Boris has ‘triggered’ a number of people. Despite repeated requests to be civil, he persists with ad hominem insults and outright threats, so when he said ‘goodbye’ I suspended his account indefinitely. My action will be reviewed by the IAPCT Board of Directors. He will probably rejoin under a different name. We will deal with that if and when it occurs.
I don’t like being in this role. As more of us participate in collective control of civility and comity here, no individual will have a ‘police’ role imposed on him or her.
Yes, the trial-and-error learning process by which we refine our perceptual input functions, our reference values for them, and our output functions for controlling those inputs.
There are at least three such circular feedback processes at different time scales: the control loop; the slower learning loop of adjustment and reorganization during the development and maturation of the individual, trying alternative ways of controlling and retaining those that work; and across generations the evolutionary process in which those individuals that control most competently are most likely to bring offspring to maturity, which is the definition of ‘survival of the fittest’. I wanted to make sure that you meant the second of these and not the first.
MOL is a clinical application of the psychological theory that is based on PCT.
Re tunnel vision in neuroscience: I think they’re still stuck in the computer analogy of the brain. If the hippocampus is associated with X then it’s analogous to the X-chip on a computer’s circuit board, so just as we might reverse-engineer a chip made by some foreign manufacturer, let’s reverse-engineer the hippocampus. Trouble is, the hippocampus (or whatever functionally and anatomically identified part of the brain) has diverse connections and the functions are not so entirely compartmentalized.
Rick has answered the ‘throw it all away’ question in respect to experimental psychology. There are also problems with schools of clinical psychology insofar as they try to change objectionable behavior, rather than letting that be a consequence of the client controlling better.
There are also organically based pathologies, which I don’t think MOL addresses well. For example, differences in the size and connectivity amygdala account for risk tolerance (see here and here). This can also result in lack of empathy or compunction in psychopaths. If MOL helps the daredevil be unconflicted about risking her family’s resources, or helps the psychopath to control better, is that a good thing?
The growing edge of PCT psychology (from a clinical perspective) is in understanding collective control. That’s what determines what behavior is OK and what behavior is objectionable, often resulting in the internal conflict that MOL addresses.
You may appreciate Kent McClelland’s chapter in the Handbook.
I repeat what I said before: