[From Bill Powers (990818 MDT)]
Kenny Kitzke (990817.2220 EDT)--
My speculation is about a higher level system that sets the reference
perceptions for the system levels in humans rather than a "reorganization"
system. Riding a bike would seem to be at the lower sensual and mental
levels of reference perceptions.
Let's ask the basic questions about your ideas: If what you say is true,
and if HPCT is the correct model, what is implied, and what should we observe?
If there is a higher-level system that sets system reference signals, what
sets the reference signals for that higher-level system? And when you
answer that question, I can ask it again about the answer you give.
Eventually we will get to the highest level, and my understanding of your
proposal is that God sets the reference signals at that level.
It seems to me that if God is setting the highest reference signals,
whatever they are, our worries are over. Everyone will be at peace, or at
least will be aspiring to the goals God has set; there will be no crime, no
sadness, no envy, no disorganization, no ignorance -- unless God wills that
such things should exist. In fact, if what you say is true, we should
observe a world of people acting exactly as God wills that they should act.
What I am writing to you now is the outcome of my spiritual level operating
through my system level and so on down to the level of typing, with God
manipulating the spiritual reference levels (and of course any other levels
He or She chooses to manipulate). So these are the words of God you are
reading. And so are yours, Rick's, and so on. What any of us says,
therefore, should always be infallible, unless it is God's will that we
make mistakes.
If God is in charge of the highest reference signals, then we should not
observe human wills to have any effect at the level where God chooses to
set the goals. Our degree and quality of spirituality is not up to us; it
is determined by God (this has been called Grace). This relieves us of any
reponsibility for being either more or less spiritual than we are.
Given that God sets the highest reference signals, the settings of lower
reference signals will reflect both God's choice and disturbances of the
perceptions in the hierarchy being compared with those reference signals.
However, if God created the physical universe as well as the details of our
bodies, He knows what the disturbances will be at every level, and so He
knows how the next-to-highest goals will be set, and so on down to the
lowest level. Even if there is a randomly-operating reorganizing system,
God in His omiscience knows how every intrinsic error will end up altering
the hierarchy of control systems, and so he knows how our organizations
will develop from conception to death.
It has been said that God has granted us free will so that we can freely
choose between right and wrong. This appears to contradict the idea that
God sets the highest reference levels. At the lower levels, it's perfectly
clear that we are not free to choose goals that violate our own goals at
the next level up. For example, if we have decided to drive a car from
Chicago to Denver during the next two days, we are no longer free to choose
which way to turn at each intersection we encounter. If we had no
destination in mind, or no time-limit, we could freely choose to turn left,
right, or not at all at each place where there is a choice. Eventually we
would get to every place a car could go. But once we have chosen a
higher-level goal, a destination, and once we have chosen time constraints,
the lower-level choices are no longer free. They are forced by the
higher-level goal. Our free will at any given level is superseded by our
reference signals we have "freely" set at the next level up.
I presume that this situation holds at each level. This means that at the
next-to-highest level, our apparently free choice of goals is superseded by
the requirements of the goals set at the highest level, which by your
proposal are set by God rather than by our own free will.
This leaves no place for willing freely, in the sense of arbitrarily or
capriciously, at least if both your proposal and HPCT are correct. So we
have to conclude that what we see people doing on this Earth, both for good
and for evil, is the will of God, and is not freely chosen. It appears that
God is the one who chooses that evil and misery exist.
There is, of course, a ready-made answer to these problems: Satan. Satan is
described as having powers allowing him to interfere with the will of God,
and set his own choices of reference signals in our hierarchies, to make us
seek goals other than the highest goals set by God. So if we are to do the
Will of God, somehow we must distinguish between the goals set in us by
Satan and the goals set by God.
Making that distinction would imply that we have a viewpoint from which to
see both God's goals and Satan's -- in other words, a level of perception
at still a higher level. But if such a level existed, it would by
definition be the highest level, and God and possibly Satan would be
setting the reference signals there. So we must conclude that God and
possibly Satan set goals that are known to us only as what seem the right
or wrong kinds of systems to establish and maintain. We have no way to know
_a priori_ whether a given "spiritual aspiration" was put into us by God or
by Satan. In fact, we can't even trust any of the earthly advisers who
claim to know the Will of God -- we have only their word that they are not
working for the Great Deceiver. Neither can we trust the "still small
voice" of conscience, because Satan, too, can influence that voice.
In truth, there seems to be little we can do but stand by and wait for God
and Satan to battle it out to a conclusion.
Clearly, the implications of your proposal in relation to HPCT are many and
complex, and it is not at all clear how the questions and apparent
contradictions could be handled. As far as human experience is concerned,
there is really little to choose among the propositions that our highest
goals are set by reorganization, evolution, God, or Satan. Whichever is the
case, we have no conscious way of altering them on purpose. It's not easy
to know exactly what our highest goals are, or even to talk about them,
since they are several levels above the levels where language operates. Our
experience of them seems to consist mainly of a sense that some high-level
perceptions are good, to be sought, and some are bad, to be avoided.
In fact, this would seem to be one of the main phenomena that religions and
other theoretical concepts are intended to explain. Where do these concepts
of right and wrong come from? What are our purposes in life? What does an
individual life amount to, that it is worth living despite all the pain it
can bring? Why do we care about science, logic, truth, beauty, or love?
Basically, why are some things experienced as good and other things as bad?
HPCT offers a theory to answer such questions in a way different from
religious explanations (which also can differ from each other quite
radically). It doesn't use concepts like God or Satan. It assumes that all
actual phenomena are natural, not supernatural and thus contradictory to
all knowledge. One of its virtues, as I see it, is in the questions it does
not purport to answer. Instead of compulsively having to give an answer to
every question, we who are using HPCT can recognize that we aren't prepared
sufficiently to answer some questions, such as the nature of consciousness,
and that we must first work on questions we have some hope of answering.
Best,
Bill P.
