The neuroscientist identified in this Science Daily news item Your brain may not actually “make” decisions | ScienceDaily seems to me like he may be on the verge of “discovering” PCT. There is no centralized controller in our brain making decisions. Instead, actions are the result of continous feed back between perception, motion and the environment. Does seem to be missing the idea of reference, though.
1 Like
Thanks Frank, and great to hear from you!
I think what this person has discovered is that the brain does not calculate actions (output). That’s certainly something that PCT shows to be the case, but I don’t think he’s really anywhere near getting PCT because before you can get the theory of PCT, you have to know the phenomenon that it explains; the phenomenon of control. And I don’t see any evidence that he gets this… yet. But maybe he’ll get it.
One of the phenomena of control is conflict. And when people are in conflict, they look (and feel) like they are trying to make a decision,— whether to control for getting one of several different perceptions. For example, whether to get the chocolate or vanilla ice cream cone.
So people do make decisions; it’s a real phenomenon. They just don’t compute (“decide on“) the actions to take to implement what is decided.
Hello all 
Preprint version of ‘this person’s’ paper :
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202507.0979
- he references you, @rsmarken, as well as Bill. So maybe he’s close to getting it indeed! 
“Whereas the behaviorists conceived of organisms as reactive to their environment, the cyberneticists viewed organisms as controlling their environment based on internal purposes or goals (Marken & Powers, 1989; Rosenblueth et al., 1943). Note that despite the use of the terms purpose and goal, their view is still consistent with physicalist principles. Reference signals are physical transactions that cause changes in efferent pathways and likely also cause the mental phenomenon of a goal. The goal cannot cause actions that control environmental variables, but the reference signal can. Based on this control theory premise, an important component for understanding behavior is understanding the environmental variables that an organism is attempting to control. For research, experiments can be designed with this premise in mind, and researchers can more purposefully direct subjects to control specific variables in the experimental environment. Mapping brain activation with controlled variables may have a greater chance of isolating negative feedback loops between the environment and specific sensorimotor reflexes.”
What’s he missing?
A perhaps less tongue-in-cheek response now I’ve had a chance to properly read and digest Thomas James’ preprint : https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202507.0979
I really like this preprint on several levels. Seeing authors and arguments familiar from PCT reading, alongside authors from different approaches, helps me reassure myself and others that with my increasing focus on PCT I haven’t entirely fallen into if not a cult then at least a bubble - PCT wouldn’t be the first supposedly paradigm-shifting fringe theory I’ve been attracted to.
This paragraph stood out to me in particular:
It is worthwhile noting that a testing environment where actions are temporally-contingent on stimulus presentation cannot disconfirm the linear causality assumption, it can only reify it (Anderson, 2011; Marken, 1980). Constrained experimental environments hide the fact that acting-to-sense can be as important as sensing-to-act (Gibson, 1966; Guerin, 2024; Pleskac & Hertwig, 2023; Turvey & Carello, 1986). Actions in naturalistic environments are used to provide important updates to sensory information. These simultaneous dynamic relations between sensing and acting are impossible to describe using a linearly-causal model like sense-think-act. However, researchers studying classic decisions have been able to ignore the impact of acting-to-sense, because the classic decision experiment environment does not allow interaction with dynamic stimuli and does not allow the subject any agency. Studies in more naturalistic environments, where sensing and acting co-inform each other, show that choices are better described as simultaneously or circularly causal, not linearly causal (Marken & Powers, 1989; Pleskac & Hertwig, 2023).
Still, @rsmarken is right to highlight the conceptual gulf between joining a chorus critiquing the linear sense-think-act sandwich, and arriving at PCT. The ScienceDaily article/press release omits all the (several) references to @rsmarken and to Powers. I take this to be because PCT is not necessary to the main thrust of the article, which I take to be something like: in the light of the replication model, we should take on board these historical and more recent critiques, and develop/ engage with better kinds of models and methodologies.
My friend found the robotics analogy in the press release helpful for understanding the sandwich critique - whereas I thought hmm well it depends what kind of robots. The preprint gets into distinctions in approaches to robotics which others will be more familiar with than I -
James’ examples and analogies come chiefly from contrasting a rationalist approach with an ‘embodied dynamic approach’. PCT is presented as a distinct approach, and I admit that I don’t at this stage know that PCT is a better approach than dynamic systems or ecological psychology approaches.
I like the way James very clearly offers PCT as an approach worthy of consideration without cajoling or arguing that that this is something the reader should do:
Theories and models from cybernetics and from embodied dynamical systems have in common that they do not rely on the four assumptions. Although both involve feedback from the environment, one difference is the prevalence in cybernetics of control theory principles that focus on negative feedback and reference signals as fundamental to the architecture (Rosenblueth et al., 1943; Wiener, 1948). In perceptual control theory, reference signals are the physical mechanism underlying goals, with the organism producing actions to bring sensory signals in line with the reference signal (Marken & Powers, 1989; Powers, 1973a). Negative feedback loops are the basis of many physiological systems and it would not be surprising if they were also implemented in the nervous system for controlling behavior. Therefore, it is worth considering that one way (and potentially a primary way) that sensorimotor modules or primitives may interact with each other is through reference input signals, rather than only sensory input signals.
I don’t know quite how to express it, but I like how the whole article works rhetorically; there’s something PCT-ish about this approach to trying to get PCT in front of a wider audience.
Hi John
I think the reason PCT might seem like a cult or a bubble is because it’s about a phenomenon that most behavioral scientists don’t recognize or fully understand: the phenomenon of control. Control is what is informally known as purposeful behavior. So PCT explains the purposeful behavior of living organisms. The big problem is that control looks a lot like stimulus response, output geneneration, or selection by consequences type behavior. So behavioral scientists study behavior based on the assumption that it is the result of one or another of those kinds of processes.
The research that’s been done to study behavior from those points of view tells you little or nothing about the controlling that is actually occurring. The most important feature of this controlling that is ignored by this research is the perceptual variable or variables around which any particular behavior is organized. PCT research is oriented to testing the PCT model which proposes the different types of perceptual, variables organisms control, how they control them and why.
So PCT has had a problem because it implies (as Bill Powers said in the Foreword to my book MIND READINGS) that a large segment of conventionally done behavioral science research has to be “deposited in the wastebasket”. Obviously, that doesn’t go over well with behavioral scientists of any persuasion.
A related problem is that PCT is often seen as simply another theory of behavior. The problem is that the “behavior“ they are talking about is not control. So a lot of discussions of PCT get confused because they don’t describe the phenomena they are trying to explain and they end up being what I call “theory first”. Or even “theory only”.
One of the things I liked most about PCT is that everything Powers said about it was based on clear and relevant demonstrations of behavioral phenomena and clear explanations of how PCT accounts for them. PCT is an “observation first“ theory of behavior.
Some thoughts follow.
In ordinary conversation I have no trouble with assertions that while driving and that I can speed up or slow down.
But examining that in terms of PCT is a different story. Frankly, I don’t know how fast my car is going. All I know is what the speedometer tells me. So, in PCT terms, I am controlling for the speedometer reading. I might want it to read so as to match the speed limit, or perhaps I want it to read faster or slower.
How do I influence the speedometer reading? By way of the gas pedal and/or perhaps the brake pedal. I can make the speedometer indicate a faster or slower speed using those two.
The controlled variable is the speedometer reading, not the speed of the car. By the way, speedometers have been known to be wrong. In any case, I compare my perception of the speedometer reading with what I want it to read. And I speed up, slow down or hold steady as required.
Do I have that right?
This is a good observation, and the reading of your speedometer could be a controlled variable, but I think we can get a relatively accurate idea of how fast we’re going from visual and other perceptual information. I rarely look at my speedometer when I’m driving. When I’m in traffic, my main job is to keep up with traffic so I control my speed relative to the other cars. I do check my speedometer reading occasionally, if I’m concerned that I might be exceeding the speed limit such as when I’m on the freeway and on an open road, and there’s no other traffic around. Controlling speed as the speedometer reading would require you to keep your eye on the speedometer, which could interfere in unpleasant ways with your ability to control for not crashing into things like people and other cars.
I don’t fix on the speedometer. Like you I glance at it intermittently and I keep pace with surrounding traffic. But quantifying the speed of my car falls to my reading of the speedometer.