[From Bruce Nevin (2006.11.08.21:19 EST)]
Fred Nickols (2006.11.08.0942 EST) --
What controls the reference condition? In the hierarchical
arrangement, my understanding is that higher-levels supply
reference signals to lower-levels and that, at the highest
level, reference signals are intrinsic. In that scheme,
everything is more or less built-in. But I can set goals,
can't I?
Aren't those reference signals? Or, are my goals simply
articulations of lower-level reference signals that owe to
some kind of discrepancy in some intrinsic reference signal?
For example, did my goal of becoming a consultant reflect
some built-in desire/goal/want/need/reference condition
and if so, what might it have been?
You're trying to find a connection between what you verbalize as your
goals and the working of the perceptual control hierarchy.
You know that we do not perceive our reference signals as such. So what
are these things that we verbalize as our goals?
One source of confusion at the levels at which you are talking about
"goals" is that what we say our goals are is always subject to post-hoc
rationalization. Another is that words make tidy patterns of their own
and sometimes we think the map is the territory.
David, Bryan, Dick, and others have investigated control of who we think
we are. Projected through memory and imagination we perceive our present
circumstances as the current moment within a progression or career of
personal history and expectations.
We often can "motivate" ourselves from these autobiographical
reflections, but if my experience and observations are any guide at
least as often our actual controlling is at variance from them and we
are unperturbed at the discrepancies.
Since for a true account of your reference perceptions at this level you
cannot rely upon the stories that you tell yourself about who you are
and what you want, the only sure way to infer your own reference
perceptions is essentially in the same way that you deduce those of
another: the Test to identify and verify controlled variables. It's not
quite that what you have must be what you wanted, your circumstances are
a product of what you are controlling plus the influences of
disturbances that you don't care (enough) to resist or have not found
means to resist. The disturbances that you do not resist can sometimes
be more informative than those that you do.
I don't know if this is helpful, but maybe it indicates some reasons why
lower levels of the hierarchy are easier to investigate, and talk of
"goals" in the management or motivational sense must proceed with great
circumspection.
/BN