[From Bill Powers (930819.1900 MDT)]
Hal Pepinsky (930819)--
A word on mechanics. I got three complete replays of what I wrote
to you, and two replays of what others wrote. When I reply to
you, I send to CSGnet and Gary Cziko (I presume) relays a copy to
you because you're not a subscriber. So everyone on this list has
already seen what I said. You've apparently been sending your
comments to another list, and also TWICE to CSGnet. If you just
send to listserv@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu, everyone on CSGnet, including
me, gets a copy. I mention this because my last mailboxfull had
about 100K in it, about 2/3 redundant, which gets to be a little
much to handle. That was the afternoon mail.
ยทยทยท
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Bill, you may not know me well enough to know how I feel about
this, but I assume everyone's perception/action is at root a
religious practice.
And I have a hunch that at the top level it's concerned with the
maintenance of "system concepts." Maybe we mean the same thing.
... you call yours a theory, you derive propositions from it,
and among those which seems to me in fact to be a
straightforward deduction from your theoretical premises is
rejection of hierarchy or law'n'order.
I don't reject things so much as try to show what's wrong with
them in terms of a consistent theory of human nature.
Either Rick's
propositions about law'n'order and Gary's about the necessity
of leadership are false, or your theory is false it seems to
me. I'm just asking y'all which it is. You not only MAY argue
about it; I think you are obliged to argue it on your own
"scientific" grounds. The validity of your theory hangs on the
result, does it not?
Well, I'm not obliged to argue anything I don't choose to argue,
am I? Anyway, control theory doesn't rest on certain conclusions
that I may draw from it matching anyone else's. I consider Rick's
and Gary's views as being possible conclusions, but nobody has
worked out the "true" meaning of control theory in these abstract
and poorly-defined realms yet, so the verdict isn't in. There's a
lot more groundwork to be laid before we will even know how to
talk about the higher levels of organization in a sensible way. I
don't mind speculating and offering guesses, but there's nothing
about my guessery that's better than anyone else's.
"Control" is a slippery term. I want to pin you down on what
you mean by it. I'm indebted to phenomenologist Alfred
Schuetz's writing for making me aware that "control" can be of
two kinds in the mind of any beholder: what Schuetz calls a
"because motive"--I perceive I have no viable option--or an
"in-order-to motive"--I'm trying to get something because I
want it.
Schuetz isn't talking about two kinds of control, but about two
circumstances under which control might occur. He isn't talking
about what control IS.
PCT (not PST, by the way -- "perceptual control theory") is
largely about saying what control is. Control in the world of
organisms is a process in which a system acts on an environment,
altering the environment and thus altering certain perceptions of
it, the result being that the perception is brought to and
maintained at some specified condition, a condition specified
inside the behaving system and not outside it. That definition
would apply in either case mentioned by Schuetz.
Your claim to have revolutionized perception research, as I
understand it, rests on positing that the perceiver RATHER THAN
external circumstances controls perceptions.
My claim isn't to have revolutionized perception research. It's
to have revolutionized our conception of what behavior is and how
it works. You give me too much credit for modesty.
I infer you must
mean my perceptions are governed by what I want, a means to the
ends of my own choosing, rather than my simply perceiving what
externalities tell me I have to perceive.
The word "perception" has to be put into the context of the whole
theory before you and I can be sure we're talking about the same
thing.
A perception, in PCT, is nothing more nor less than a neural
signal in the brain that is a function of what is going on in the
environment outside the nervous system. The aspect of the
environment represented by the signal depends on perceptual
functions -- neural computers, if you like -- that receive
signals from closer to the periphery and generate new signals
that are complex functions of the incoming signals. Awareness and
consciousness are an entirely different subject, bringing in a
phenomenon that nobody even begins to understand. Perceptual
signals can exist, and function as parts of active control
systems, with or without consciousness. That's why you can walk
while your mind is on something else.
Changing a perception can be done in two ways. The "ordinary" way
is to alter something in the environment, by acting on it. This
causes all perceptual signals that depend on the altered aspect
of the environment (or body) to change their magnitudes. The
perception of the distance between your hand and a glass of water
can be changed by using your arm muscles to move your hand's
position, a simple control process, or by asking someone sitting
across from you to push the glass closer to your hand, a much
more complex (and less reliable) control process. In either case,
the perception of hand-to-glass distance is changed. It isn't
changed into a different kind of perception; it's changed only in
magnitude, without changing its identity.
The other way to alter a perception is to reorganize. When a
perception is reorganized, the functions that derive it are
changed, so the same inputs yield a different amount of
perceptual signal, and so the same perceptual signal comes to
represent a different variable aspect of the environment. This is
how we come to see an environment in the first place; how
sensations, objects, motion, events, relationships, categories,
sequences, logical programs, general principles, and system
concepts come into being. Reorganization is a much slower process
than ordinary control of perception which does not alter the
nature of our perceptual functions.
Overt behavior is concerned with the "ordinary" kind of control
of perception. The ordinary kind of perceptual control is
interpreted by most people as being control of a real objective
environment, the one Out There. The evidence is compelling,
however, that everything we experience of that world has to get
into the brain via sensory receptors; there is no other way. The
brain can't literally control the world Out There; it can control
only what it knows of that world in the form of perceptual
signals. Saying that behavior is the control of perception is, to
those who have learned the theory in detail, simply a reminder
that all we know of anything is in the form of perceptual signals
in the brain. Subjectively, we control the world that we
experience, in the regards that matter to us the most.
What we "want" is simply a specification for what we want to
perceive. The PCT model embodies wants as real neural signals,
set to specific magnitudes and entering comparators which also
receive perceptual signals (one reference signal and comparator
for each controllable perception, one perception for each
controllable attribute of the experienced world). One possibility
is that wants -- reference signals -- are selected from memories
of past values of perceptual signals. While sensory experience
doesn't tell us what to want, it might determine what we _can_
want.
The power to decide what I want cannot be taken from me, and
hence, as I have so often cited E.F. Schumacher as saying,
"Individual behavior is in principle unpredictable."
Deciding what to want is the business of higher levels of
control, for they choose the reference signals, the wants, for
lower-level systems. There are many levels of wanting, from
wanting an itch to go away to wanting a PhD. If you can get a
person to hold a want constant for a while, predicting the
actions of that person becomes relatively easy, because the
actions will oppose any environmental disturbance that tends to
make perceptions deviate from their desired values.
But predicting behavior, as action, is not what PCT is about.
Actions change with every disturbance. We want to know under PCT
what perceptions a person is controlling for (whether poorly or
expertly). If we know the kind of perception, and the particular
state of that perception that a person wants, we can predict
actions pretty well. The actions will oppose the effects of
disturbances on the perceptions that are under control.
I have long since given up trying to separate reality from
hallucination (inspired by countless others who have done so
before me).
Under PCT there isn't much difference. A hallucination is an
imagined perception low in the hierarchy of control, at the level
of sensations. Imagination in general is the self-generation of
perceptual signals at some level. Non-imagined perceptions come
from sensory endings instead of being internally generated, but
once they exist there's no difference. The main difference is in
controllability. A "real" perception is one that you can change
only by acting on the world (or your body's physical relationship
to the world). You have to learn by trial and error what you must
do to control a "real" perception, and in general you must act if
you want real perceptions to remain in any particular state --
the environment is always full of disturbances. An imagined
perception can be controlled simply by wanting it to be in a
different state; no action is required, and no independent
disturbances occur. Many perceptions are uncontrollable, so it's
hard to tell whether they came from outside or from inside (e.g.,
from the effects of LSD on the nervous system). But if you can
control a perception, it's pretty easy to tell whether you made
it occur yourself or something else did. In general, all
perceptions contain a mix of sensed-based and imagination-based
information: you imagine, for instance, that the pressure you
feel from your butt as you read is coming from something that
looks like a chair. You'd have to get out of the chair, turn
around, and look to check the accuracy of what you imagine. And
even then, you'd only be seeing one side of the chair.
After decades of debates, I also find no objective way to
separate doing what one has to (e.g., serving one's gods), and
doing what one will. All I can see possible to assess is what
we get get for responding to one another one way rather than
the other.
Debates without some kind of theory to give them coherence seldom
settle anything. But your solution makes good sense in PCT terms.
What you get is, of course, what you perceive yourself getting as
a result of acting one way rather than another. Once you decide
what it is you want to get -- perceive -- it's the world and your
own lower levels of organization that determine what you must do
to get it. And in general, you'd have to do some internal
exploring to find out WHY you want it -- what higher-level want
is involved. If what you want is to stand up, you don't have much
choice but to want to push down with your feet.
I said:
[If I succeed in turning your anger into happiness,]...I will
still want you happy, but because I am now in fact seeing you
as happy there will be nothing further to do.
You said:
I'm reminded of what I imagine to be a universal feeling by a
tired parent: Now that I've catered to my child and quieted
her, please let her sleep and leave me in peace when I walk out
of the room!
You missed my point. If you keep up the action that brings a
controlled variable to its reference level, the action will start
to cause instead of correct errors. I continued by pointing out
that if I persist in wanting you to look happy, I will in effect
make myself your slave, taking on the obligation of preventing
anything that might make you unhappy. That was the price of
controlling others (even for the "good") to which I referred.
To me, happiness in the form of social security is ACTION--a
world of action, of attention. You can expect neither trust
nor happiness (Marilyn French calls it "felicity"; native
people speak of "joy") to continue unless you continue to
nurture it.
As I said, once you take on the responsibility for other people's
state of mind, you can't relax. I think it's more practical to
attend to your own serenity, of course avoiding doing what will
impede the path of others toward serenity. You can give nice
names to controlling other people, but it's still controlling
other people. I think that most of them would rather do it
themselves if they knew how.
As some parents learn to their sorrow, leaving a child alone is
asking for trouble. That may be solipsistic freedom, but home
it ain't. The science of peacemaking I again join a host of
ancestors in proposing is one of studying how happiness is
obtained AND SUSTAINED.
A child needs lots of things because the child is still
reorganizing rapidly and doesn't know how to do much. But part of
raising children is knowing how and when to withdraw the
supports. If you keep on helping too long, the child will let you
know that it's time to let go. And if you don't let that happen,
you will end up with a large child instead of an adult.
I don't like the word happiness because the way most people
define it it can't possibly be sustained. Like you, I'm only
interested in steady-state solutions. The pursuit of happiness
can easily become an obsession. More to the point, I think, is to
find a state in which everything's working right, with no inner
or outer conflicts. The state you experience when that's
momentarily true isn't an emotion; it's a state of being that is
extraordinarily right. I don't think that the Buddha was talking
about an emotion of happiness when he spoke of enlightenment. It
was something more important than that. Not that he didn't enjoy
a belly-laugh occasionally. But not continuously.
I suppose instead that persistent drive toward any goal is
violence itself, which we variously describe (or feel crazy or
fearful of acknowledging) as behaviors we think represent it--
like trying to get someone's purse or into their body whatever
it takes.
But according to PCT, behavior itself is the process of goal-
achievement. The problem here is that you are thinking of a goal
as something distant, difficult to achieve, consistently beyond
reach. I'll agree that that situation leads to pathology,
regardless of what has been said about "a man's reach should
exceed his grasp." That's just poor selection of goals. Wiser
heads have pointed out that goals should be selected so as to be
reachable immediately: instead of worrying all the time about
getting your degree years in the future, make your goal that of
learning all you can every day. That's a goal you can achieve
right now and keep on achieving until the day they surprise you
with the degree. Degree-getting uses up about 30 seconds. The
journey is more important than the destination, and a lot more
interesting.
An unreachable goal means that your perceptions are always far
from the reference level, so that whatever control process is
going on is operating continuously under conditions of extreme
error. This is one of the conditions that, according to PCT,
leads not to systematic control but to reorganization.
Reorganization, driven too hard, becomes disorganization and
chaos.
But even without reorganization, large errors lead to large
outputs, and as I pointed out last time, the upper range of
output is what we know as violence. So I agree with you, but only
because you're talking about pathological goal-seeking, not
normal goal-seeking which never permits errors to get very large.
Even when you get it, your anxiety remains, in the existential
forms described by Max Weber for instance as Calvinist belief
in predestination or by Emile Durkheim as anomie--getting all
the goodies you ever dreamed of getting and having nothing left
to live for (much like the child who is left alone by
infinitely tolerant parents).
This shows only that stimulus-response theory and maximization
theory are wrong. People don't ordinarily seek all they can get
of ANYTHING -- even orgasms in oversupply become tiresome and
painful. Of course many people have the false impression that
goals are open-ended. But that's just a misapprehension about how
people work. 300 meals a day are not better than 3. Athletes know
better, or learn better, than to set a goal of running 50 miles
per hour. A pound of salt on your french-fries is worse than a
pinch.
Goal-seeking is almost always aimed at a specific state of
perception, not a maximum state. And one must remember that goals
are not all static: a person can have a goal of learning
something new every day, a goal which can be achieved but not
achieved once and for all. Many goals are dynamic; maintaining
them requires continuous action, and often continuously-changing
action. Anomie of the kind Durkheim spoke of results from having
your theory of life disproved. This doesn't mean you can't get a
better one.
If you gave up control of everything, you would collapse into a
limp mass of flesh. All behavior, of any kind, is control.
...happy relations, joy in living require that one suspend
one's fear that life is meaningless without accomplishing
goals, and to surrender oneself to trusting one's destiny to
the decisions of others without predetermining what one is
after.
Balderdash. That's my decision for you. Abandon your goal of joy
in living, and let me make the decisions for you. Trust your
destiny to me, pal. That way you won't ever have to do any hard
thinking ever again. I'll do it all for you.
You may think of what you're proposing as going with the flow,
but to others it sounds like being up Shit Creek without a
paddle. Like being in Nazi Germany and waving bye-bye to your
Jewish neighbors because that's what has been decided for you. I
don't buy it. You can't even eat breakfast without using hundreds
of control systems at a dozen levels, all madly seeking goals,
and achieving them, hundreds of times per second, inside you and
nobody else. Whatever it is that you find objectionable about
goal-seeking, it doesn't have much to do with PCT.
Letting go of one's attachments is one way it is commonly put.
In fact, Bill, you speak much this way in your last chapter
about how to live with PCT: seize the moment and let yourself
listen and be guided by it.
Whenever I think I hear "the moment" talking, it always turns out
to be me. Letting go of attachments means ceasing to be stuck at
one level of control. When you see how your goals are put
together, many of them turn out to be simply optional means
toward more important ones. The most important ones, I agree, are
given, not invented: they define what it is to be human in the
world. You just accept them: pain hurts, pleasure feels good. But
thinking feels good, too, and so do order and beauty and
invention. A theory that brings a lot of experience into a single
coherent frameworks feels terrific, except where you find things
wrong with it, in which case fixing what's wrong feels great,
too. At least to them as finds pleasure in such things.
I only think that now, with Rick and Gary pushing PCT in a
different direction, you belie your own propositions, and fail
to acknowledge that the "conflict-free" world you extrapolate
from your theory has a distinct character of its own.
Conflict comes from trying to control other people, or things
that matter a lot to other people. You see Rick, Gary, and I as
pushing PCT in different directions because you don't grasp the
vast underlying agreement that comes from understanding the
principles of PCT all the way from fundamentals on up.
Disagreement becomes conflict only when you try to force the
other person to adopt your view. I have no desire to make Rick or
Gary agree with me. They respect my views, and that's enough for
me. I don't have any arguments that would compel them to change
their minds; maybe I'm the one who will end up with a changed
opinion. That's OK with me; it's more important to me that the
whole picture hang together than it is to see it come out to fit
my half-thought-out wishes. That's part of non-attachment, come
to think of it. I don't have any strong wishes for how the story
should come out.
Where the goal is maintaining the security of one's social
relations, it pays to worship no other goals before it.
Well, that tells me what one of your high-level goals is. I have
other ones that seem more important to me. Not that I don't like
to have nice social relations; they're very satisfying. But there
are other things that are equally satisfying, to me. Maybe not to
you.
As to using violence because that's the only way I can make the
violence stop, I do it myself, find myself reluctant to pass
judgment on others who do as against trying to understand why
they do it (as you do, Bill), and conclude the geometry book
with an admission that I don't expect to resolve the problem
for myself or anyone else.
So we're not very far apart. I don't think you kid yourself that
using violence ever makes the violence stop (except for the
moment), and neither do I. In fact, I'm quite nonviolent in
actions, although when I sit watching some news broadcasts you
might never know that. I do think that the problem can be
resolved, eventually, through teaching people how they work, so
they will understand what violence is, and why it would be better
for them to avoid it practically all the time (I wouldn't want to
forbid anyone to play football). I don't expect this resolution
to come soon, as it entails such things as convincing economic
planners and sdhigh-school coaches that competition is a slow
form of suicide.
Why bother learning how people attain security (yes Bill, by
degrees or moments to be sure)? Because like any seeker of
knowledge I assume my power to get what I want increases the
more I learn about how to get there. One irony in peacemaking
is that you can best plan how to get there by not-planning
where to be when you arrive.
All right, I will buy that. Just be sure you set goals that can
be attained immediately, and sustained. That's what control is
all about.
Bill P.