Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Thu, 23 Jul 1992 11:01:24 EDT
From:         "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@CCB.BBN.COM>
Subject:      reorganizing
X-To:         csg-l%vmd.cso.uiuc.edu@bbn.com
X-cc:         bn@ccb.bbn.com

[From: Bruce Nevin (Wed 920722 13:24:12)]

The above time stamp is wildly bogus with respect to the prior and
subsequent times of actually writing this.  I'm stealing snatches of
time whenever my workstation loads files, saves files, prints, etc.  I
hope coherence doesn't suffer too much.

(Bill Powers (920718.1600) ) --

>As I had figured, there are some dissenters from my concept of the
>hierarchy, and my discussion of implicit versus explicit functions turned
>up some more.

I'm not dissenting from your concept of the hierarchy, I didn't
understand your distinction between implicit and explicit functions and
how it applied to what I was exploring.  Now I do, and it doesn't.

I was not talking about

(Bill Powers (920713.1200) )
>the emergence of higher levels
>from populations of systems of an existing level, without the addition of
>any new kinds of physical systems.

I was talking about the emergence of a new order of control hierarchy
from populations of control systems of an existing order.  Whether
this involves the addition of new capacities or functions within control
systems of order n (e.g. cells) as they evolve in their function as
constituents of control elements (e.g. neurological ECSs) within control
systems of order n+1 (e.g. neurological control systems, such as those
of humans and cockroaches) is an interesting question, and perhaps I was
wrong not to have raised it, but I didn't.

Bill Powers (920719.0800) --

> It's not fair to bring up things your wife does as examples of real
> behavior, because anyone (like me) who doubts that these phenomena exist
> outside the imagination of believers is put in the position of criticizing
> your wife -- and you are put in the position of defending an idea in which
> you have a personal emotional investment and a loved one to defend. I think
> that the human brain is capable of supplying itself with any experiences it
> has reason to want, even with a vividness and to an extent that normally
> would be dangerous because of substituting too much imagined information
> for real-time sensory information. My opinion of psychic research is that
> it is sloppy, credulous, selective, and often dishonest. If you want to get
> into this subject that's up to you. But the result will not be an
> enhancement of our sense of intellectual companionship.

I introduced the topic of "auras" only make the notion of an analog to
neural currents somewhat less abstract.  Insofar as some humans can see
them, the analogy of "auric changes" to neural current is a poor one.
My first recasting of Rick's paragraph to show the analogy (which I did
not post) used the "fu" of "fubar," somewhat like this:

> A person is busy controlling many variables.  The systems controlling
> these variables are made out of cells, neural structures, and organs of
> perception and execution (probably there's a better word, but I'm in a
> rush).  But one thing a human does is change its fu.  That is, the
> variables involved in this functional relationship . . .  are not (as
> far as I know) perceived and controlled by the human.  It is this
> input-output characteristic of the human's fu behavior that makes it a
> useful component of a control system. The human responds to changes in a
> neighboring human's fu by changes in its own fu.  This is a "dedicated"
> cause-effect characteristic of the human; the human cannot change the
> way it responds (fu) to input (fu)  -- there is no control involved in
> this functional relationship; that is what I mean by functional
> specificity. In terms of it's fu response to fu stimulation of the body
> the human functions like a wire in a circuit ( with fu change rate the
> analog of current and intensity of fu the analog of voltage). A control
> system must be built out of such "functionally specific" components.

This seemed needlessly abstract.  Aside from being more specific and
less mysterious, putting it in terms of auras had a nice fit precisely
because most people have no awareness of them, as cells necessarily must
have no perception of neural currents as such if they are to function as
neural "wires."  Even the very strong prejudice in our culture against
taking auras seriously or even discussing them led, I thought in an
interesting way, to the question, does Darwinian selection suffice to
keep cells in the dark about the neural currents they are transmitting,
or might some additional factors be involved?

I have nothing vested in the choice of aura over fu as a term in the
larger analogy.  By saying it's not "fair" of me to bring such things
up, you indicate (I think) that you feel a need to forebear from
expressing your doubts, so as to avoid putting me in a position of
defending my wife etc.  Why don't we set all that baggage aside.  It is
that sort of fencing off of forbidden topics, to my mind, that
interferes with "intellectual companionship." If you doubt the reality
of a perception of mine, or reported by another person (my wife or
anyone else), please feel free to say so.  Given the indeterminately
extensive role of imagination in ordinary perception, and the unsettled
controversy over epistemological implications of control theory, that
would put you on rather unsure footing, but you are welcome to occupy
it.  I most probably would not be too much provoked by your doubt.  My
intellectual M.O. is integrative, and I value CT in part because it
supports the integration of things that so far as I can tell had been
rejected only because they did not fit official canons.  You saw stones
fall from the sky?  Nonsense!  Ptolemy has shown that to be impossible.
But I saw them fall--something more than Ptolemy must be going on.  With
this constitutive relationship between hierarchies, CT may come to
provide an explanation for some aspects of "psi" perceptions.  Perhaps
psi is all imagination (a great deal of it surely is).  But perhaps
something more is going on.

Incidentally, psychic research may be so dreadful in part because it
tries to apply conventional methodology that is inappropriate even for
perceptions that people can control well to perceptions that people
control less well if at all.  (Just as the cell must not control neural
currents as a cellular perception if it is to transmit them in an ECS.)

But let's get away from areas that provoke allergies.

What is important in all this, to my mind, is some possible insight into
the character of the transition from one order of control to another,
and into the character of reorganization (including learning,
development, and evolution).  You argue for the existence of distinct
but in some way contiguous hierarchies, and that seems right to me.  You
have held in reserve a "distributed" model of reorganization that
appears to accord with what I have been suggesting.  Therefore, I was
surprised at your response:

> >I am proposing (920709 09:13:52) that reorganization is carried out in
> >populations of entities of order n-1.

> Propose away. But I ask that you specify all the functions and variables
> needed for this reorganization to happen, in addition to those needed for
> the control processes already going on. You've indicated an overall result
> that you want; it remains to demonstrate that such a result is possible, by
> some means that we can grasp. What does each part of this new reorganizing
> process have to accomplish, sense, do ... ? And what is your reason for
> believing that what such a system will do will actually solve the problem?

I proposed that the mechanism resides in the responses that cells make
to consequences, for each cell in its intracellular environment, of
chronic error in the higher-order control system that the cells
constitute.  The error itself is as invisible to them as the conflict
that engenders it, and is as invisible to them as the elements of the
higher-order control system (in conflict) that they constitute; only the
consequences of error in their intracellular environment are in their
perceptual universe.  Roughly speaking (perhaps you see me as always and
only speaking roughly, that is, without adequate discipline), I suggest
that higher-order error has as a byproduct lower-order environmental
"toxicity" of some kind, something that individual cells control for.

Individual cells, like all control systems, do whatever it takes to
reduce the error (the "toxicity").  They change their shape and
proximity to other cells (tropism), etc.  As it happens, however, only
when they do something that reduces the higher-order error for the
higher-order control system undergoing reorganization does their
environmental "toxicity" go down.

In cellular terms, they seek only to reduce unwanted cellular
perceptions.  Byproducts of this seeking may include the appearance (to
the observer) of cellular behavior that exploits and enhances
environmental stability, that promotes stable inter-cellular
relationships and structures (with greater environmental stability as a
payoff).  But whatever reduces error in the higher-order system reduces
toxicity in the intracellular environment.  The toxicity may be
relatively local or distributed, depending on the higher-order elements
(ECSs) involved in conflict.  Therefore (here, I contradict you), the
appearance of reorganization from the higher-order perspective may be
more than local, though each cell's motivation and action is of course
local.

Distasteful though they may be, there are obvious analogies to human
social unrest and distress.

Another positive product of the analogy is that it may help put to rest
certain kinds of recurrent discourse about social control.  The argument
is that there can be no hierarchical social control in which humans
directly receive reference signals from superordinate control systems.
Any supra-human control system must be of a different order, a separate
hierarchy from that of neurologically based perceptual control systems,
an order of control systems which can "communicate" with humans and
groups of humans only in ways that are perceivable by control systems of
the neurological order as environmental conditions, including especially
their perceptions of their relations to their peers.

It may be that humans (unlike cells, so far as we know) can learn to
participate more consciously in such a suprahuman organism (if it
exists), or that other complex living control systems of human scale in
the universe have so learned.  That would be an interesting approach
indeed to questions of ethics and social order.  However, it seems
beyond us here.

Finally, this conception of different orders or hierarchies, and of
reorganization, is capable of being modelled.  Only that would properly
ground and "discipline" the discussion.

Gotta run.

	Bruce
	bn@bbn.com
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