Since Rupert's original essay [From Rupert Young (2015.12.31 15.15)] sounded rather familiar, I just went back to a few months of the CSGnet archives that I happen to have stored locally, and searched for the word "consciousness". I extracted a few chunks out of some messages, and a couple of complete messages. I expect that if I had searched for "Attention" or "Awareness" and similar words, I would have found a bit more, but these give a flavour of what was happening on CSGnet in the (more or less randomly chosen) years 1997-99 (plus one fragment from the now defunct ECACS (Explorations of Complex Adaptive Control Systems) bulletin board).
Extracts from CSGnet messages in which the word "consciousness" occurs. If the whole message is
quoted, the signature is included at the end. Otherwise only a snippet of a longer message is
included.
···
------
[From Bill Powers (970613.1101 MDT)]
Martin Taylor 970613 0935--
MT: >Presumably "mastery" control is an aspect of the reorganizing
>system, targeted toward the reorganization of a sub-part of the
>perceptual hierarchy that could be involved with the perception
>whose control is to be "mastered."
BP: I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think the actual achievement of mastery is under
the control of learned systems, which is where consciousness resides. The reorganizing system is not
part of them; it works automatically, at all levels, in the same way every time. It's an _unlearned_
control system, working outside the learned hierarchy and outside consciousness.
------------------ [From Rick Marken (971010.1000)]
I think consciousness moves up and down the hierarchy "at will", going to the places where error is
currently largest. If you cut your finger consciousness moves down to the intensity/sensation level
(pain). If you are having problems at work consciousness moves up to levels having to do with
relationships, rules and values.
------------------------- [From Rick Marken (971024.1000)]
i.kurtzer (971023) --
> i would suggest that one of the clearest implications of a
> hierarchy of _experience_, !!!!not to be confused with a
> concatation of control structures!!! is that there is no
> real "i" . that it is an arbitrary identification and
> subsequently a reification.
I basically agree with what you are saying here. What I have been calling the "consious me" does
seems to experience the world (the hierarchy of perception) from the point of view of the particular
level in the hierarchy from which it is currently aware. So there are, in a sense, as many conscious
me's as there are levels in the hierarchy.
But the nature of the conscious aspect of me that becomes aware of the world in these different ways
nevertheless seems always the same to me; I think Bill P. once said something like: the nature of
consciousness seems to be the same whether we are conscious of our fingertips or our faults. I think
I have something like the same experience.
I do think it is reasonable to distinguish a conscious, observing, volitional aspect of ourselves
from the automatically controlling aspect. I think this distinction is already embodied in HPCT as
the distinction between the control hierarchy and the reorganization system. The latter is (I think)
the conscious aspect of us that is always "tinkering" with the control hierarchy; it tinkers more
with systems that are experiencing a lot of error than it does with systems that are working fine;
that's probably why the consious aspect of ourselves seems to spend most of it's time tinkering with
higher level perceptions -- of relationships, categories, programs, principles and even system
concepts.
-------------------
[From Bill Powers (971103.1524 MST)]
>i.kurtzer (971103.0915)
> >> i would suggest that one of the clearest implications of a hierarchy of
>>> _experience_, !!!!not to be confused with a concatation of control
>>> structures!!! is that there is no real "i" . that it is an arbitrary
>>> identification and subsequently a reification.
One of my I's agrees with you. There may be no real i's, but there are certainly apparent ones. They
are very convincing, too. As you say, however, they are probably control structures: system
concepts, principles, programs. Of course control systems at that level can do a lot of complex
things, like think and plan; they can be jealous or loving, they can lay blame and accept
responsibility -- all those things that we usually say "I" do. They're not imaginary.
But the real essence of the "I" feeling is none of those things. Whatever you observe about your own
"I", it is an object of observation, not the observer. If you think "I'm too fat" what you mean is
that your body is too fat. The point of view from which you observe your body is not too fat (thin,
angry, fearful, etc.).
There is an Observer which remains the same no matter what is being observed. When you shift
attention from one aspect of yourself to another, the content of consciousness changes but the
Observer does not. This is why all the I's to which you attend are unsatisfactory as a definition of
yourself; they are simply aspects of your experience. However, unless they are being Observed, they
are not part of conscious experience. All those things about you have changed since you were an
infant -- but the Observer is the same.
Not so?
Best,
Bill P.
----------------------------[From Bill Powers (971109.0639 MST)]
...So what IS "conscious experience?" Is it merely the existence of signals in perceptual pathways?
If so, it seems entirely unnecessary. And this interpretation doesn't explain why experience seems
confined, at one moment, to a small subset of all the neural signals that exist in the brain at a
given time, or why it should be confined to _afferent_ neural signals (as it is). And most
important, it doesn't explain how the field of experience can change from one time to another, so
sometimes we attend to one part of it, and sometimes to other parts at the expense of what was in
experience before. The variable content of consciousness is a big problem for any proposal that
would leave out Observation as a separate phenomenon.
Of all the aspects of the variable content of consciousness, the most telling one is the fact that
we can attend at different levels of perception. We can attend selectively to intensity information
or to system concepts or anything between. But if the hierarchical control model is correct, in
order for any higher-level perception to be controlled, perceptions at all lower levels must also be
under control. This means that when we are attending, say, to the route we will be riding on our
bicycle, we are still controlling perceptions of balance, effort, and so forth. Those perceptual
signals MUST STILL BE PRESENT and they must be under active control -- yet they are not part of
experience at that time. If this were not so, the higher levels of control could not be working. If
the lower perceptual signals did not go right on existing as usual while we attend to higher ones,
we couldn't be riding the bicycle while we tried to remember whether to turn right or left at the
next corner.
What this demonstrates is that the existence of a perceptual signal is independent of the experience
of the perceptual signal. When I try to think of a model that would have that characteristic, all I
can come up with is some sort of receiver that can be connected selectively and variably to various
afferent signals in the hierarchy. When this receiver is receiving information from some set of
perceptual signals, those signals are consciously experienced. When it is receiving from elsewhere,
those same signals, even though they continue to exist, are not experienced.
It is very convenient, therefore, to have some evidence of the existence of this selective receiver:
it's me. _I_ can attend selectively to different subsets of the perceptual signals that exist in my
body. This is not the "I" that is characterized by my physical or mental attributes, because I can
easily attend to something other than those -- the form of the Orion Nebula in an eyepiece, for
example, while forgetting that my fingers are freezing. This "I" that is not any of those other
"I's" is the receiver, tuned into this or that aspect of perception, at high or low levels.
----------------- [From Rick Marken (980402.1330)]
-- the reorganization system (which is basically what we call "consciousness")
------------------ [From Bill Powers(980404.0024 MST)]
The way we know about reference signals for the highest conscious level of control is that some
perceptions seem right while others seem wrong. In the control mode, there is no separate
consciousness of the reference signal against which the perception is being compared; the sense of
right and wrong is like a consciousness of the error signal. But I suspect it is more like
consciousness of the effects of actions driven by the error signal, and not of the error signal
itself. At least this is consistent both with experience and with the general postulate that
perception is associated only with the afferent systems.
-------------------- [From Bruce Nevin (980407.1128)]
Bruce Gregory 9980407.1015 EDT) --
>Rick is stepping well beyond the bounds
>of HPCT when he identifies consciousness with the reorganization
>mechanism. Clearly reorganization can and does take place in the
>total absence of
consciousness. And, as Bill points out, HPCT
>works in exactly the same what with or without consciousness.
Doesn't follow. Consciousness can not be aware of itself. If you identify consciousness with
reorganization, it follows that we are not conscious of reorganization itself any more than we are
conscious of consciousness itself.
Bruce Nevin ---------------------------- [From Rick Marken (980407.2120)]
The perceptual signals are always there; what changes is which of these perceptual signals
becomes the object of awareness (you suddenly become aware of the Rachmaninoff playing in the
background) and which disappear from awareness (the pressure on the butt disappears from
consciousness -- oops, it popped back when I said that;-)).
--------------------------
[From Bill Powers (980408.0248 MST)]
Bruce Gregory (980407.1628 EDT)-- Bruce Nevin (980407.1519 EST)--
>> What is happening when I observe something without control? "Observing" is
>> itself a controlled perception. ...
> Exactly.
Is that true? It doesn't seem so to me. If I realize "Ah, I'm observing the apple," I am no longer
doing that. I can observe various things, but how do I choose them in order to observe them? To say
I control which of them I am observing is to say that I know of them before I start observing them,
which is self-contradictory (that is, I know of something without, at first, observing it). If I am
observing an apple, there is an apple in my consciousness. But if I am obnserving the act of
observing, my attention is no longer on the apple, but on the observing.
The Method of Levels is based on the hypothesis that the Observer is never aware of itself.
Best,
Bill P.
---------------------- [From Bill Powers (980408.0255 MST)]
I think of awareness as a sort of tunable receiver; tuning it brings various activities in the
perceptual hierarchy into view of the Observer. The perceptual signals that are tuned in appear in
awareness, so we can say that those signals are the content of consciousness. But perceptual signals
that are not tuned in are still present, like all the radio stations that are broadcasting signals
outside the range of the receiver's tuning.
...
The "perception of perceiving" is always a higher level perception involving a different type of
perception. That is the basis of the Method of Levels. If you observe what you are perceiving at one
level, you become aware of perceptions _about_ the first perceptions, but not of the same type as
the first perceptions.
------------------------ [From Bill Powers (980408.0255 MST)]
Bruce Nevin (980407.2208 EDT)--
>... paying attention is coincident with control. Whatever
>attention is, the statement is that we see an instance of it when a control
>system controls a perception.
But what about control systems that are controlling perceptions of which you are not, at the moment,
aware? Right now (unless you're in bed) you are balancing, and you have been doing so for some time.
But you were not, I'll bet, aware of controlling the perceptual variables of balance. There are many
perceptual signals at levels both higher and lower than the level at which you're habitually aware
that are under control, but they are not in the field of consciousness. The higher systems are
determining the reference signals that set the highest goals of which you're aware, and your
conscious control actions result in varying controlled perceptions at lower levels, also outside
awareness. You can become aware of many of these signals, but most of the time you are not aware of
them even though they are present and being controlled.
...
I don't think attention has anything to do (directly) with control. Attention is the reception of
information from perceptual channels by something outside those channels. If any influence on the
process of control is to occur, it would have to be carried out through a different path, going
_from_ the outside something _to_ the control system. The label for that kind of channel would be
more like "volition" than "attention" (or "awareness").
So attention may be a necessary ingredient for affecting control systems, but the direction of
effects is wrong; there must be some other process that generates effects ON the control systems, in
order to affect how they operate.
This is the sort of thing that led me to conjecture about a connection between awareness/volition
and the reorganizing system.
--------------------
[From Bruce Nevin (980413.1456)]
Rupert Young (980413.1800 BST)--
>What do you mean by attention ? One way of looking at it is as the
>terminology that is given to the _observed_ behaviour that a living system
>goes through when it carrying out some task relative to specific aspects of
>the environment (and is said to be 'attending' only to those aspects), or in
>other words, when it is controlling perceptions to reduce error. This is
>already explained within PCT and at best 'attention' is synonomous with 'the
>behaviour of reducing perceptual error' and as such has no place in the
>terminology and theory of PCT. For example, if you are looking for a blue
>object the higher levels set non-zero reference values for blue and zero
>reference values for red resulting in behaviour relative only to blue objects,
>ie, 'attending to blue'.
What about when there is no observable behavior but the person (e.g. yourself) reports shifting
attention from that blue object on the screen to that humming sound to the smell of smoke to a
memory of a camping experience to the imagined experience of going camping this weekend, now there's
a good idea, whoops where's that smoke coming from? And at this point you see some observable action
for the first time.
Could still be controlling perceptual inputs of a higher-level PIF to reduce error at that level?
What do you think?
>> BO
> >I'll send you some soap ?
Gee, and all this time I thought it was short for "best offer", instead of "best."
Be well,
BN
--------------------------- [From Rick Marken (980413.1250)]
According to PCT, reorganization is always going on (to some extent) since there is always some
small level of error in some control systems. Consciousness seems to be involved in this process;
maybe its trying to direct the reorganization process to the part of the hierarchy experiencing the
most error
------------------------- [From Rick Marken (980413.2230)]
Speculations about the relationship between consciousness and the HPCT model can be found in B:CP
(p. 197 - 201). On p. 201 Powers says "If there is anything on which most psychotherapists would
agree, I think it would be the principle that change demands consciousness from the _point of view_
that needs changing". When I said "gain a perspective" I meant the same thing Bill meant when he
discussed "point of view". Another nice discussion of this "point of view" notion is found in the
chapter on "An Experiment With Levels" in LCS II (p. 41).
------------------- [From Rick Marken (980414.1550)]
Because I see no way for the hierarchy itself to solve conflicts that exist within itself, and
because I see people (including myself) solve conflicts all the time -- sometimes with great ease --
I believe that there is something about people that lets them do this. My own experience with
solving conflicts leads me to believe that consciousness is involved in this process. Again, I don't
know how consciousness "works"; all I know is that the HPCT model can't solve it's own conflicts.
Reorganization, which we _can_ model, can solve some conflicts. But I can solve most of my little
conflicts "instantly" when I can see them from a new conscious perspective; this may be
"reorganization" but it is not the kind of reorganization we have modeled; it seems to involve a
change of conscious perspective on the problem; that's why I talk about going "up a level" as a way
to solve conflicts.
-------------------
[From Bill Powers (990311.1053 MST)]
Bruce Gregory (990310.1650 EST)--
>
>It seems to me that the process of learning and then performing a
>tracking task both demand attention. In the learning stage
>reorganization may be going on, but there seems to be no evidence that
>it is occurring after "good" control is achieved. Have I missed
>something? If not, what does this simple example tell us about >attention?
All good relevant questions.
It's hard to imagine learning any control task unconsciously, but there are those who claim it can
be done. I'm sure we're never consciously aware of all the details we have learned, but it seems to
me that some degree of consciousness accompanies all learning.
I wonder why it is that when our attention wanders from the variable we're most saliently
controlling, that control begins to deteriorate (I think). I always think of a grandchild excitedly
reporting on something that went on at school, while the hand holding the glass of milk droops
closer and closer to spilling the milk on my computer. Does loss of awareness lower the gain of the
control system? Or does it allow the reference signal or the perception of "upright" to drift? Some
very specific experimentation is needed to see what is actually changing. Anyone who does the needed
experiments will be the first in the world to do it right.
I also wonder about control systems that have been very well learned -- so well that they can
apparently work quite well with no conscious awareness at all. Is it true that this really happens?
And what is different between such "automatized" control systems, if they exist, and others that
seem to require some attention to be paid to them?
Lots of room for good research here.
Best,
Bill P.
------------------------
And one snippet from the (now defunct) ECACS bulletin board, 2004
Martin Taylor
> > A long time ago I made a proposal for what perceptions are in consciousness at any moment. My
proposal is no better than any of the many others that have been offered, but it ties in with the
foregoing and suggests a possible approach to the memory selection problem, so I'll offer it as
though there were some evidence to support it, even though there is actually none.
> >
> > My proposal is that we are conscious of those perceptions for which control is imperfect or
difficult, or that are candidates for being switched in or out of control. This latter set must
exist, since the degrees of freedom for control are orders of magnitude fewer than the number of
perceptions that are potentially controllable. Most perceptions vary freely at any moment, while a
few are being actively controlled. Now I am suggesting that the candidate perceptions for
associative storage are the perceptions of which we are conscious. One testable consequence of this
suggestion is that we would ordinarily not remember anything of which we were not conscious at the
time. This cannot be true absolutely, as the cases of the mnemonicist and the eidetiker woman
demonstrate, but it could be largely true of most people.
Bruce Gregory:
As I sit looking out at the trees behind our house I wonder to what extent they represent a
perception for which control is imperfect or difficult or are candidates for being switched in or
out of control. I agree that we seem to become conscious of perceptions that fall into these
categories, but they seem to constitute a minority of the perceptions of which I am conscious. What
about situations such as watching the nightly BBC news? Watching the program involves control, but
does the content that interests me?
