William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Hi Allie and all

In responding to you here I believe I am also posting this to CSGNet.

Regarding your two questions of me:

Re #1: Yes, there is a CSG Research fund to which people can make (and have made) tax deductible contributions. The CSG is a legitimate 501(c) organization and therefore I can give a receipt that will allow people to deduct the amount of their contribution from their taxes. Just send the contributions to me at:

Rick Marken
10459 Holman Ave
LA, CA 90024

And make the checks out to the Control Systems Group.

Re #2: I would be honored to set up a group to go through your Dad’s stored works. Of course this will be in the future - the fairly near future I hope – but of course I will help in any way I can.

Warm Regards

Rick

···

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Barb and all

It is with considerable regret that I tell you that I will not be able to attend Bill’s Memorial in person. I say in person because I hope it might be possible – if you think it appropriate – for me to participate via Skype? I have been in some internal conflict about this because I want very much to attend the Memorial but I am also reluctant to leave home for more than a few hours because Linda had an operation on her foot (completely successful) and really can’t get around very well, and we have no one here who I feel comfortable prevailing upon to look after her for a couple days. She will be in a cast and unable to walk for another couple months so it’s unlikely that she will be mobile by the time of the Memorial. So I have decided to stay with her and hope that I can look in on (and perhaps say a few words at) the 3:00 Saturday Memorial and, perhaps, also participate in Alice’s Sunday discussion of Bill’s last book idea via the internet, again if you feel that would be appropriate.

I will say that I plan to work in two ways to ensure Bill’s legacy and make sure the world recognizes the enormous contribution made by this great and kind man to our understanding of the nature of living systems. First, I will continue to do what I think I do best – which is doing research and publishing papers on PCT. I think it’s important to put as much quality PCT based research into the scientific literature as possible to give it legitimacy and visibility. I plan to inundate the journals with papers based on PCT; it’s hard to get them into print but I have a pretty good track record and I think it’s worth the effort. Second, I will try to publish papers in the relevant scientific literature describing Bill’s accomplishments. I’m starting with trying to get a professional obituary published in American Psychologist, which, I believe, is the first psychological journal in which Bill is published (pre-dating the major 1960 piece in Perceptual and Motor Skills by three years: Powers, W. T., McFarland, R. L., & Clark, R. K. (1957). A general feedback theory of human behavior: A prospectus. American Psychologist, 12, 462.). If that doesn;t go I’ll look for other relevant venues for such an obituary.

Finally, I completely agree with Henry Yin that " Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected." It was Bill’s genius – and Bill’s alone – that produced the insights that are included in what we now call PCT and he, like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel and other scientific giants, should be recognized and celebrated for his contributions. And it is a tragedy that this recognition and celebration is currently occurring among a relatively small (but not all that small) group of people. We must work to give William T. Powers the place in scientific history that he deserves. And the main way I will try to do this is the way I would encourage all of us who recognize the enormity of BIll’s contribution to the life sciences to do it: by continuing, in whatever way we can – through research,application, publication – to build on the extraordinary foundation that Bill provided and described with such incredible lucidity.

Best regards

Rick

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:04 PM, bara0361@gmail.com bara0361@gmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

It’s been so comforting, reading all of your messages about Dad. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I continue to be amazed at the scope of his impact, in so many ways…

We will let you know just as soon as possible when the details have been finalized for Dad’s memorial…

For those arriving on Friday, June 7th, we will be making arrangements for a gathering.

Saturday, the 8th, the memorial will probably be around 3:00 pm. Anyone so compelled is welcome and encouraged to share a few (or many!) words.

On the 9th, Bill’s sister, Alice, would like to discuss the book that Dad had hoped to complete, but had so far just written the forward. There will be a conference room available for this purpose.

We appreciate your continued patience as we get through all of this. It’s been a bit difficult over a holiday weekend, as our hands are tied to some extent until Tuesday.

Thank you again, and many times over…

*barb


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:

All,

Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.

Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).

– Gary

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:

Hi Rick,
I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.

Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.

Henry

On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:

Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.

Best

Rick

=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU

Subject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU

from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:

Dear Bill:

In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I

have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.

As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to

understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had

broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to

do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –

was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of

emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.

The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of

course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.

Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to

the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.

William of Occam would not approve.

The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its

functioning.

You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms make

use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as

the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year

1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills
) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period

before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.

Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,

reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in

the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.

But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the

compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but

simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the

enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the

hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.

The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing

research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.

For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three

together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number

5!

I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began

rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am

writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are

multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an

hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I

am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.

To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a

theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your

1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines

or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.

But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.

You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal

upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,

persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.

In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.

I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me

a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would

say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.

Thanks, brother.

Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.

Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving

Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
Member, Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember, Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission

Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page

May I add my condolences. I knew, and of course Bill knew, that this moment would come, and could come at any time, but it is still a great sadness when it does. My hope is that his work will live on, and flourish.

-- Richard Kennaway

···

--
Richard Kennaway, R.Kennaway@uea.ac.uk, http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.

I belong to several lists on LinkedIn and elsewhere where people have an interest in human behavior and performance. Few, however, know of or are interested in PCT. I plan to post the following to those lists tomorrow. If anyone cares to comment regarding my post please do so today.

Fred Nickols

William T. Powers, the engineer/psychologist who developed Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) passed away on May 24, 2013 at the age of 86. PCT is a revolutionary and exciting theory of human behavior, one that invalidates much of what currently passes as psychological research and existing theories of human behavior. Essentially, PCT views people as purposeful, “living control systems,” whose behavior shapes its consequences instead of the other way around. PCT is a feedback-governed view of human behavior. It holds that we target certain variables for control and we compare our perceptions of the current state of those variables with our goal state or reference condition for those variables. If unacceptable gaps exist, we behave in ways that serve to close those gaps. Thus it is that our behavior serves to control our perceptions. There are, however, other actors and factors at work that influence the same variables we are trying to control. Ordinarily these “disturbances” as they are known in PCT are compensated for and pose no problem. On occasion they can prove overwhelming. Our control is far from perfect. PCT is rife with implications for researchers, those who simply want to understand human behavior and those who would manage human performance.

Powers will be laid to rest next to his wife, Mary, in a cemetery overlooking the city of Durango, CO. His work will continue, pursued by those who knew him and who came to know PCT. His theory will someday receive the recognition it deserves – and so will he.

···

From: BePrint for Living, Inc /Shelley Roy [mailto:beprint@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 9:35 PM
To: bara0361@gmail.com; controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: rsmarken@gmail.com; gcziko@gmail.com; hy43@duke.edu; 1@aut.me; Fred@nickols.us; nview@aol.com; bdw1332@yahoo.com; heather.bell@uleth.ca; RichardPfau4153@aol.com; sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; tcloak@unm.edu; mmermel@mikemermel.com; jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; brian.mingus@colorado.edu; bbollmann@bbollmann.com; apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com; dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; wmansell@gmail.com; sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net; powers_w@frontier.net; bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net; denny68flh@gmail.com; MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; fplooij@kiddygroup.com
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Please notify all of us of the Skype call. I have your Dad listed on my contact if you are using his login.

Shelley A.W. Roy
Be Creating!

-----Original Message-----
From: bara0361 bara0361@gmail.com
To: Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com; Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com; Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu; Autumn Winter 1@aut.me; Fred and Gail Nickols Fred@nickols.us; Fred and Perry Good nview@aol.com; Brett Wilkinson bdw1332@yahoo.com; Heather Bell heather.bell@uleth.ca; Richard Pfau RichardPfau4153@aol.com; Sergio Verduzco-Flores sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; Ted Cloak tcloak@unm.edu; Mike Mermel mmermel@mikemermel.com; Richard Kennaway jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; Brian Mingus brian.mingus@colorado.edu; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann bbollmann@bbollmann.com; Alice McElhone apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com bbabbott@frontier.com; Dag Forssell dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com; Sara Tai sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net mmt@mmtaylor.net; Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net; Bruce Nevin bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net rjrobertson2@comcast.net; Denny Powers denny68flh@gmail.com; McClelland, Kent MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; Hugh Petrie hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; David Goldstein davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; Shelly Roy beprint@aol.com; Frans Plooij fplooij@kiddygroup.com
Sent: Mon, May 27, 2013 7:15 pm
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Bill’s grandsons (my boys) are very computer savvy, and brought Dad to Derek’s wedding via Skype. We shall certainly work on this for you!

*barb

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Rick - I have been trying to keep up with all of the responses, but find my reserves are starting to dwindle - and so I hope that everyone can forgive my not being able to respond immediately.

However, I do want to let you know that I fully understand your situation - as well as that of others who have written and so graciously shared with me reasons for why they cannot attend. There need not be a reason either - since traveling on short notice and to high altitude can be reason enough. I will certainly be looking into setting up Skype access for those of you who might wish to listen in and add some comments of your own.

We will be burying Dad’s ashes in Durango, CO by Mary’s side shortly after on June 11th, I believe. There is a black granite grave marker there at the Greenmount Cemetery upon the hill that overlooks the town that they loved so much - a beautiful place for them to lay to rest together. On the stone are a female deer and a buck on either side, standing under the pines facing one another.

I have two things to ask of you, Rick.

One - do you have a CSG research fund where we may ask people to contibute money in lieu of sending flowers?

And two - we intend on storing Dad’s archives in a climate controlled storage facility around the corner from where he lived. We cannot remember who was going to work on going through these old papers, experiments, etc. but will have it set up so that it will be able to be accessed and easily opened with a table a chair which can be folded out. We will pay for the initial month and we can discuss if we will need to cover any subsequent months or the details of when and where these records will be stored more permanently. I suppose what I am asking of you here is to perhaps form a group of people who would like to participate in this project. We can talk about that more later since these archives will be in a safe place for the time being.

Thank you, Rick - we appreciate your desire to continue to forge ahead on Dad’s behalf - and in many ways on everyone’s behalf, since spreading the concepts of PCT truly can help make the world a better place.

Allie

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Barb and all

It is with considerable regret that I tell you that I will not be able to attend Bill’s Memorial in person. I say in person because I hope it might be possible – if you think it appropriate – for me to participate via Skype? I have been in some internal conflict about this because I want very much to attend the Memorial but I am also reluctant to leave home for more than a few hours because Linda had an operation on her foot (completely successful) and really can’t get around very well, and we have no one here who I feel comfortable prevailing upon to look after her for a couple days. She will be in a cast and unable to walk for another couple months so it’s unlikely that she will be mobile by the time of the Memorial. So I have decided to stay with her and hope that I can look in on (and perhaps say a few words at) the 3:00 Saturday Memorial and, perhaps, also participate in Alice’s Sunday discussion of Bill’s last book idea via the internet, again if you feel that would be appropriate.

I will say that I plan to work in two ways to ensure Bill’s legacy and make sure the world recognizes the enormous contribution made by this great and kind man to our understanding of the nature of living systems. First, I will continue to do what I think I do best – which is doing research and publishing papers on PCT. I think it’s important to put as much quality PCT based research into the scientific literature as possible to give it legitimacy and visibility. I plan to inundate the journals with papers based on PCT; it’s hard to get them into print but I have a pretty good track record and I think it’s worth the effort. Second, I will try to publish papers in the relevant scientific literature describing Bill’s accomplishments. I’m starting with trying to get a professional obituary published in American Psychologist, which, I believe, is the first psychological journal in which Bill is published (pre-dating the major 1960 piece in Perceptual and Motor Skills by three years: Powers, W. T., McFarland, R. L., & Clark, R. K. (1957). A general feedback theory of human behavior: A prospectus. American Psychologist, 12, 462.). If that doesn;t go I’ll look for other relevant venues for such an obituary.

Finally, I completely agree with Henry Yin that " Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected." It was Bill’s genius – and Bill’s alone – that produced the insights that are included in what we now call PCT and he, like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel and other scientific giants, should be recognized and celebrated for his contributions. And it is a tragedy that this recognition and celebration is currently occurring among a relatively small (but not all that small) group of people. We must work to give William T. Powers the place in scientific history that he deserves. And the main way I will try to do this is the way I would encourage all of us who recognize the enormity of BIll’s contribution to the life sciences to do it: by continuing, in whatever way we can – through research,application, publication – to build on the extraordinary foundation that Bill provided and described with such incredible lucidity.

Best regards

Rick

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:04 PM, bara0361@gmail.com bara0361@gmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

It’s been so comforting, reading all of your messages about Dad. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I continue to be amazed at the scope of his impact, in so many ways…

We will let you know just as soon as possible when the details have been finalized for Dad’s memorial…

For those arriving on Friday, June 7th, we will be making arrangements for a gathering.

Saturday, the 8th, the memorial will probably be around 3:00 pm. Anyone so compelled is welcome and encouraged to share a few (or many!) words.

On the 9th, Bill’s sister, Alice, would like to discuss the book that Dad had hoped to complete, but had so far just written the forward. There will be a conference room available for this purpose.

We appreciate your continued patience as we get through all of this. It’s been a bit difficult over a holiday weekend, as our hands are tied to some extent until Tuesday.

Thank you again, and many times over…

*barb

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:

All,

Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.

Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).

– Gary

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:

Hi Rick,

I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.

Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.

Henry

On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:

Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.

Best

Rick

=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU

from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:

Dear Bill:

In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.

As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.

The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.

The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.

You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms make
use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills
) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.

Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.

But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.

The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.

For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!

I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.

To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.

You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.

In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.

I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.

Thanks, brother.


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

==================================================

Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.

Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving
Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
Member, Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember, Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission
Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

Bara,

The “web monkey”, as you put it, for pctweb.org is Warren Mansell of the University of Manchester. It might be possible for him to arrange a Skype link or post a video, and you should contact him to check out the options.

Kent

···

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:31 AM, Fred Nickols
fred@nickols.us wrote:

I belong to several lists on LinkedIn and elsewhere where people have an interest in human behavior and performance. Few, however, know of or are interested
in PCT. I plan to post the following to those lists tomorrow. If anyone cares to comment regarding my post please do so today.

Fred Nickols

William T. Powers, the engineer/psychologist who developed Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) passed away on May 24, 2013 at the age of 86. PCT is a revolutionary and exciting theory of human behavior, one that invalidates much of what currently
passes as psychological research and existing theories of human behavior. Essentially, PCT views people as purposeful, “living control systems,” whose behavior shapes its consequences instead of the other way around. PCT is a feedback-governed view of human
behavior. It holds that we target certain variables for control and we compare our perceptions of the current state of those variables with our goal state or reference condition for those variables. If unacceptable gaps exist, we behave in ways that serve
to close those gaps. Thus it is that our behavior serves to control our perceptions. There are, however, other actors and factors at work that influence the same variables we are trying to control. Ordinarily these “disturbances” as they are known in PCT
are compensated for and pose no problem. On occasion they can prove overwhelming. Our control is far from perfect. PCT is rife with implications for researchers, those who simply want to understand human behavior and those who would manage human performance.

Powers will be laid to rest next to his wife, Mary, in a cemetery overlooking the city of Durango, CO. His work will continue, pursued by those who knew him and who came to know PCT. His theory will someday receive the recognition it
deserves – and so will he.

From: BePrint for Living, Inc /Shelley Roy [mailto:beprint@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 9:35 PM
To: bara0361@gmail.com;
controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: rsmarken@gmail.com;
gcziko@gmail.com;
hy43@duke.edu; 1@aut.me;
Fred@nickols.us; nview@aol.com;
bdw1332@yahoo.com;
heather.bell@uleth.ca;
RichardPfau4153@aol.com;
sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu;
tcloak@unm.edu; mmermel@mikemermel.com;
jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk;
brian.mingus@colorado.edu;
bbollmann@bbollmann.com;
apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com;
dag@livingcontrolsystems.com;
wmansell@gmail.com;
sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk;
Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au;
mmt@mmtaylor.net; powers_w@frontier.net;
bruce.nevin@gmail.com;
rjrobertson2@comcast.net;
denny68flh@gmail.com;
MCCLEL@grinnell.edu;
hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu;
CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu;
davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com;
fplooij@kiddygroup.com

Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Please notify all of us of the Skype call. I have your Dad listed on my contact if you are using his login.

Shelley A.W. Roy

Be Creating!

-----Original Message-----

From: bara0361 bara0361@gmail.com

To: Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com

Cc: Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com; Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com; Henry Yin <hy43@duke.edu >;
Autumn Winter 1@aut.me; Fred and Gail Nickols Fred@nickols.us; Fred and Perry Good <nview@aol.com >; Brett
Wilkinson bdw1332@yahoo.com; Heather Bell heather.bell@uleth.ca; Richard Pfau <RichardPfau4153@aol.com >;
Sergio Verduzco-Flores sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; Ted Cloak tcloak@unm.edu; Mike Mermel <mmermel@mikemermel.com >;
Richard Kennaway jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; Brian Mingus brian.mingus@colorado.edu; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann <bbollmann@bbollmann.com >;
Alice McElhone apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com <bbabbott@frontier.com >;
Dag Forssell dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com; Sara Tai <sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk >;
Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; <mmt@mmtaylor.net >
mmt@mmtaylor.net; Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net; Bruce Nevin <bruce.nevin@gmail.com >;
rjrobertson2@comcast.net rjrobertson2@comcast.net; Denny Powers <denny68flh@gmail.com >;
McClelland, Kent MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; Hugh Petrie hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) <CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu >;
David Goldstein davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; Shelly Roy beprint@aol.com; Frans Plooij fplooij@kiddygroup.com

Sent: Mon, May 27, 2013 7:15 pm

Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Bill’s grandsons (my boys) are very computer savvy, and brought Dad to Derek’s wedding via Skype. We shall certainly work on this for you!

*barb

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Rick - I have been trying to keep up with all of the responses, but find my reserves are starting to dwindle - and so I hope that everyone
can forgive my not being able to respond immediately.

However, I do want to let you know that I fully understand your situation - as well as that of others who have written and so graciously shared
with me reasons for why they cannot attend. There need not be a reason either - since traveling on short notice and to high altitude can be reason enough. I will certainly be looking into setting up Skype access for those of you who might wish to listen in
and add some comments of your own.

We will be burying Dad’s ashes in Durango, CO by Mary’s side shortly after on June 11th, I believe. There is a black granite grave marker there at the Greenmount Cemetery upon the hill that overlooks the town that they loved so much - a beautiful place for
them to lay to rest together. On the stone are a female deer and a buck on either side, standing under the pines facing one another.

I have two things to ask of you, Rick.

One - do you have a CSG research fund where we may ask people to contibute money in lieu of sending flowers?

And two - we intend on storing Dad’s archives in a climate controlled storage facility around the corner from where he lived. We cannot remember
who was going to work on going through these old papers, experiments, etc. but will have it set up so that it will be able to be accessed and easily opened with a table a chair which can be folded out. We will pay for the initial month and we can discuss if
we will need to cover any subsequent months or the details of when and where these records will be stored more permanently. I suppose what I am asking of you here is to perhaps form a group of people who would like to participate in this project. We can talk
about that more later since these archives will be in a safe place for the time being.

Thank you, Rick - we appreciate your desire to continue to forge ahead on Dad’s behalf - and in many ways on everyone’s behalf, since spreading
the concepts of PCT truly can help make the world a better place.

Allie

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Barb and all

It is with considerable regret that I tell you that I will not be able to attend Bill’s Memorial in person. I say in person because I hope it might be possible – if you think it appropriate – for me to participate via Skype? I have been in some internal conflict
about this because I want very much to attend the Memorial but I am also reluctant to leave home for more than a few hours because Linda had an operation on her foot (completely successful) and really can’t get around very well, and we have no one here who
I feel comfortable prevailing upon to look after her for a couple days. She will be in a cast and unable to walk for another couple months so it’s unlikely that she will be mobile by the time of the Memorial. So I have decided to stay with her and hope that
I can look in on (and perhaps say a few words at) the 3:00 Saturday Memorial and, perhaps, also participate in Alice’s Sunday discussion of Bill’s last book idea via the internet, again if you feel that would be appropriate.

I will say that I plan to work in two ways to ensure Bill’s legacy and make sure the world recognizes the enormous contribution made by this great and kind man to our understanding of the nature of living systems. First, I will continue to do what I think I
do best – which is doing research and publishing papers on PCT. I think it’s important to put as much quality PCT based research into the scientific literature as possible to give it legitimacy and visibility. I plan to inundate the journals with papers based
on PCT; it’s hard to get them into print but I have a pretty good track record and I think it’s worth the effort. Second, I will try to publish papers in the relevant scientific literature describing Bill’s accomplishments. I’m starting with trying to get
a professional obituary published in American Psychologist, which, I believe, is the first psychological journal in which Bill is published (pre-dating the major 1960 piece in Perceptual and Motor Skills by three years: Powers, W. T., McFarland, R. L., & Clark,
R. K. (1957). A general feedback theory of human behavior: A prospectus. American Psychologist, 12, 462.). If that doesn;t go I’ll look for other relevant venues for such an obituary.

Finally, I completely agree with Henry Yin that " Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected." It was Bill’s genius – and Bill’s alone – that produced the insights that are included in what we now call PCT and he, like Galileo, Newton, Darwin,
Mendel and other scientific giants, should be recognized and celebrated for his contributions. And it is a tragedy that this recognition and celebration is currently occurring among a relatively small (but not all that small) group of people. We must work
to give William T. Powers the place in scientific history that he deserves. And the main way I will try to do this is the way I would encourage all of us who recognize the enormity of BIll’s contribution to the life sciences to do it: by continuing, in whatever
way we can – through research,application, publication – to build on the extraordinary foundation that Bill provided and described with such incredible lucidity.

Best regards

Rick

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:04 PM,
bara0361@gmail.com bara0361@gmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

It's been so comforting, reading all of your messages about Dad.  Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences.  I continue to be amazed at the scope

of his impact, in so many ways…

We will let you know just as soon as possible when the details have been finalized for Dad’s memorial…

For those arriving on Friday, June 7th, we will be making arrangements for a gathering.

Saturday, the 8th, the memorial will probably be around 3:00 pm. Anyone so compelled is welcome and encouraged to share a few (or many!) words.

On the 9th, Bill’s sister, Alice, would like to discuss the book that Dad had hoped to complete, but had so far just written the forward. There will be a conference room available for this purpose.

We appreciate your continued patience as we get through all of this. It’s been a bit difficult over a holiday weekend, as our hands are tied
to some extent until Tuesday.

Thank you again, and many times over…

*barb

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:

All,

Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.

Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the
conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).

– Gary

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:

Hi Rick,

I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like
to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.

Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can
produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.

Henry

On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:

Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and
I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me.
I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.

Best

Rick

=====================================================

Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700

From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU

Subject: Powers

To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU

from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:

Dear Bill:

In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me

that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you

in only two published places, both of which were constrained by

narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I

have set down in some public place some further testimonial.

Therefore this.

As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your

followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to

understand your view of perception and action, I found my own

accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,

even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown

hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had

broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new

understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological

method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take

on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to

do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the

various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is

what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut

the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –

was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the

one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual

functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems

a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of

emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and

system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with

mainstream methods of psychological research.

The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of

course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires

abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most

people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –

which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.

Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop

requires circular causation, with every function in the loop

performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies

continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to

the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot

have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and

straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops

while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.

William of Occam would not approve.

The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to

grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean

it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its

functioning.

You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical

devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when

electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote

about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms make

use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which

the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –

that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be

sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as

the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know

that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in

the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade

or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year

1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor

Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the

historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960

will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period

before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.

Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your

theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in

psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,

reading here and there in the journals of mathematical

psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing

with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible

at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in

the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement

error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical

theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.

But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the

compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of

human perception and action. You saw that there was not a

sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a

personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but

simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into

one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you

say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is

crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the

enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously

disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin

with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will

take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the

hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize

that you and others have already built models having two or three

levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that

the models actually work.

The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding

categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the

relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,

too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing

research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early

theory is a remarkable achievement.

For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you

deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three

together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that

happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am

lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978

to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number

5!

I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired

a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,

conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I

still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began

rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general

nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come

upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile

of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am

writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple

ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an

hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as

simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are

multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to

describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I

find now and again that I have opened further regions of

complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an

hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I

do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel

that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and

exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I

am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you

have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and

I have guided mine only with thinking.

To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a

theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first

conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.

Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages

answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your

1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more

single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my

experience with academic social scientists, my questions have

usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines

or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a

publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean

all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I

have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.

But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than

any.

You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not

to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the

slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal

upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this

strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our

anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished

beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,

persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and

modest under praise.

In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the

intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.

I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me

a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,

a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You

have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more

than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would

say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make

PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,

a privilege, and a comfort.

Thanks, brother.

Richard S. Marken PhD

rsmarken@gmail.com

www.mindreadings.com

==================================================

Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees
or groups with which I am associated.

Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD

Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving

Past President & Current Steering Committee Member,
Champaign County Bikes

Member,
Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember
,
Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission

Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page

Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page

Richard S. Marken PhD

rsmarken@gmail.com

www.mindreadings.com

I will miss Bill. I am so sad to hear this. I talk about PCT and mention his name several times a month. I am proud to tell people that PCT will someday become mainstream, and that I have had (and witnessed) many stimulating discussions with the man who formulated it. RIP. We will miss you.

···

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.

Best

Rick

=====================================================

Date: Wed, 13 Oct
1999 19:49:26 -0700

From: Philip Runkel
runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU

Subject: Powers

To:
CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU

from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:

Dear Bill:

In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me

that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you

in only two published places, both of which were constrained by

narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before
I

have set down in some public place some further testimonial.

Therefore this.

As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your

followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove
to

understand your view of perception and action, I found my own

accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,

even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown

hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had

broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new

understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological

method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take

on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont
to

do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the

various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is

what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword
that cut

the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –

was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the

one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual

functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect
seems

a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of

emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and

system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with

mainstream methods of psychological research.

The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of

course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn,
requires

abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most

people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –

which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.

Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop

requires circular causation, with every function in the loop

performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies

continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to

the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot

have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and

straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with
loops

while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.

William of Occam would not approve.

The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to

grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I
mean

it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its

functioning.

You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical

devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when

electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even
wrote

about “feedback.” But the manner in which living
organisms make

use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which

the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –

that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be

sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as

the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know

that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in

the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade

or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year

1960 (when your two articles appeared in _Perceptual and Motor

Skills_) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the

historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before
1960

will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period

before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.

Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your

theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in

psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,

reading here and there in the journals of mathematical

psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing

with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it
possible

at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in

the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement

error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of
mathematical

theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.

But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the

compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of

human perception and action. You saw that there was not a

sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a

personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but

simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into

one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As
you

say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What
is

crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the

enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds.
Previously

disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin

with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will

take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the

hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize

that you and others have already built models having two or three

levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that

the models actually work.

The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding

categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the

relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,

too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing

research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early

theory is a remarkable achievement.

For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you

deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three

together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that

happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am

lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in
1978

to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number

5!

I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired

a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,

conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I

still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began

rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general

nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come

upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile

of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I
am

writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple

ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an

hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as

simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas
are

multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to

describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I

find now and again that I have opened further regions of

complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take
an

hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I

do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel

that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and

exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But
I

am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you

have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and

I have guided mine only with thinking.

To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a

theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very
first

conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.

Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages

answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your

1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more

single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my

experience with academic social scientists, my questions have

usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines

or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a

publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean

all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I

have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.

But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than

any.

You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not

to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the

slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal

upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this

strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our

anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished

beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,

persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and

modest under praise.

In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the

intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.

I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given
me

a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,

a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You

have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more

than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would

say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to
make

PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,

a privilege, and a comfort.

Thanks, brother.


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

Hi, Fred,

This is a fine plan.

I’d suggest including the word or concept of “hierarchical” if you have space enough. That’s what most clearly differentiates Powersian PCT from other, less well thought out, ideas of feedback in psychology, IMO.

Regards,

Ted

···

From: Fred Nickols [mailto:fred@nickols.us]
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 6:32 AM
To: ‘BePrint for Living, Inc /Shelley Roy’; bara0361@gmail.com; controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: rsmarken@gmail.com; gcziko@gmail.com; hy43@duke.edu; 1@aut.me; nview@aol.com; bdw1332@yahoo.com; heather.bell@uleth.ca; RichardPfau4153@aol.com; sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; tcloak@unm.edu; mmermel@mikemermel.com; jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; brian.mingus@colorado.edu; bbollmann@bbollmann.com; apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com; dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; wmansell@gmail.com; sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net; powers_w@frontier.net; bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net; denny68flh@gmail.com; MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; fplooij@kiddygroup.com
Subject: RE: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

I belong to several lists on LinkedIn and elsewhere where people have an interest in human behavior and performance. Few, however, know of or are interested in PCT. I plan to post the following to those lists tomorrow. If anyone cares to comment regarding my post please do so today.

Fred Nickols

William T. Powers, the engineer/psychologist who developed Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) passed away on May 24, 2013 at the age of 86. PCT is a revolutionary and exciting theory of human behavior, one that invalidates much of what currently passes as psychological research and existing theories of human behavior. Essentially, PCT views people as purposeful, “living control systems,” whose behavior shapes its consequences instead of the other way around. PCT is a feedback-governed view of human behavior. It holds that we target certain variables for control and we compare our perceptions of the current state of those variables with our goal state or reference condition for those variables. If unacceptable gaps exist, we behave in ways that serve to close those gaps. Thus it is that our behavior serves to control our perceptions. There are, however, other actors and factors at work that influence the same variables we are trying to control. Ordinarily these “disturbances” as they are known in PCT are compensated for and pose no problem. On occasion they can prove overwhelming. Our control is far from perfect. PCT is rife with implications for researchers, those who simply want to understand human behavior and those who would manage human performance.

Powers will be laid to rest next to his wife, Mary, in a cemetery overlooking the city of Durango, CO. His work will continue, pursued by those who knew him and who came to know PCT. His theory will someday receive the recognition it deserves – and so will he.

From: BePrint for Living, Inc /Shelley Roy [mailto:beprint@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 9:35 PM
To: bara0361@gmail.com; controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: rsmarken@gmail.com; gcziko@gmail.com; hy43@duke.edu; 1@aut.me; Fred@nickols.us; nview@aol.com; bdw1332@yahoo.com; heather.bell@uleth.ca; RichardPfau4153@aol.com; sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; tcloak@unm.edu; mmermel@mikemermel.com; jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; brian.mingus@colorado.edu; bbollmann@bbollmann.com; apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com; dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; wmansell@gmail.com; sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net; powers_w@frontier.net; bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net; denny68flh@gmail.com; MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; fplooij@kiddygroup.com
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Please notify all of us of the Skype call. I have your Dad listed on my contact if you are using his login.

Shelley A.W. Roy
Be Creating!

-----Original Message-----
From: bara0361 bara0361@gmail.com
To: Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com; Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com; Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu; Autumn Winter 1@aut.me; Fred and Gail Nickols Fred@nickols.us; Fred and Perry Good nview@aol.com; Brett Wilkinson bdw1332@yahoo.com; Heather Bell heather.bell@uleth.ca; Richard Pfau RichardPfau4153@aol.com; Sergio Verduzco-Flores sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; Ted Cloak tcloak@unm.edu; Mike Mermel mmermel@mikemermel.com; Richard Kennaway jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; Brian Mingus brian.mingus@colorado.edu; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann bbollmann@bbollmann.com; Alice McElhone apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com bbabbott@frontier.com; Dag Forssell dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com; Sara Tai sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net mmt@mmtaylor.net; Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net; Bruce Nevin bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net rjrobertson2@comcast.net; Denny Powers denny68flh@gmail.com; McClelland, Kent MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; Hugh Petrie hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; David Goldstein davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; Shelly Roy beprint@aol.com; Frans Plooij fplooij@kiddygroup.com
Sent: Mon, May 27, 2013 7:15 pm
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Bill’s grandsons (my boys) are very computer savvy, and brought Dad to Derek’s wedding via Skype. We shall certainly work on this for you!

*barb

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Rick - I have been trying to keep up with all of the responses, but find my reserves are starting to dwindle - and so I hope that everyone can forgive my not being able to respond immediately.

However, I do want to let you know that I fully understand your situation - as well as that of others who have written and so graciously shared with me reasons for why they cannot attend. There need not be a reason either - since traveling on short notice and to high altitude can be reason enough. I will certainly be looking into setting up Skype access for those of you who might wish to listen in and add some comments of your own.

We will be burying Dad’s ashes in Durango, CO by Mary’s side shortly after on June 11th, I believe. There is a black granite grave marker there at the Greenmount Cemetery upon the hill that overlooks the town that they loved so much - a beautiful place for them to lay to rest together. On the stone are a female deer and a buck on either side, standing under the pines facing one another.

I have two things to ask of you, Rick.

One - do you have a CSG research fund where we may ask people to contibute money in lieu of sending flowers?

And two - we intend on storing Dad’s archives in a climate controlled storage facility around the corner from where he lived. We cannot remember who was going to work on going through these old papers, experiments, etc. but will have it set up so that it will be able to be accessed and easily opened with a table a chair which can be folded out. We will pay for the initial month and we can discuss if we will need to cover any subsequent months or the details of when and where these records will be stored more permanently. I suppose what I am asking of you here is to perhaps form a group of people who would like to participate in this project. We can talk about that more later since these archives will be in a safe place for the time being.

Thank you, Rick - we appreciate your desire to continue to forge ahead on Dad’s behalf - and in many ways on everyone’s behalf, since spreading the concepts of PCT truly can help make the world a better place.

Allie

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Barb and all

It is with considerable regret that I tell you that I will not be able to attend Bill’s Memorial in person. I say in person because I hope it might be possible – if you think it appropriate – for me to participate via Skype? I have been in some internal conflict about this because I want very much to attend the Memorial but I am also reluctant to leave home for more than a few hours because Linda had an operation on her foot (completely successful) and really can’t get around very well, and we have no one here who I feel comfortable prevailing upon to look after her for a couple days. She will be in a cast and unable to walk for another couple months so it’s unlikely that she will be mobile by the time of the Memorial. So I have decided to stay with her and hope that I can look in on (and perhaps say a few words at) the 3:00 Saturday Memorial and, perhaps, also participate in Alice’s Sunday discussion of Bill’s last book idea via the internet, again if you feel that would be appropriate.

I will say that I plan to work in two ways to ensure Bill’s legacy and make sure the world recognizes the enormous contribution made by this great and kind man to our understanding of the nature of living systems. First, I will continue to do what I think I do best – which is doing research and publishing papers on PCT. I think it’s important to put as much quality PCT based research into the scientific literature as possible to give it legitimacy and visibility. I plan to inundate the journals with papers based on PCT; it’s hard to get them into print but I have a pretty good track record and I think it’s worth the effort. Second, I will try to publish papers in the relevant scientific literature describing Bill’s accomplishments. I’m starting with trying to get a professional obituary published in American Psychologist, which, I believe, is the first psychological journal in which Bill is published (pre-dating the major 1960 piece in Perceptual and Motor Skills by three years: Powers, W. T., McFarland, R. L., & Clark, R. K. (1957). A general feedback theory of human behavior: A prospectus. American Psychologist, 12, 462.). If that doesn;t go I’ll look for other relevant venues for such an obituary.

Finally, I completely agree with Henry Yin that " Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected." It was Bill’s genius – and Bill’s alone – that produced the insights that are included in what we now call PCT and he, like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel and other scientific giants, should be recognized and celebrated for his contributions. And it is a tragedy that this recognition and celebration is currently occurring among a relatively small (but not all that small) group of people. We must work to give William T. Powers the place in scientific history that he deserves. And the main way I will try to do this is the way I would encourage all of us who recognize the enormity of BIll’s contribution to the life sciences to do it: by continuing, in whatever way we can – through research,application, publication – to build on the extraordinary foundation that Bill provided and described with such incredible lucidity.

Best regards

Rick

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:04 PM, bara0361@gmail.com bara0361@gmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

It’s been so comforting, reading all of your messages about Dad. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I continue to be amazed at the scope of his impact, in so many ways…

We will let you know just as soon as possible when the details have been finalized for Dad’s memorial…

For those arriving on Friday, June 7th, we will be making arrangements for a gathering.

Saturday, the 8th, the memorial will probably be around 3:00 pm. Anyone so compelled is welcome and encouraged to share a few (or many!) words.

On the 9th, Bill’s sister, Alice, would like to discuss the book that Dad had hoped to complete, but had so far just written the forward. There will be a conference room available for this purpose.

We appreciate your continued patience as we get through all of this. It’s been a bit difficult over a holiday weekend, as our hands are tied to some extent until Tuesday.

Thank you again, and many times over…

*barb

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:

All,

Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.

Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).

– Gary

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:

Hi Rick,

I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.

Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.

Henry

On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:

Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.

Best

Rick

=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU

from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:

Dear Bill:

In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.

As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.

The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.

The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.

You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms make
use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills
) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.

Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.

But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.

The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.

For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!

I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.

To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.

You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.

In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.

I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.

Thanks, brother.


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

==================================================

Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.

Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving
Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
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Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

Many thanks to all who comments on my planned post to various internet lists. Here is the final version of what I posted:

William T. Powers, the engineer/psychologist who developed Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) passed away on May 24, 2013 at the age of 86. PCT is a revolutionary and exciting theory of human behavior, one that invalidates much of what currently passes as psychological research and existing theories of human behavior. Essentially, PCT views people as purposeful, “living control systems,” whose behavior shapes its consequences instead of the other way around. PCT is a feedback-governed view of human behavior. It holds that we target certain variables for control and we compare our perceptions of the current state of those variables with our goal state or reference condition for those variables. If unacceptable gaps exist, we behave in ways that serve to close those gaps. Thus it is that our behavior serves to control our perceptions. There are, however, other actors and factors at work that influence the same variables we are trying to control. Ordinarily these “disturbances” as they are known in PCT are compensated for and pose no problem. On occasion they can prove overwhelming. Our control is far from perfect. PCT abounds with insights, implications and new directions for researchers, those who simply want to understand human behavior and those who would manage human performance in the workplace.

Powers will be laid to rest next to his wife, Mary, in a cemetery overlooking the city of Durango, CO. His work will continue, pursued by those who came to know Powers and PCT. His theory will someday receive the recognition it deserves – and so will he.

Those interested in learning more about PCT will find a primer at the following link: http://www.nickols.us/PCT101.pdf. It contains a basic explanation of PCT (reviewed and approved by Powers) as well as pointers to several of Powers’ more important books. Two useful and relevant websites can be found at http://www.pctweb.org and http://www.iapct.org.

···

From: Bruce Nevin [mailto:bruce.nevin@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 11:42 PM
To: Fred Nickols
Cc: BePrint for Living, Inc /Shelley Roy; 328babs .; Alison Powers; Richard Marken; Gary Cziko; Henry Yin; Autumn Winter; nview; Brett Wilkinson; Heather Bell; Richard Pfau; Sergio Verduzco-Flores; Ted Cloak; Mike Mermel; Richard Kennaway; Brian Mingus; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann; APMcElhone@aol.com; Bruce Abbott; Dag Forssell; Warren Mansell; sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim Carey; mmt@mmtaylor.net; Bill Powers; rjrobertson2@comcast.net; denny68flh@gmail.com; Kent McClelland; Hugh Petrie; Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet); David Goldstein; F.X. Plooij
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Nice, concise statement. It’s a kind of Necker cube challenge to speak simultaneously to cognoscenti and newcomers I agree with Ted about including something about hierarchical control, if you can.

Also, “rife” extends to a range negative of connotations.

rife /rif/

Adjective

(esp. of something undesirable or harmful) Of common occurrence; widespread.

Adverb

In an unchecked or widespread manner.

Synonyms

common - prevalent - widespread

prevalent especially to an increasing degree <suspicion and cruelty were rife — W. E. B. DuBois>. 2. : abundant, common. 3. : copiously supplied : abounding …

Maybe something like “PCT abounds with insights” or if its not too hyperbolic maybe even something like “PCT is a cornucopia of new directions and insights for researchers, for those who simply want to understand why we do what we do, and for those who would manage human performance.”

/B

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 8:31 AM, Fred Nickols fred@nickols.us wrote:

I belong to several lists on LinkedIn and elsewhere where people have an interest in human behavior and performance. Few, however, know of or are interested in PCT. I plan to post the following to those lists tomorrow. If anyone cares to comment regarding my post please do so today.

Fred Nickols

William T. Powers, the engineer/psychologist who developed Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) passed away on May 24, 2013 at the age of 86. PCT is a revolutionary and exciting theory of human behavior, one that invalidates much of what currently passes as psychological research and existing theories of human behavior. Essentially, PCT views people as purposeful, “living control systems,” whose behavior shapes its consequences instead of the other way around. PCT is a feedback-governed view of human behavior. It holds that we target certain variables for control and we compare our perceptions of the current state of those variables with our goal state or reference condition for those variables. If unacceptable gaps exist, we behave in ways that serve to close those gaps. Thus it is that our behavior serves to control our perceptions. There are, however, other actors and factors at work that influence the same variables we are trying to control. Ordinarily these “disturbances” as they are known in PCT are compensated for and pose no problem. On occasion they can prove overwhelming. Our control is far from perfect. PCT is rife with implications for researchers, those who simply want to understand human behavior and those who would manage human performance.

Powers will be laid to rest next to his wife, Mary, in a cemetery overlooking the city of Durango, CO. His work will continue, pursued by those who knew him and who came to know PCT. His theory will someday receive the recognition it deserves – and so will he.

From: BePrint for Living, Inc /Shelley Roy [mailto:beprint@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 9:35 PM
To: bara0361@gmail.com; controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: rsmarken@gmail.com; gcziko@gmail.com; hy43@duke.edu; 1@aut.me; Fred@nickols.us; nview@aol.com; bdw1332@yahoo.com; heather.bell@uleth.ca; RichardPfau4153@aol.com; sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; tcloak@unm.edu; mmermel@mikemermel.com; jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; brian.mingus@colorado.edu; bbollmann@bbollmann.com; apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com; dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; wmansell@gmail.com; sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net; powers_w@frontier.net; bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net; denny68flh@gmail.com; MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; fplooij@kiddygroup.com

Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Please notify all of us of the Skype call. I have your Dad listed on my contact if you are using his login.

Shelley A.W. Roy
Be Creating!

-----Original Message-----
From: bara0361 bara0361@gmail.com
To: Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com
Cc: Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com; Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com; Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu; Autumn Winter 1@aut.me; Fred and Gail Nickols Fred@nickols.us; Fred and Perry Good nview@aol.com; Brett Wilkinson bdw1332@yahoo.com; Heather Bell heather.bell@uleth.ca; Richard Pfau RichardPfau4153@aol.com; Sergio Verduzco-Flores sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; Ted Cloak tcloak@unm.edu; Mike Mermel mmermel@mikemermel.com; Richard Kennaway jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; Brian Mingus brian.mingus@colorado.edu; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann bbollmann@bbollmann.com; Alice McElhone apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com bbabbott@frontier.com; Dag Forssell dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com; Sara Tai sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net mmt@mmtaylor.net; Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net; Bruce Nevin bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net rjrobertson2@comcast.net; Denny Powers denny68flh@gmail.com; McClelland, Kent MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; Hugh Petrie hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; Control Systems Group Network (CSGnet) CSGNET@listserv.illinois.edu; David Goldstein davidgoldsteinphd@gmail.com; Shelly Roy beprint@aol.com; Frans Plooij fplooij@kiddygroup.com
Sent: Mon, May 27, 2013 7:15 pm
Subject: Re: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

Bill’s grandsons (my boys) are very computer savvy, and brought Dad to Derek’s wedding via Skype. We shall certainly work on this for you!

*barb

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Rick - I have been trying to keep up with all of the responses, but find my reserves are starting to dwindle - and so I hope that everyone can forgive my not being able to respond immediately.

However, I do want to let you know that I fully understand your situation - as well as that of others who have written and so graciously shared with me reasons for why they cannot attend. There need not be a reason either - since traveling on short notice and to high altitude can be reason enough. I will certainly be looking into setting up Skype access for those of you who might wish to listen in and add some comments of your own.

We will be burying Dad’s ashes in Durango, CO by Mary’s side shortly after on June 11th, I believe. There is a black granite grave marker there at the Greenmount Cemetery upon the hill that overlooks the town that they loved so much - a beautiful place for them to lay to rest together. On the stone are a female deer and a buck on either side, standing under the pines facing one another.

I have two things to ask of you, Rick.

One - do you have a CSG research fund where we may ask people to contibute money in lieu of sending flowers?

And two - we intend on storing Dad’s archives in a climate controlled storage facility around the corner from where he lived. We cannot remember who was going to work on going through these old papers, experiments, etc. but will have it set up so that it will be able to be accessed and easily opened with a table a chair which can be folded out. We will pay for the initial month and we can discuss if we will need to cover any subsequent months or the details of when and where these records will be stored more permanently. I suppose what I am asking of you here is to perhaps form a group of people who would like to participate in this project. We can talk about that more later since these archives will be in a safe place for the time being.

Thank you, Rick - we appreciate your desire to continue to forge ahead on Dad’s behalf - and in many ways on everyone’s behalf, since spreading the concepts of PCT truly can help make the world a better place.

Allie

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:

Dear Barb and all

It is with considerable regret that I tell you that I will not be able to attend Bill’s Memorial in person. I say in person because I hope it might be possible – if you think it appropriate – for me to participate via Skype? I have been in some internal conflict about this because I want very much to attend the Memorial but I am also reluctant to leave home for more than a few hours because Linda had an operation on her foot (completely successful) and really can’t get around very well, and we have no one here who I feel comfortable prevailing upon to look after her for a couple days. She will be in a cast and unable to walk for another couple months so it’s unlikely that she will be mobile by the time of the Memorial. So I have decided to stay with her and hope that I can look in on (and perhaps say a few words at) the 3:00 Saturday Memorial and, perhaps, also participate in Alice’s Sunday discussion of Bill’s last book idea via the internet, again if you feel that would be appropriate.

I will say that I plan to work in two ways to ensure Bill’s legacy and make sure the world recognizes the enormous contribution made by this great and kind man to our understanding of the nature of living systems. First, I will continue to do what I think I do best – which is doing research and publishing papers on PCT. I think it’s important to put as much quality PCT based research into the scientific literature as possible to give it legitimacy and visibility. I plan to inundate the journals with papers based on PCT; it’s hard to get them into print but I have a pretty good track record and I think it’s worth the effort. Second, I will try to publish papers in the relevant scientific literature describing Bill’s accomplishments. I’m starting with trying to get a professional obituary published in American Psychologist, which, I believe, is the first psychological journal in which Bill is published (pre-dating the major 1960 piece in Perceptual and Motor Skills by three years: Powers, W. T., McFarland, R. L., & Clark, R. K. (1957). A general feedback theory of human behavior: A prospectus. American Psychologist, 12, 462.). If that doesn;t go I’ll look for other relevant venues for such an obituary.

Finally, I completely agree with Henry Yin that " Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected." It was Bill’s genius – and Bill’s alone – that produced the insights that are included in what we now call PCT and he, like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Mendel and other scientific giants, should be recognized and celebrated for his contributions. And it is a tragedy that this recognition and celebration is currently occurring among a relatively small (but not all that small) group of people. We must work to give William T. Powers the place in scientific history that he deserves. And the main way I will try to do this is the way I would encourage all of us who recognize the enormity of BIll’s contribution to the life sciences to do it: by continuing, in whatever way we can – through research,application, publication – to build on the extraordinary foundation that Bill provided and described with such incredible lucidity.

Best regards

Rick

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:04 PM, bara0361@gmail.com bara0361@gmail.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

It’s been so comforting, reading all of your messages about Dad. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I continue to be amazed at the scope of his impact, in so many ways…

We will let you know just as soon as possible when the details have been finalized for Dad’s memorial…

For those arriving on Friday, June 7th, we will be making arrangements for a gathering.

Saturday, the 8th, the memorial will probably be around 3:00 pm. Anyone so compelled is welcome and encouraged to share a few (or many!) words.

On the 9th, Bill’s sister, Alice, would like to discuss the book that Dad had hoped to complete, but had so far just written the forward. There will be a conference room available for this purpose.

We appreciate your continued patience as we get through all of this. It’s been a bit difficult over a holiday weekend, as our hands are tied to some extent until Tuesday.

Thank you again, and many times over…

*barb

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com wrote:

All,

Allie mentioned the memorial for Bill being June 8 - 9 although the original conference was scheduled for June 7 - 9.

Can anyone let me know when the times the memorial will be and when others plan to arrive and leave Boulder? I hadn’t made plans to be at the conference (I had another commitment, but I would like to participate in the memorial activities for Bill).

– Gary

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu wrote:

Hi Rick,

I am familiar with Runkel’s letter. Was moved the first time I read it and rereading it now I find that it captures very well how I feel. He said everything I would like to say. But I hope you (Bill’s friend and collaborator for so long) will be able to write something just as eloquent.

Not since Mendel has there been a great man so neglected. But the power of dogma comes from highly efficient control systems, and we know how much resistance they can produce. The few of us who understand control should show future generations that there has indeed been some human progress since Mendel, by fully expressing our appreciation of Bill’s work.

Henry

On May 26, 2013, at 12:10 PM, Richard Marken wrote:

Dag posted this to CSGNet but I thought I would report it to everyone on this list since it includes people who may not be on CSGNet. It’s a letter from Phil to Bill and I wish I had the skill and poise to write it because it is a full-throated expression of exactly the way I feel about Bill. Phil’s path to PCT exactly mirrors mine, down to the fact that it was the 1978 Psych Review article that lite the PCT fire under me. I want to thank Dag for preserving and posting Phil’s eloquent homage.

Best

Rick

=====================================================
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 19:49:26 -0700
From: Philip Runkel runk@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: Powers
To: CSGNET@POSTOFFICE.CSO.UIUC.EDU

from Phil Runkel on 13 October 1999:

Dear Bill:

In a moment of musing on the fragility of life, it occurred to me
that I had set down my admiration, respect, and affection for you
in only two published places, both of which were constrained by
narrow purposes. And I do not want one of us to expire before I
have set down in some public place some further testimonial.
Therefore this.

As you know, I have been reading your writings and those of your
followers since 1985. I have told you before how, as I strove to
understand your view of perception and action, I found my own
accustomed views undergoing wrenching, unsettling, unhinging,
even frightening changes. I found myself having to disown
hundreds, maybe thousands of pages which at one time I had
broadcast to my peers with pride. I found, too, that as my new
understanding grew, my previous confusions about psychological
method, previously a gallimaufry of embarrassments, began to take
on an orderliness. Some simply vanished, as chimeras are wont to
do. Others lost their crippling effects when I saw how the
various methods could be assigned their proper uses – this is
what I wrote about in “Casting Nets.” For me, the sword that cut
the Gordian knot – my tangle of methodological embarrassments –
was the distinction between counting instances of acts, on the
one hand, and making a tangible, working model of individual
functioning, on the other. That idea, which in retrospect seems
a simple one, was enough to dissipate (after some months of
emotion-fraught reorganization of some cherished principles and
system concepts) about 30 years of daily dissatisfaction with
mainstream methods of psychological research.

The idea that permits making tangible, working models is, of
course, the negative feedback loop. And that, in turn, requires
abandoning the almost universally unquestioned assumption by most
people, including psychologists, of straight-line causation –
which, in turn, includes the conceptions of beginning and ending.
Displacing that theoretical baggage, the negative feedback loop
requires circular causation, with every function in the loop
performing as both cause and effect. That, in turn, implies
continuous functioning (beginnings and endings are relegated to
the convenience of perception at the fifth level). One cannot
have it both ways. Living creatures do not loop on Mondays and
straight-line on Tuesdays. They do not turn the page with loops
while reading the print in linear cause-to-effect episodes.
William of Occam would not approve.

The loop, too, is a simple idea. I don’t say it is easy to
grasp. I remember the difficulty I had with it in 1985. I mean
it is a simple idea once you can feel the simultaneity of its
functioning.

You did not invent the loop. It existed in a few mechanical
devices in antiquity, and came to engineering fruition when
electrical devices became common. Some psychologists even wrote
about “feedback.” But the manner in which living organisms make
use of the feedback loop – or I could say the manner in which
the feedback loop enabled living creatures to come into being –
that insight is yours alone. That insight by itself should be
sufficient to put you down on the pages of the history books as
the founder of the science of psychology. I am sure you know
that I am not, in that sentence, speaking in hyperbole, but in
the straightforward, common meanings of the words. In a decade
or two, I think, historians of psychology will be naming the year
1960 (when your two articles appeared in Perceptual and Motor
Skills
) as the beginning of the modern era. Maybe the
historians will call it the Great Divide. The period before 1960
will be treated much as historians of chemistry treat the period
before Lavoisier brought quantification to that science.

Using the negative feedback loop as the building-block of your
theory also enabled you to show how mathematics could be used in
psychological theorizing. (I spent a few years, long ago,
reading here and there in the journals of mathematical
psychology. I found that most articles were actually dealing
with statistics.) Your true use of numbers has made it possible
at last to test theory by the quantitative degree of approach, in
the behavior of each individual, to the limits of measurement
error, as in other sciences. This incorporation of mathematical
theorizing was another of your contributions to the discipline.

But even making a science possible was not enough to fill the
compass of your vision. You saw the unity of all aspects of
human perception and action. You saw that there was not a
sensory psychology over here, a cognitive over there, a
personality in this direction, a social in that, and so on, but
simply a psychology. You gathered every previous fragment into
one grand theoretical structure – the neural hierarchy. As you
say, the nature of the particular levels is not crucial. What is
crucial is the enabling effect of organization by levels – the
enabling of coordination among actions of all kinds. Previously
disparate psychologies with disparate theories can now all begin
with the same core of theoretical assumptions. Though it will
take a long time to invent ways of testing the functioning of the
hierarchy at the higher levels, I find it exhilarating to realize
that you and others have already built models having two or three
levels organized in the manner of hierarchical control and that
the models actually work.

The neural hierarchy is far more than a listing of nice-sounding
categories. The theory itself tells how we can recognize the
relatively higher and lower placements of levels. It tells us,
too, some of the kinds of difficulties to be anticipated in doing
research at the higher levels. That kind of help from early
theory is a remarkable achievement.

For any one of those three momentous insights, I think you
deserve a bronze statue in the town square. To put all three
together in one grand system concept is the kind of thing that
happens in a scientific field once in a century or so. I am
lucky to be alive when it is happening. How lucky I was in 1978
to have my hands on the Psychological Review, volume 85, number
5!

I do not want to give the impression that I think I have acquired
a deep understanding of PCT. After 15 years of reading,
conversing, writing, and thinking about PCT almost every day, I
still feel the way Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began
rowing their boats up the Missouri River. I know the general
nature of the territory, but I know that much of what I will come
upon will be astonishing and baffling, and I know that every mile
of the journey will be hard going. As I work on the book I am
writing, much of which will be elaborations of the three simple
ideas I set out above, I find time and again that I must take an
hour or a day to struggle with ways of keeping the words as
simple as the idea. The ramifications of those simple ideas are
multifarious, intertwined, and subtle. As I set forth to
describe a complication in the way those ideas work together, I
find now and again that I have opened further regions of
complexity for which I am wholly unprepared. Then I must take an
hour or a day or a week to find my way back to firm footing. I
do not feel that I am trudging along a prescribed path. I feel
that I am taking every step with caution, but also with awe and
exhilaration as I wonder what I might come to understand. But I
am sure I have only an inkling of the exploratory feelings you
have had; you have guided your footfalls by experimentation, and
I have guided mine only with thinking.

To those who know you, Bill, you are a treasure not only as a
theorist and researcher, but also as a person. In our very first
conversation by letter in 1985, I learned about your generosity.
Without any hesitation, you spent eight single-spaced pages
answering my ten questions of 23 July of that year about your
1978 article in the Psychological Review and four more
single-spaced pages answering my letter of 9 September. In my
experience with academic social scientists, my questions have
usually been ignored or sometimes answered in three or four lines
or by a reprint or two – or sometimes just a reference to a
publication – without any personal words at all. I don’t mean
all my letters have drawn that sort of disappointing response; I
have formed several happy professional friendships by letter.
But you were more generous with thought, time, and paper than
any.

You have bestowed thought, time, paper, and computer screens, not
to speak of hospitality, on everyone who has evinced the
slightest interest in PCT. You have understood the internal
upheavals suffered by those of us who try to comprehend this
strange new world – our intellectual foot-dragging and our
anguished obsequies muttered at the graves of our long-cherished
beliefs. You have been patient with misunderstanding,
persevering in the face of disdain, forbearing of invective, and
modest under praise.

In all of this, you have been aided immeasurably by the
intelligence, stamina, and love of Mary.

I owe you, for your help to me, a great debt. You have given me
a way, after all these years, of laying hold of a system concept,
a psychology, that is more than a grab-bag and a tallying. You
have given me a way to set down thoughts that will come to more
than a mere rearrangement of what every other psychologist would
say. To join you and your other followers in the effort to make
PCT available to others is, for me, here in my last years, a joy,
a privilege, and a comfort.

Thanks, brother.


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

==================================================

Any views contained in this message are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations, commissions, committees or groups with which I am associated.

Gary Cziko (“ZEE-ko”), PhD
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CyclingSavvy Instructor (CSI) & League Cycling Instructor (LCI) of Defensive Bicycle Driving
Past President & Current Steering Committee Member, Champaign County Bikes
Member, Urbana Sustainability Advisory CommissionMember, Urbana Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Commission
Manager, Defensive Bicycle Driving Facebook page
Co-Manager, i am traffic Facebook page


Richard S. Marken PhD
rsmarken@gmail.com
www.mindreadings.com

Dear Alison,

Like others, I would like to express my heartfelt condolence to you and your family for your loss, felt by all of us as our loss too. Bill was a great gentleman of intelligence, creativity, and helpfulness to those of us over the years who have been in the process of learning about and working with the concepts that he has so eloquently and patiently expressed. His great mind and pleasant personality will be sorely missed.

He was the Hari Seldon of our time.

Sincerely,

Richard Pfau

···

-----Original Message-----

From: Alison Powers controlsystemsgroupconference@gmail.com

To: Autumn Winter 1@aut.me; Fred and Gail Nickols Fred@nickols.us; Fred and Perry Good nview@aol.com; Brett Wilkinson bdw1332@yahoo.com; Heather Bell heather.bell@uleth.ca; Richard Pfau RichardPfau4153@aol.com; Sergio Verduzco-Flores sergio.verduzcoflores@colorado.edu; Ted Cloak tcloak@unm.edu; Mike Mermel mmermel@mikemermel.com; Richard Kennaway jrk@cmp.uea.ac.uk; Brian Mingus brian.mingus@colorado.edu; Barbara (Bobbie) Bollmann bbollmann@bbollmann.com; Alice McElhone apmcelhone@aol.com; bbabbott@frontier.com bbabbott@frontier.com; Dag Forssell dag@livingcontrolsystems.com; Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com; Warren Mansell wmansell@gmail.com; Sara Tai sara.tai@manchester.ac.uk; Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au Tim.Carey@flinders.edu.au; mmt@mmtaylor.net mmt@mmtaylor.net; Henry Yin hy43@duke.edu; Bill Powers powers_w@frontier.net; Bruce Nevin bruce.nevin@gmail.com; rjrobertson2@comcast.net rjrobertson2@comcast.net; 328babs . bara0361@gmail.com; Denny Powers denny68flh@gmail.com; McClelland, Kent MCCLEL@grinnell.edu; Hugh Petrie hgpetrie@acsu.buffalo.edu; Gary Cziko gcziko@gmail.com

Sent: Fri, May 24, 2013 12:05 pm

Subject: William T. Powers 8/29/26 - 5/24/13

It is with enormous regret and deepest sadness that I must inform all of you that Dad passed this morning. We are still awaiting arrival of hospice and will let all of you know when a memorial will be scheduled.

Allie