Where Rick's Chapter 7 on "Social Control" goes off track

[bnhpct]

Yes, I think we all have a high degree of faith that our perceptions are truthful. You once expressed your faith with this excellent credo:

Rick Marken (2004.07.16.1130)

@Richard_Marken2

experimentation shows that there are consistent constraints on our ability
to produce intended perceptions and modeling shows that these constraints
are external to ourselves and, thus, represent a reality independent of
ourselves.

So that’s the rock (the one that Sam Johnson kicked), but this is the hard place: your only source of knowledge is your perceptions. We understand two senses of the word ‘perception’. Perceptual signals are theoretical entities in the model which have some considerable confirmation as CVs in neuroscience. The experience of perceptions is not theoretical, but it is necessarily subjective.

The work of science is to make the subjective objective, to identify perceptions that we justify calling observed facts. But however factual and real we judge them to be they are still perceptions, subjective experiences.

@rsmarken

The intensities, sensations, configurations, transitions, relationships, etc. are not explanations of subjective experience. They are hypotheses about the aspects of the environment that organisms control.

Hypotheses are subjectively experienced perceptions. To test hypotheses we act as though what is hypothesized is a fact. You have often quoted Bill’s example of the taste of lemonade. We know there are sensors for specific tastes and textures, and the taste of lemonade is a mixture of some of these. Another is the color purple. We know there are cone cells sensitive to green, red, and blue (in a human who is not color blind), and purple is a mixture of stimulation to blue- and red-sensitive cells. To illustrate this, you have created diagrams with variables {v1, v2, …, v3} in the environment, combinations of which correspond to the taste of lemonade, the color purple, etc.

But the variables {v1, v2, …, v3} are controlled variables in the physical sciences. On the authority that we assign to science we assume that these variables are actually present in the environment. But ultimately they are subjective experiences of perceptions by individual scientists.

We perceive that some perceptions are objective, rather than subjective, to the extent that we successfully control them. More so when we agree with one another that we are controlling the same variables. Sciences do this in a disciplined way. Everybody does this informally. “Mmm! Doesn’t this lemonade taste good!” “Look at the chiaroscuro effect here, shading into such a rich, deep purple.”

What makes observed facts objective is the observed fact that the environment is in relevant ways the same for all relevant observers.

@rsmarken

The model explains the observed fact that organisms control various aspects of their environment. The idea that PCT explains subjective experience completely misses the point of PCT, which is to explain the controlling done by organisms.

Not at all. To say that the model explains subjective experience (which is all that we ultimately have) in no way denies that the model explains other things as well.

The observation of control still has its basis in the subjective experience of the person who projects the hypothesis that their own perception of an aspect of the environment has a reference value to which, when they disturb that variable, it consistently returns as a consequence of what the observed organism does. This is a fascinatingly more complex situation than the color purple or the taste of lemonade, or any other interaction with something that does not control, but it involves the same phenomenon of experiencing a unitary perception (lemonade, purple, control) which theory (a construct of perceptions) tells us depends upon combinations of variables. An important purpose for constructing such theories (the physical basis of the color purple or the taste of lemonade or control) is so that we can justify a claim that these subjective experiences are experiences of realities in the environment. Closer to home, so to speak, these theoretical understandings can help us control better.

@rsmarken

it would be helpful if you showed why, when we’re modeling “collective control”, we are not “modeling physics or environmentally present living control systems.”

A virtual controller is ‘environmentally present’ in the same way. The color purple has a fairly simple relation to CVs controlled by physicists. To observe control requires a much more complex interaction with physical phenomena, projecting the PCT model into the environment on the hypothesis-testing assumption that it is real. Collective control is a yet more demanding hypothesis, but the process of testing it is fundamentally the same. All three cases of scientific explanation are ultimately grounded in individuals’ perceptions—their subjective experiences. In all three cases a scientific model explains those subjective experiences, as well as explaining any perceptual constructs at intermediate levels of CVs (rod and cone cells, wavelengths or photon energetics, levels and interconnections in a PCT model of the behavior, etc.).

@rsmarken

Just show me where "perceptions constructed within LCSs and projected by them into the environment as though ‘real’” are to be found in the PCT model. But it would be nice if you could find where Bill said something like this.

You’re just unwilling to look because you deny it’s possible. This 2007 exchange with Richard Kennaway is one place among many. An excerpt:

Bill Powers (2007.02.14.0750 MST)

@Bill_Powers1

I think that there is excellent indirect evidence that there is something external to me. Overwhelming, incessant waves of evidence. But that’s all it is, evidence, meaning perceptions. It is not the thing itself. So all still depends on my own human perception and reasoning. If I convince myself that I know there is a reality, I can’t forget that I had to convince myself – reality did not thrust itself on my awareness in the same way perceptions do. I can’t become unaware that I wanted to know reality, and that to satisfy that want, I found premises and a train of reasoning that would end with that desired conclusion. That is not discovery, it’s invention.

‘Invention’ or ‘projection’, same thing. We act as if our subjective experiences of the environment are realities in the environment because we have to. Or to turn that around, to be convinced that our perceptions are not veridical would be profoundly disturbing.

To keep this on topic, collective control is an important way of testing and confirming the veridicality of our individual, subjective perceptions. It may be the only way out of solipsism. Johnson had to demonstrate his argumentum ad lapidum to Boswell. Logically, that argument is (informally) fallacious. (See Appeal to the stone in Wikipedia.) That’s why agreement alone is not sufficient. But science rests on replication, in principle if not always in practice, and whether or not something is a replication is a matter for agreement.