Hi Fred…
···
From: “Fred Nickols” (fred@nickols.us via csgnet Mailing List) [mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 3:26 PM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: RE: Why Control of Perception? (Re: Powers, 2007…)
[From Fred Nickols (2015.08.12.0920)}
I’m happy to modify the wording, Boris. How about this: “Behavior is an effort to control some selected aspect of the perceived environment.”
HB : Why bother Fred if Bill has put it as it should be put :
“behavior is effect of output on input”. That’s what “feed-back” is. That’s all what behavior is doing in the external environment. In Bill’s diagram is this the only thing I can see about behavior. This is general explanation. There is no “controlled aspect of environment” .
It’s not control of output to any “aspect of environment”, specially not perceived. “Perceived environment” (perception) is to some extent controlled in comparator not outside (see Bill’s diagram). But maybe I didn’t clearly understood you. It’s quite a complicated definition you put for behavior. But I think it’s not worth. Bill explained everything quite simple.
Behavior is not control. It’s just effect of muscles on environment, transformation of control into environment, affecting also input. That’s all what I see in Bill’s diagram. Maybe you see something more. What if something is tickeling you on the skin in the back ? What do you control in external environment (which aspect of environment) if you scratch on the place of tickeling on the skin ? PCT is theory that tends to explain all behaviors, not just those with side effects on some “aspect of environment”. Bill knew what he was doing with not putting “controlled variable” or “aspect of environment” into external environment.
FN : Clearly, none of us can control our entire environment and I don’t think any of us try to do that but I do think we all try to control certain selected aspects of the world we perceive.
HB : This is quite behavioristic or self-regulation view. Thinking that entirely or some “aspect of environment” can be controlled with behavior is not PCT reasoning. Bill’s diagram of “Control of perception” was meant for all behaviors, not just those which “control loop” effects goes through “aspect of environment”. As the behavior one above (scratching) there are also other behaviors that don’t affect any “aspect of environment”, but affect directly input (perception). There are just effects of control perceived outside in external environment. Control is done inside organism.
FN : It’s probably worth mentioning that some of our efforts are conscious and deliberate and others are more or less automatic.
HB : Depends on which level of hierarchy perception is controlled.
But maybe I didn’t understood you quite well. Are you saying that you can make conscious or more or less automatic efforts (directly contract muscle), not with “Control of effort perception” ? Maybe you could go and read B:CP about this one J.
Best,
Boris
Fred Nickols
From: “Boris Hartman” (boris.hartman@masicom.net via csgnet Mailing List) [mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 4:17 AM
To: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: RE: Why Control of Perception? (Re: Powers, 2007…)
Hi Fred…
From: Fred Nickols (fred@nickols.us via csgnet Mailing List) [mailto:csgnet@lists.illinois.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 1:44 AM
To: rsmarken@gmail.com
Cc: csgnet@lists.illinois.edu
Subject: Re: Why Control of Perception? (Re: Powers, 2007…)
[From Fred Nickols (2015.08.11.1945)]
FN : So would it be correct to say “Behavior is control of the perceived environment”?
HB : Which environment Fred ?
Behavior is not control, it’s just one of means of control that is affecting external environment.
Best,
Boris
Fred Nickols
Managing Partner
Distance Consulting LLC
Be sure you measure what you want.
Be sure you want what you measure.
Sent from my iPad
On Aug 11, 2015, at 7:16 PM, Richard Marken (rsmarken@gmail.com via csgnet Mailing List) csgnet@lists.illinois.edu wrote:
[From Rick Marken (2015.08.11.1615)]
Rupert Young (2015.08.10 20.30)
RM: Aspects of the environment don’t “contribute” to a perception; they are the perception.
RY: Then I am wondering why you use the phrase “Behaviour is the control of variable aspects of the environment” if it is perceptions we are talking about, which, I think, we all understand are (imagination aside) functions of physical (environmental) variables.
RM: Because "aspects of the environment’ means (to me) the same thing as “functions of environmental variables” which means the same thing (to me) as “perception” (or “perceived aspects of the environment”). Area, for example, is one aspect of physical (environmental) variables (width, w, and height, h) that make up a rectangle; perimeter is a different aspect of those same variables. That is, both are f(w,h); area = w*h and perimeter = 2(w+h). Area and perimeter can also be said to be two different ways of perceiving the same physical environment. By the way, another demonstration of the fact that you can control different perceptual aspects of the same environmental var iables is my “Control of Perception” demo at http://www.mindreadings.com/ControlDemo/ControlOfPerception.html.
RM: Maybe it’s because my main field of study in psychology was perception but when I hear the word “perception” I automatically think of that word as referring to a mental (or neural) correlate of some aspect of the environment. The study of perception is all about how our nervous system turns what is “out there” in the world – physical (environmental) variables – into our experience of the world – perceptions.
RY: As I mentioned before it is a bit misleading as it suggests that the controlled variable is something in the environment.
RM: I don’t see this as a terrible mistake. Indeed, there are many prominent psychologists who are students of perception who believe that perceptions are a direct reflection of things out there in the environment, J. J. Gibson being one. And in many cases when we talk about the things that people control it’s hard to avoid talking about them in terms of variables that we perceive as being in the person’s environment. For example, I was watching a baseball game last night and it was hard to avoid noticing that there was a lot of controlling of an environmental variable – the baseball – going on. Pitchers were controlling the location of the ball relative to the strike zone, batters were controlling the location of their bat relative to the pitched ball, fielders were controlling the location the the ball relative to their mits, etc. I know that the players were actually controlling their own perceptions perceptions. But even Vin Scully would have a tough time talking about baseball this way. A technical understanding of what perceptual variables are being controlled when we see people carrying out particular behaviors is, of course, essential when doing PCT science. But when we are just talking about control informally we can talk about it in terms of what we perceive as the aspects of the environment – balls, bats, mits, etc – that are being controlled.
RY: This may be what a newcomer to PCT might think, faced with this phrase, without even any appreciation that perceptions are involved.
RM: This leads me think it that it might be worth considering why Powers called his book *Behavior: The Contro l of Perception *(hence the new name for the thread). Why did Bill use the phrase “control of perception” rather than “control of perceptual aspects of the environment” or just “control of the environment” in the title of his book? The word “perception” is never used in engineering texts on control theory. Engineers never talk about their mechanical control systems as controlling their perceptions, though those systems do control their perceptions. Engineers never point out that a device like the thermostat controls a perception, though it does. They talk about a thermostat controlling a physical (environmental) variable – temperature. And that seems to work for them. So, again, why did Bill call his book about living control systems Behavior: The Control of Perception rather than, say, Behavior: The Control of Physical Variables?
RM: I believe that Bill called his book Behavior: The Control of Perce ption because he wrote it for an audience of psychologists (like me) and he knew that title would catch their attention (as it did mine). Psychologists are trained to think of behavior as controlled by perception, where behavior is seen as “output” and perception is seen as “input”. So when a psychologist (like me) passes by a book with a title that implies that behavior is the control of perception they do a double take (as I did) and pick it up to see what the heck it could possibly be about (as I did back in 1974, the year that changed my life;-).
RM: To a psychologist, a book that says “behavior is the control ** of** perception” gets it exactly backwards. It seems to be saying that output causes input when, as every psychologist knows, input causes output. And that’s the challenge that Bill wanted to present to the psychological establishment. His book is about the fact that it’s the psyc hologists who got it it backwards, not him. Their discipline has been based on the idea that input causes output when, in fact, output controls input. [Psychologists don’t make a clear distinction between “cause” and “control”,by the way. Indeed they treat these words as synonyms; so another thing Bill had to do in B:CP was explain the difference between cause and control].
RM: So I believe Bill used the word “perception” in the title of his book because he knew that psychologists would see it as referring to the “input” of an organism, while the word “behavior” would be seen as referring to the organism’s “output”. But if that’s true then why not call the book “Behavior:The control of the environment”? Psychologists know that perceptions are caused by environmental variables so the environment is as much an input as is perception. I think Bill used “perception” rather than “environment” in the title, not only because “environment” is not an a ccurate description of what is controlled by organisms (it is aspects – functions – of the environment that are controlled) but because he knew that psychologists would understand that the word “perception” refers not only to the input to an organism but also to the fact that this input is a function of the organism’s environment.
RM: So for a psychologist (like me) the title of Powers’ book is making two claims: 1) output controls input and 2) input is a function physical variables in the organism’s environment. A psychologist would find the second claim non-controversial (perceptions are understood to be functions of physical variables; the whole field of perceptual psychology is aimed at trying to figure out what these functions are and how they work). It’s the first claim – that output controls input – that is the tough one (for psychologists), so tough that it has been nearly impossible to get psychologists to pay attention to PCT for more than a few seconds.
RM :Unfortunately, when people who are not psychologists see the title Behavior: The Control of Perception what they often find most intriguing is not the idea that output controls input but that what is controlled is perception. To the layman “perception” is just another word for “reality is just a subjective opinion”. So PCT has attracted a lot of what I believe are called “post modernists” who seem to think that there is no way to know what’s really out there and facts are just what people perceive them to be. In other words, we get people who believe that “control of perception” means that we shouldn’t disagree with each other because nobody can know what is really true so we are all equally right. Such a philosophy is not very conducive to doing science. But apparently this philosophy has been around for some time since it was satirized in the late 1800s by Gilbert & Sullivan in the “Mikado” when the Mikado himself sang the lyric that I quoted earlier: “And I am right and you are right and everything is quite correct.” Of course, once such people figure out “control of perception” doesn’t mean that everyone’s right – that it doesn’t deny science – they get very mad and eventually leave.
RM: So Bill’s choice of the phrase “control of perception” to describe PCT has managed to get lots of people upset. It gets’ psychologists upset because it means what they think it means: that output controls input. And it upsets post-modernists (and other “radical subjectivists”) upset because it doesn’t mean what they think it means: that there is no reality (or that our perceptions are somehow independent of reality).
RM: One last thing. The reason that perception is an important concept in control theory when applied to living organisms but not so much when applied to mechanical control syste ms is because the perceptions controlled by the latter typically correspond to simple physical variables. For example, the perception controlled by a thermostat is a function of a single physical variable, temperature (the perception exists in many thermostats as the diameter of a bimetallic strip). Since the term “perception” usually refers to a more complex aspects of the environment than just a single physical variable it hasn’t been used to describe the variables controlled by mechanical control systems that control simple physical variables.
RM: There are mechanical control systems that control more complex aspects of the environment; a humidity control system, for example, controls a perception of humidity, which is a complex function of two physical variables, temperature and water vapor. So the humidity control system controls what would be called a “sensation” type perception in PCT. But I don’t think engineers would say that a humidity cont rol system controls a perception of humidity possibly because the word “perception” seems a little too anthropomorphic. But that’s what the humidity control system is controlling – a perception of an aspect of the environment that we call “humidity”.
RM: Powers great insight (other than realizing behavior is control and that control is organized around perceptual variables) was that the behavior of living things can be explained in terms of control of perceptions that can represent aspects of the environment of increasing complexity – such as relationships, events, sequences, programs, principles and system concepts. That is, some things people do can be explained by assuming that they are controlling a perception of a principle like "honesty. In order to build a machine that could do what a person does – control how honest it is in various encounters – we would have to give it the ability to perceive the aspect of the environment that corr esponds to the perception of honesty. Indeed, the idea that behavior is organized around control of perceptions of increasingly complex aspects of the environment – a hierarchy of perceptions – is really the main substance of PCT. Chapters 6-13 of B:CP discuss the different perceptual aspects of the environment that Powers originally proposed as the types of perceptions around which human behavior seems to be organized.
RM: So this is another reason for using the phrase “control of perception” in the title; PCT is all about explaining behavior in terms of the types of perceptual variables that people control. All those perceptual variables, from intensities to system concepts, are functions of environmental variables, functions that are computed by the neural networks in our afferent nervous system. It will surely be a long time before we figure out how to compute the perception of a principle like “honesty” or a system con cept like “Dodger fan” from the physical variables impinging on our sensory surface. But these perceptions, like all others, must be a function, ultimately, of these physical variables. What else could they be a function of?
RM: I think the message of PCT to roboticists like you, Rupert, is that robots will produce human like behavior (control) only when they control the same kinds of perceptions that humans control. That’s why I liked your robot that clearly controlled a sequence of activities; it was controlling a high level perception – a function of lower level perceptions that were ultimately a function of physical variables in the robot’s environment. It was not just producing a sequence of outputs. It was an excellent illustration of robotics based on PCT.
RM: In the above example, the environment is three variables: t, c and s. One aspect of that environment is k (t-c); another is arcsine [(t-c)/s]; still another (which I didn’t consider) is t-c+s. In other words, I view an “aspect of the environment” as a mathematical function of physical (environmental) variables.
RY: What is the difference between this and a perception?
RM: Absolutely nothing. You could rewrite the paragraph above as follows and it would mean exactly the same thing:
RM: In the above example, the environment is three variables: t, c and s. One perception of that environment is k (t-c); another is arcsine [(t-c)/s]; still another (which I didn’t consider) is t-c+s. In other words, I view “perceptoin” as a mathematical function of physical (environmental) variables.
Best
Rick
Richard S. Marken
www.mindreadings.com
Author of Doing Research on Purpose.
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