[From Rick Marken (950222.1100)
Chris Kitzke (950221) --
Welcome to csg-l, Chris.
How do you explain people who tell you they do not know what they "want"? Is
it possible they really do not know?
Good question.
I think it is VERY possible. According to PCT, behavior involves the
simultaneous control of a hierarchy of perceptual variables. Knowing what one
"wants" would involve knowing all the perceptions being controlled by this
hierarchy and the reference level for each one. This is a tough order.
Just yesterday someone asked me essentially "what do you want" and I was
unable to answer. The person wanted to know what I am doing, strategically,
when I play raquestball (I'm a pretty good player, for an old dufus). It was
hard for me to answer; raquetball is pretty fast and I'm rarely saying to
myself "I want to perceive myself just to the left of my opponent so that I
can perceive myself making a cross shot off the side wall as I perceive my
center of gravity moving toward the location of the rebound ... blah blah".
It just happens. I suppose I could try to think about what I am doing more
carefully in order to determine what I am wanting while I play raquetball. I
think a good raquestball coach is a person who knows what a player should
"want" and can describe the perceptions to want and the levels at which to
want them.
I think consciousness tends to linger at the higher levels of our hierarchy
of perceptual control so we tend to think mainly of higher level "wants" when
we think of "wants". A want like "perceive myself in a relationship with
person X" seems more like a "want" than "perceive my body in an upright
posture", and we are certainly more likely to be conscious of the former than
of the latter. I think this is only because we are more likely to have
control problems at the higher levels so consciousless is more likely to be
there; but we do become aware of lower level wants under certain
circumstances; when we walk in an intense wind we become aware of our want to
be standing upright, for example.
Awareness of wants is not something that PCT deals with explicitly; that's
because consciousness and awareness are not part of the model-- yet; we just
don't know much about them. But the structure of the PCT hierarchy of wants
does help by showing us wnat a want is (the reference state of a perceptual
variable) and what might be involved in becoming conscious of our own wants
(knowing what perceptual variable is controlled and at what level).
Seems that if you get two control systems (people who 'understand' PCT)
together, they could get stuck in and endless cycle of asking the other what
they want.
I think people are control systems whether they understand PCT or not;-)
And that would certainly be an annoying way for any two people to interact,
indeed. Fortunately, PCT provides a non-verbal way of determining what
another person wants. It's called the Test for the Controlled Variable and
Bill Powers (950221.0850 MST) described it in some detail yesterday. The Test
provides some more insight into your question about knowing what we
want because it often reveeals that what people think they want is not
necessarily what they REALLY want. This is what I discovered in the inverted
T study; I thought I wanted the horizonal and vertical lines to be some
constant difference in length; what I actually wanted (according to a version
of The Test) was for the ratio of line lengths to be a certain value.
So we might not know what we want even when we think we know what we want.
if PCT cannot help society in a practical way, no matter how incomplete
their brute understanding of PCT is, then why learn it at all.
Some people might not want to help society; they might want to learn PCT
just because they enjoy understanding aspects of their own existence. I
personally do want to help society and I think a more general understanding
of PCT (ie. one's own human nature) would help enormously. But PCT can be
worthwhile even for misanthropes.
I do not believe in the evolutionary theory for human existence
I didn't know that evolutionary theories were designed to explain human
existence. I thought they were designed to explain the facts of evolution
-- fossil record, speciation, that kindda stuff;-).
Best
Rick