[From Philip 8.20.14 @ 20:01]
Jesus Christ, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Stop fighting and let’s get to the heart of this.
What is the purpose here? Are we trying to establish exactly “why PCT is necessary”? Is this a quarrel over whether a tracking task or an observation of decay in living organisms establishes the necessity of PCT? I don’t even know. But you guys REALLY seem to be having a blast with this. When I look at these conversations, I truly believe PCT is in a state of crisis. There is only one way to put an end to this.
We all need to answer the following question: what is the most serious threat to PCT? We all know in our heart of hearts that PCT is accurate and true (meaning that: when we came across PCT, we felt intuitively that we knew something which we never knew before). We are absolutely certain that Bill Powers was a good man and that his ideas were powerful. But Bill Powers had died before he had ever seen PCT blossom into fruition. And PCT has still not blossomed. And PCT will not blossom at this rate. We’ve been seeing the same exact sentences describing the meaning of control for decades now.
The meaning of control is basically what Rick said earlier, and earlier before as well, and even earlier than that as well too:
Control is the general phenomenon of maintaining perceived aspects of the environment in goal states, protected from anything that would tend to move this perception from the goal state. AND SO, when we see that behaving organisms do this, we need a control theory to explain this fact.
Very good. We know that PCT explains every observation we have. And it does so WITHOUT exception. Thus, unlike most scientific theories, PCT is essentially immune to falsification. One might even dare to say that it’s on par with quantum mechanics itself. For anybody who thinks that quantum mechanics is one day going to be replaced, let’s just realize that there has never been a single experimental observation EVER which has gone against quantum mechanics. Now, what’s the difference between quantum mechanics and PCT? Why has QM - a theory which has absolutely NO(!!!) intuitive appeal - become a household name, whereas PCT is relegated to obscurity?
I know a tiny bit about the history of science. From what I understand, quantum mechanics was necessitated from a large repertoire of scientific observations. Many of these observations were “accidentally” noticed - meaning that they were unexpected coincidences which just happened to be noticed (although, they NEED NOT have been noticed - as they weren’t specifically the phenomena under scientific investigation). Just picture a namely scientist noticing interesting patterns which he has absolutely no expectation of and making note of them, just for the sake of writing down EVERYTHING he sees. After a while some of the same patterns were noticed by different scientists and then the importance of these coincident observations superceeded the importance of the phenomena originally under investigation. The thing which made these observations so important was that they could not be explained by current theories - in most cases, AT ALL. There was literally no way (even in schizophrenic imagination mode) to describe why these observations would result. For instance, the existence of spectral lines for elements. The concept of quantization needed to be born; thus quantum mechanics was conceived.
Now, Bill invented PCT in an entirely different atmosphere. He conceived the notion “in singularity”, while in the meanwhile, nobody was asking him to do it. Regarding the questions which Bill found answers to…scientists had already managed to find ways of conceptualizing these phenomoena. I’m sorry, but Bill was “too late” - he clearly missed the imaginary opportunity to have arrived on scene BEFORE behaviourism established itself. By the time Bill made his presence known, nobody needed Bill; only Bill needed Bill. Bill needed Bill to answer Bill’s questions.
Now, the reason I asked, “what is the most serious threat to PCT?”, is specifically because PCT is actually the most serious threat to all, and we know this. Nothing destroys PCT; PCT destroys all - theoretically speaking. Let’s not bullshit around and pretend to be skeptics here - Bill didn’t leave enough room for anything to fit inside his margin of error. I have read 40 years of his writings and they are remarkable. Bill exudes mathematical and scientific brilliance. If Bill had studied quantum mechanics with a PCT intellect, he would have invented indescribable things. But Bill didn’t get around to this because he engaged himself in a war with the world. The motherworld, in fact, of behavioral psychology. The Earth.
But there are worlds beyond earth, and where there is intelligent life on these worlds, there is perceptual control. And where there is intelligence, there is mathematics. Math is an interesting thing. How do you describe it? Pure math - the stuff Euclid and Euler and Reimann and Wyles and many contemporaries are effortfully drudging along with - this stuff has no applications. Mathematicians actually boast the fact that their work is “pure” math, with no “applied” aspect. So what good is this math? It’s good math, of course, but what good is it?
What is math anyway? I’m trying to figure it out. So you have classes, you have names for these classes, you have members of these classes, and you have maps to and from the members of these classes. These maps are choices - choices of assignment. We create these maps between members of classes. And class members need to have certain “parameters” to belong to the classes to which they belong - each member of a class must match a defined “reference” parameter in order to belong. And that’s basically the logic aspect of math, logic being the tool with which we define and compare things in math. Now, on top of this stuff about members and classes, you have “representations”. I mentioned the concept of the “map-territory” relation, as if it was about a geographic map, but the concept actually stems from numerology. Representation theory is the concept which birthed the concept of quarks, as quarks were seen to “be” (I must figure out the proper way to phrase this) representations of geometric symmetry classes. I’ve been studying representation theory, along with nuclear chemistry, relativistic optics and electrodynamics, etc. There needs to be a link between quantization and PCT and I think I can find it. It’s going to take me a little time to move through all the material, but somebody’s gotta do it. I only ask that you guys stop fighting with each other over nothing you’ve invented yourselves, and to extend very very deeply into fields of study you have never dared to infiltrate. In my opinion, PCT is not about reinterpreting ECT, but about cutting to the chase - controlling our orientation with respect to the stars.
Rick and Martin (because it’s mainly you two), I promise not to post anything stupid or snobby if you don’t either (we all know I’m the master of the snobby post anyway). Please answer my earlier questions at your own convenience.
I’ll be showing you the progress of my work in math as it becomes available. To let you in on a little secret, I’ve discovered a disturbingly important phenomenon of numerology. As I said, I’ve been after the Reimann zeta function…those damn primes.
Best Regards,
Phil
···
On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 5:00 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:
[From Rick Marken (2014.08.20.1700)]
Martin Taylor (2014.08.20.17.47)–
MT: Did you notice the word “isolated”?
RM: Yes. And apparently I got your point of view basically correct since you say in your last post: “:what decreases the entropy of a living thing is simply the fact that a controlled variable IS controlled”. So you are saying that living systems do decrease their entropy and this decreased entropy indicates that they are control systems. Since the the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy never decreases in an isolated system (such as an organism) you are also saying that organisms violate the second law of thermodynamics. And this violation of the second law shows that organisms do control and that, therefore, PCT is necessary. Why were you saying that I got it wrong? Don’t you like your own explanation anymore?
MT: As for the rest of it, there's no way I know of to help those who do
not wish to be helped, so I leave it at that.
RM: Well, I still would like to know how your thermodynamic point of view shows that control is involved in a simple tracking task. But I imagine that you can’t do that and that that is why you are attributing to me a desire to not be “helped”. Nice.
Best
Rick
–
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
Author of Doing Research on Purpose.
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble
RM: I guess I took thermodynamic instability to
refer to the second law of thermodynamics, which says
that the entropy of an isolated system never
decreases.