Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Wed, 26 Aug 1992 16:18:12 EST
From:         Avery Andrews <andaling@FAC.ANU.EDU.AU>
Subject:      Re: The Bible is Close Too

[from Avery Andrews 920826.1615]

  Rick Marken (920825.2100)

> The Agre
>quote was ruling out mechanisms (which I read as
>"models") to explain observations.

No, it wasn't.  But it probably has to be read in context to be understood
properly.  It was advocating that mechanism by reduced to a minimum
(but a *sufficient* minimum, which puts C&A in a different basket than,
say, Bickhard, who seems to have no sense at all of what `sufficient
mechanism' might look like).  He wants people to get prizes for eliminating
unnecessary mechanism.


 >My intention is to explain the phenomenon of
 >control.

Fine, but it is also necessary to get people to suspect that control
is central to ordinary human activity, and that they don't already
understand it properly.  This, I think, requires having a large
library of examples that will `grab' people, & picking the ones that
will appeal to people from particular backgrounds (given the fragmentation
of the human `sciences' there won't be any `one size fits all' solution.
Somehow, for some reason, that fact that you need feedback to point
at things or stand upright doesn't seem to get to AI-ers, I think because
they don't seem `cognitive' enough.  The right examples, I think, have
a capacity to burn holes in people's minds that mere arguments don't
(academics are trained to win arguments, and people from Harvard and
MIT base their egos on the the idea that they're (almost, if they're
humble) the smartest person they know).  I'm hoping that the steering
example will prove effective, but there must be lots more.


 >Actually, what they have is no idea what feedback
 >control system DO. They know zip about control so
 >they obviously have no interest in figuring out how
 >control systems work.

I *think* that this is true.  So what's needed is to get them interested.


 >any of these people (ai types mainly)
 >have no apparent interest in science, for that matter.

Definitely false of the Interactive AI crowd, from what I've seen.


 >What in the world is "shaky" about the PCT view of
 >perception???? What perceptual processing has
 >Chapman put in his models that is so "useful".

Well, could you build a system that could look at a video screen &
process what it sees there well enough to play the game?  Chapman can't
really do that either, but Sonja embodies a lot of work on the problem.
Interestingly, in his thesis proposal, he said that Sonja' perceptual
system would be like Pengi's, but her central processor would be much
more complicated.  Interestingly, the reverse proved to be true:
`deciding what to do is easy when you know what's in front of you'.
The main reason I didn't become a PCT-er at age 20 or so was an inabilty
to get anywhere on understanding how high-level perceptual functions
work - e.g. not a clue about how language is actually processed, for example.

Now, I think it's time to look again, partly because there has been
real progress on the perceptual front, also because you & Bill have
gotten me to begin to suspect that maybe the problem of unknown mechanisms
for perception is not as serious as I thought it was (if you can
demonstrate that the critter is controlling for X, then you know it
contains an X-detector, even if you don't know how to build one.  And
you know that you ought to look for one).


Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l