simple control systems interact by
affecting some aspect of the world that is part of the perceptual signal
of each, the resulting behaviour of the total system (the two interacting
simple control systems) may be stable, oscillating, chaotic, or unstable.
One cannot tell, except by analysis or simulation of the specific control
systems.
In what we may call "classic" PCT, a control system or hierarchy that
does not reduce its error consistently is a candidate for reorganization--
it changes what it is perceiving or it changes how it acts on the world.
If there are two interacting control systems and their resulting dynamic
is not stable, both will frequently or persistently experience error that
they cannot immediately reduce, and both are therefore candidates for
reorganization. Reorganization will proceed until the interaction between
the two control systems is stable and both can control their perceptions,
though these perceptions may not be based on the same perceptual functions
as the control systems were using at the start of their interaction. They
"see things differently" as a consequence of the interaction. The stable
state does not necessarily involve both reorganizing to be the same--it
might well come from them changing their perceptual functions so as not
to be much affected by the part of the world they act on in common.
Large interacting systems are seldom unconditionally stable, particularly
if they are nonlinear, as real control systems must be. If we extend
the interaction of two control systems to three, four, and more, we
would expect to find more and more cause for reorganization as the
control by one of them disturbs the control of others. At least SOME
of the signal loops that pass through multiple control systems are likely
to have positive loop gain at least some of the time. However, there
are likely to be some combinations of perceptual function and of mode
of action that lead to stable interactions much of the time, and
reorganization within the various individual control systems will tend
to bring the structure of interactions to such a situation of usual stability.
Again, it is unlikely that all the control systems will have reorganized
the same way. Instead, it is more likely that they will develop a variety
of forms of perception and actions, so that they occupy what are sometimes
called "ecological niches."
In my Durango talk, I discussed part of this process (you can get the video
from Dag).
I talked about how a control hierarchy could learn a language convention
such as a syntax, and how newly created control systems exposed to the
interactions of older, stabilized, systems should be expected to learn
a convention much like that used by the older systems (though necessarily
not identical). Language is just one set of conventions among many that
have stabilized over the ages within smaller or larger groups of interacting
individuals. Language is an ARTIFACT. It exists independently of its use.
It is the set of conventions that has stabilized by the mechanism described
above--reorganization until interactions stabilize. If "Kill the Umpire"
meant the same as "kill the enemy soldier about to shoot you," we would have
few (N. American) sports with much popularity. But it is a convention
that (usually) does not lead to the demise of the umpire.
"Society" is, I think, an artifact, like language. It exists independently
of the people (or animals) who constitute it. It is the set of conventions
that have stabilized because their use (as a set) leads to relatively low
uncontrolled error in the control systems that are the individuals in the
society. Different "societies" have different convention sets that work
pretty well together, in the sense that so long as people use the same
conventions, their perceptions are reasonably controllable, and whatever
reorganization they do does not disturb other people into reorganizing
into a more stable convention set. But clearly the convention sets that
define and determine most societies are not absolutely stable. In some
societies some people can create large uncontrollable errors in a victim
by labelling that person "Socialist," and can render those errors again
controllable by switching the label to "Capitalist." In other societies,
the labelling can have the same effect in reverse. And the effects can
change over time.
Conflicts among people can arise at any level of the hierarchy, but the
lower the level at which the conflict is expressed, the easier it is for
the conflicting persons to find other ways of satisfying their higher-level
reference signals without reorganizing. So reorganization is more likely
to occur when the conflicts are at high levels--what we call systems and
principles. Stable societies, in the sense of the artifactual sets of
conventions, are those in which the reference levels for high-level
perceptions, and the fairly high-level supporting parts of the hierarchy,
are in most people such as to create little or no conflict. Again, this
does not mean that everyone will have the same reference levels or even the
same perceptual functions or modes of action to control their perceptions,
but it means that the ways they have reorganized TOGETHER does not result
in much conflict.
Some of these high-level perceptual functions that develop through
reorganization have to do with what we call "rights."
Living things, humans included, have no inherent "rights." None. What
they have in common is an ancestry that acted in such a way as to pass
on their genes.
No person alive had a single ancestor who acted so as to get himself or
herself killed before mating. A person lived in a society that did not
"believe in a right to life" after some fashion was less likely to pass
on their genes than would someone be in a more solicitous society. So we,
the living, are likely to have had ancestors who lived in a society in
which the convention "no unprovoked killing" was part of the stable set.
Other societies, if ever they came into being, must have died as surely
as the people of which they were composed died.
We, as children, reorganize so that we can stably act (i.e. continue to
control our perceptions) in the environment of social convention of our group.
We "absorb" the conventions, perhaps without consciously knowing it until
perhaps we are confronted with the existence of another society--another
set of conventions which work reasonably well together in the sense of
stability agains the random reorganizations of the individuals.
Now, I hope that the foregoing will suggest that not only "socialists/
communists" (two wildly different concepts, by the way) believe that
"society itself is a thing independent of the people that make up society."
Classic PCT leads one to that view as well, from a point of view that
concentrates on the individual. So the "Thus" in "Thus they approach
the problem from a point of view that totally ignores the individual"
is a total non-sequitur.
Society as artifact is as worthy of study as is the artifact, language.
PCT explains how the artifact is created and (quasi)stabilized. It isn't
stable in the sense a control system is stable against disturbance, but
it is stable in the sense that a ball on a surface of hills and valleys
is stable against moderate shaking of the surface. The ball can lie
for a long time in or near one place, but then it can move rapidly to another
"stable" place. So with society. Mores change. Some principles probably
are required for a society to be stable (I suspect a "do not kill" principle
to be one). Some go together with others to form a coherent group, but
could be changed for others--we have only to look at the different sets of
conversational customs to see that. And yet others are malleable. We
pick them up because our friendship group uses them, but as fads they
come and go (ever hear of "beanies" now?).
So, we come back to the first passage I quoted:
Given just the idea that a human being able to control well is a
fundamental good, then possible an entire structure of ethics and
morality could be constructed using PCT principles to guide decisions in
the "building".
Yes, probably so. And many of them, any of which could serve a stable
society, but which would be incompatible with other such sets. Conflicts
would arise when people using different conventions interacted. Would
a fundamentalist Christian be happy being required to worship Aphrodite
and participate in a Bacchanale, or would there be some perceptual error
in either or both of the Christian and the Christian's hosts?
It might well be possible to use some vastly expanded version of Bill Powers'
CROWD program with reorganization, on some supercomputer, to see what
kinds of stably interacting kinds of structures developed. That would
be a very interesting exercise, some day.
Martin