[Avery Andrews 940805.1347]
(Paul George 940804 1600)
>Having finished B:CP, I think it is a good piece of work. Too bad so much of i
t
>seems to be ignored in most of the research and the discussions here, which
>seem focused on the 'worm's eye view' of PCT (1st & 2nd order control). Perhap
s
>because the other concepts are deemed 'uninteresting'? 
I won't speak for the others, but I've been focussing on the lower
levels (so far) because we have a long tradition of investigation
of the upper levels (going back to Aristotle and the Stoics, if not
further), and large numbers of clever and well-funded people still
beavering away at them, but it all is and will remain very up in the air
until we understand how the upper levels cash out as actual activity,
which requires connecting them to lower-level systems, which requires
reaching some minimal level of understanding of how these work.
Plus it seems to me the that actual properties of even simple
closed-loop systems are often seriously misunderstood by people (such as
Fowler and Turvey, or Abbs and Winstein) who one would really expect
to understand them properly, so there is obviously some kind of problem there.
There is also the fact that the behavior of control systems is often
wildly counter to even well-informed intuition, so that if you can't
model, you run a big risk of producing bullshit. But our ability to
model is limited by, among other things, our ability to construct
perceptual functions, which is, especially at the higher levels, pretty
minimal.
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au