[From Bill Powers (2002.06.20.1129 MDT)]
Bruce Abbott remarked that if all the theoretical points in B:CP had had to
be verified experimentally , it would have been a pretty thin book. I
browsed through it a bit just to see how much thinner it would have been,
and while doing so realized something that was going on that I never
actually talked about -- I just did it.
Starting with chapter 7, a large part of the book is concerned with the
types of perceptions that we control. As I skimmed through some of these
chapters, I realized that the main unspoken point that is made over and
over is not that the control model is the right model, but that all these
different aspects of experience to which I refer ARE PERCEPTIONS that have
to find a home, somewhere, in the model. I can see now how easy it would be
for a confirmed realist to miss this point completely -- in fact I've never
seen a review or citation that recognized it. It would be very easy to read
these chapters as if the perceptions being mentioned were simply aspects of
reality, and I was proposing that the brain perceives them and uses them in
controlling things.
I recommend scanning the middle part of the book with this in mind. Just
about every page is brimming with examples of aspects of experience being
referred to as perceptions rather than as objective features of reality.
What I'm doing over and over is raising the subject of how such-and-such a
thing, like a musical chord, is brought into existence by the operation of
the brain's perceptual functions. I am taking the entire world as evidence,
direct and irrefutible evidence, about the nature and content of human
perception. While proposing levels of perception, I am also pointing to
multitudinous examples of such perceptions -- which of course some people
will simply think are aspects of the environment.
It seems to me that _every other theory of behavior_ divides the totality
of human experience into two kinds: the kinds that arise from
interpretations and preferences and opinions and habits and so forth, and
are clearly part of the internal operation of the brain, and the kinds that
are simply reports on the state of the objective world outside us. In such
theories one can talk about the causal influence of A on B as if it existed
independently and the observer simply noticed it. The idea that this
self-evident and obvious relationship is an interpretation by someone's
brain would simply never arise: the observer is not what is being
discussed, but only the observed. The fact that it takes a brain to make an
observation is not even within the universe of discourse in other theories
of behavior.
By the time I got down to the final draft of B:CP, it no longer occurred to
me that any aspect of experience, whether concrete or abstract, was
anything other than a perception in my own brain. I spoke of _appearances_,
how things _seem_ to us human beings, and I was trying to remind other
brains of all the kinds of experience that we had to consider in making a
model of how a brain works. Nothing was exempt, nothing at all. Anything I
could catch myself noticing, doing, or thinking was grist for the mill. An
example would be this paragraph, in which there are letter- and
word-configurations with terms referring to transitions, events,
relationships, categories, and sequences, all being set forth in a
sequential pattern that conveys certain logical propositions that pertain
to principles within the whole system-concept of control theory. At the
moment I'm the only one experiencing this paragraph, but I'm trying to
imagine how others will read it, how some terms could be misread or
misinterpreted, and what meanings other than those I intend could be
extracted from it. I just went back and inserted "terms referring to", so
as not to imply that the paragraph contains the actual transitions etc. to
which I allude. And I even spent a few leisurely seconds appreciating what
a nice, exact word "allude" is -- as I think of it.
Actually,. B:CP would not have been much thinner if evidence were required
for all the statements in it. I consider that the bulk of the book consists
of evidence, evidence derived from simple ordinary experiences we all
share, or from observations by scientists reporting what they have found in
the laboratory. And the evidence is recursive, for the mere fact that I
cite a given piece of evidence shows that I expect the reader to recognize
what I'm talking about, and to realize that if recognition does take place,
it is yet another example of the reader's own perceptions that I am
describing.
Of course that realization would depend on the reader's catching on to the
fact that the discussion and his own recognition of what is being discussed
-- like a musical chord -- is direct evidence that the reader, too, has
perceptual functions of the appropriate type. Practically every page in the
book is overflowing with such informal little perceptual experiments. If I
had left them out, the book would have been slim indeed -- as well as
totally unbelievable.
Best,
Bill P.