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

[rsmarken]

@bnhpct

Yes, I think we all have a high degree of faith that our perceptions are truthful.

Concern about whether or not perceptions are “truthful” is irrelevant to PCT. Actually, it’s more than irrelevant; it’s misleading. It implies that our ability to control depends on having perceptions that are accurate representations of external reality. In fact, our ability to control depends only on having accurate analogs of the perceptual variables we control.

@bnhpct

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.

That was in a discussion about whether PCT was solipsistic. It’s not.

@bnhpct

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.

I would say that the work of science is to find explanations, preferably in the form of quantitative models, of why we perceive what we perceive. Those models are what we take to be the external reality that is the basis of what we perceive.

@bnhpct

@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.

The third sentence (and everything after it) appears to be a non-sequiter. It has nothing to do with testing hypotheses about the types of perceptions people control. And I’m quite sure that scientists knew that color perceptions depended on the mixture of light of different wavelengths well before they knew about rods and cones in the retina.

@bnhpct

But the variables {v1, v2, …, v3} are controlled variables in the physical sciences.

They are simply physical variables. They are not controlled by scientists because they are theoretical entities. Like all other people, scientists control perceptions that are presumed to be functions of those theoretical entities.

@bnhpct

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.

Again, those physical variables are purely theoretical. We don’t treat them as actually present in the environment because of the authority we assign to scientists; we treat them as physical variables because they explain the results of experiments so well.

@bnhpct

We perceive that some perceptions are objective, rather than subjective, to the extent that we successfully control them.

I personally don’t experience the world as a perception; it’s all reality to me. And I don’t have to control things to experience them as objectively real. For example. I can tell that the lamp on my desk is real just by looking at it; same with the books, the desk, etc. Even the after effects of staring at the stupid lamp look objectively real. My experience is of the real world. Intellectually I know that it is all perception but I certainly don’t experience it that way. And I bet everyone else experiences it that way too. Even you.

@bnhpct

@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.

But the model doesn’t explain subjective experience. Thinking that it does is, as I said, missing the point. The model explains control (purposeful behavior) in terms of control of different types of perceptual variables. What the controller’s subjective experience is while controlling is completely irrelevant to the model. Once I’ve found that you are controlling the distance between cursor and target, for example, I know the perception you are controlling (c - t). I don’t know if you are experiencing this perception in the same way I am but that is irrelevant to the model (and me, for that matter).

@bnhpct

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 simply not true There is no “projection” of a hypothesis when testing for controlled variables. It certainly isn’t happening when the computer does the test for the controlled variable in my MindReading demo. Unless you think computer programs “project” perceptions.

@bnhpct

@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.).

I’m sorry. This is just too complicated for me. I really can’t see how this explains your claim that "when we’re modeling “collective control”, we are not “modeling physics or environmentally present living control systems.” Aren’t there people involved in collective control? Aren’t we modeling the behavior of people? Aren’t people living control systems? Aren’t they present in the environment with other people when they are collectively controlling?

@bnhpct

@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:

What I’m denying is that there is anying in PCT about living control systems projecting their perceptions into the environment. I don’t deny that it’s possible but I’ve never seen any evidence that it happens. But whether it happens or not, I know for sure that projection is not a part of the PCT model.

@bnhpct

Bill Powers (2007.02.14.0750 MST)

@Bill_Powers1

I think that there is excellent indirect evidence that there is something external to me…If I convince myself that I know there is a reality, I can’t forget that I had to convince myself …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.

Bill was talking about a person who was trying to convince herself (and, possibly, others) that there is a reality behind our perceptions. He was not describing projection (or its new synonym, invention) of reality as a property of the PCT model.

@bnhpct

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.

I think the only people who need a way out of solipcism are philosophers, and among those, only the ones who want an out from solipsism; post-modernists seem to be quite comfortable with it;-) But solipcism is not a problem for PCT any more than it is for any scientist. Simply assuming that there is a reality behind our perceptions seems to work pretty well in termns of developing successful theories.

PCT can explain why a person (like the one Bill took the role of in his post) might want to invent (or, project) “proofs” that there is a reality behind our perception. But that is the only way that invention (or projection) would fit into PCT. But invention/projection is not part of the PCT model that explains the behavior of a person who does the inventing/projecting.