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Date:         Tue, 29 Dec 1992 15:35:04 MET
From:         Maler <maler@IMAG.FR>
Subject:      Re: PCT and other disciplines
              other disciplines" (Dec 26,  8:06)

[From Oded Maler (921229)]

[Bill Powers (921226.0700 MST)]

  This is all true. I trust you aren't saying that ALL of the
  studies of arbitrary systems will prove to be relevant and
  applicable to understanding human behavior.

I agree and even more, only a small fraction of it will be relevant
to anything... but which fraction?

* A little fanaticism is appropriate if it's limited to the
* boundaries of the PCT-non-PCT controversy. You need some kind of
* support structure when there are so many people who look on your
* views with disdain, condescension, and irritation, apparently
* believing that this is how science is supposed to work.

Each community has its own system of rewards and encouragements,
whether it is the church of established Science or the cult of
enlightened PCTers. Maybe if you could offer tenures, you would have
by now more experimental research done, but you will lose some the
flame and devotion to truth. Just look at the history of some
well-known religions.

About Sacks's book. I still recommend it (it is very easily read,
especially for native English speakers). It has some cases of people
who lost proprioperception and compenstated it thry visual feed-back
loops, etc.

*
* >The following is a cross-posting from the Control (in the
* >mathematical engineering sense) mailing list. It contains
* >titles of all papers in the subject published recently. Just
* >for information I don't claim anything will be relevant.
*
* If you wanted to make me feel ignorant, you certainly succeeded.
* How I wish that I could understand all that stuff!

Me too!

The next great
* leap forward in PCT is going to be generated by a person who is
* comfortable with those advanced mathematical treatments, AND who
* has a clear idea of the phenomena of behavior that need to be
* explained. That person hasn't appeared yet, and probably won't
* until the basic concepts of PCT have been accepted widely enough
* that a person could devote a career to it.
*
* I would love to write a paper for journals like these explaining
* what we are trying to do with PCT and how people with such great
* talents could contribute to the work. But such a paper would have
* to be written by someone who speaks the language; anything I
* wrote would be considered too simple-minded even to be
* interesting to the readership. PCT needs translators;

*
* The world of psychology seems almost closed to PCT, but
* psychologists are not the only ones who are trying to understand
* human nature. PCT can spread to other disciplines, and is doing
* so. In every case, however, this spread has been none of my
* doing, but the doing of others who can take the basic ideas to
* their own colleagues and explain them in relation to the
* interests of those other disciplines. There always remains the
* problem of displacing the old concepts of human behavior,
* traceable mostly to conventional psychology and biology, but this
* is done most easily by people who grew up with those ideas and
* understand how they look to those who have adopted them.
*
* We lack biologists and biochemists and control-system engineers,
* among others. Maybe these, along with psychologists, are the
* toughest nuts to crack because of the direct contradictions
* involved in biology, and the implied competition in control  engineering. If
*  anyone knows people in these fields who might be
* willing to join in, by all means try to recruit them.
*
* And you, Oded. Are you all alone in your appreciation of the
* concepts of PCT? Do you have any colleagues who show any
* interest?
* -----------------------------------------------------------

To clarify matters let me state that I'm almost 36, with Ph.D. in
computer science (automata theory, logic, verification of programs)
and without a permanent position. If the latter fact will not change
within 3-4 years, I will have to abandon my academic habits and
addictions (reading e-mail, visiting libraries, day-dreaming on some
interesting problems, proving some theorems and writing papers from
time to time, etc.) and start getting paid for doing things that
are of interest to other but not to me. In order to prevent this
prostitutional nightmare from becoming true, I must have some
recognized achievements which will somehow fall within the boundaries
of some discipline. My only chances are in the neighborhood of
computer science. My niche (hybrid discrete-continuous dynamical
systems) is already enough relatively multi-disciplinary (bridging
between CS and Control people) to be dangerous, and mixing it with
an (unrecognized!) species of the life/mind sciences will do me no
good.

My background in the mathematics of control is probably weaker than
yours, but I'm in the situation of knowing some (friend of cousin
of..)  control mathematicians and knowing what they are talking about.
Your main problems, I think, will be to define the environment, (Boss
reality, CEV etc.). The type of results these people usually have is
of the form "given an environment obeying such and such restrictions
(including stochastic ones), a controller defined like this and that
will achieve performance such and such (e.g., mean error smaller than
something). " Apparently you might want to prove some properties of
your infamous hierarchical servo-loops aka HPCT, but what kind of
properties exactly? Does the fact they they model living systems
play some role? I think a first step in any direction is to state
exactly what is your current dissatisfaction with the mathematical
state-of-the-art of PCT. And please do it very slowly in small
pieces, because I'm a very atypical pseudo-mathematicians.

Best regards

--Oded

p.s.

To Rick; Your atittude towards Jacob might change a bit if you notice
that his cheating Esau was one of the first instances of manipulating
perceptual variables of others (Isaac's) . Maybe he predated Bill in
discovering some levels of PCT, although at that time, since he didn't
yet have principles, he abused is advanced state of knowledge. Also,
criticising his "cowardness" when returning to Knaan, is not
consistent with your attitude toward conflicts.  He was seeking
a compromise and was ready to offer Esau some of his herds, instead of
getting into a fight.



--
===============================================================
Oded Maler, LGI-IMAG (Campus), B.P. 53x, 38041 Grenoble, France
Phone:  76635846  Fax: 76446675   e-mail: maler@vercors.imag.fr
===============================================================
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