X-Envelope-to: CSG-L@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
X-VMS-To: @CSG
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 21:07:55 -0700
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Language; complex perceptions; complex control

[From Bill Powers (921123.1900)]

Bruce Nevin (921123.0958) --

>When has a deaf community invented a language in the absence of
>an environing community of people possessed of language who
<intercommunicate with the deaf folks by whatever means they are
>able?

Gee, you guys sure do take an idea off in some strange directions. I
just wanted to raise the idea of doing some experiments to see how
people would actually behave in inventing a language using symbols.
What's the big problem? Penni assured me this has already been done, so
why not just look at the data and see how people do this? Or if by some
chance the experiments were done some irrelevant way, why not just do
the experiments? It might not be a very pure experiment, and it might
not explore any of the more complex aspects of language, but it might
provide some insights into why language is put together as it is.

>I disagree that language "is fundamentally communication".  Even
>more basically, people use language to create information that
>could not exist without language and could not have existed prior
>to language.

When you get all these classifications worked out, tell me. I'm sure
that there is information that couldn't exist without (verbal) language:
how about "'red' is an adjective?"

>This is not to say that the perceptions ("meanings") with which
>words are correlated could not have existed, though some
>categories may well not be universal, but rather that
>higher-level organizations of those perceptions (which are
>themselves perceptions, of course) are not merely communicated by
>means of language, but are consensually created by means of
>language.

It's hard for me to see how putting words together in bunches and
strings yields anything more than bunches and strings of words -- unless
you've got something nonverbal to hook them up with. By putting words
that are already hitched to meanings together, you can bring meanings
into unforseen mutual relationships -- but unless you're prepared to
perceive the result, nothing new will happen.

>But to get at the foundations of language you must study something
>that is unique to language.

I would say you have to start with a person who has a pressing need for
another person to know about or do or understand something. Language
will follow. Or won't it? Gosh, how could we find out?
------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Taylor (921123.1140) --

The editor of Theory & Psychology has rejected the paper by Tom and me,
but thanks to your remarks and those of the other new reviewer, and
probably to his own sense of justice, he has encouraged us to write a
different kind of paper on control theory. We will probably do so.
RE: complex perceptions

>(1) as a label that we as analysts may use as a shorthand to
>communicate amongst ourselves about groups of things that may be
>seen to be happening together (in us, the patterns are the
>perceptual input functions for scalar perceptual signals, but we
>are talking about complex things happening outside of us).

It's difficult to keep the analyst and the human subject separated. It
would be easier if analysts were not human, and could somehow be aware
directly of "complex things happening outside of us." Unfortunately,
according to PCT, that is not possible. If we are aware of something, it
is a perception, even if we are analysts.

So the vexing problem arises as to how we can make models of how the
brain works. The answer would seem to be "at a level below that of the
functional operations of the brain." We can talk about the way
computations may interact sideways at a perceptual level, so that one
perception is influenced by the state of another one (Land's color
theory of vision, and his experimental demonstrations, are the best
example of that that I know about). But the result of these interactions
is simply a set of individual perceptions. The next level has to make
what it will of them, discover the interactions or not. Give me 50 more
years and I may understand what I'm trying to say here.

>The next level probably makes many things of the vector, but an
>outside analyst would say that those things were of a kind
>different from the elements of the vector, or from the vector
>itself.

You may be trying to say the same thing I am trying to say. As analysts
we are trying to understand the operation of a DEVICE. The outcome of
this device's operation is the world that we experience.

>In a structured perceptual signal, there are many CEVs, and thus
>many degrees of freedom (or perhaps I should put it the other way
>round).

Yes, I would put it the other way around, and also add a word: in a
structured perceptual signal there are many degrees of freedom, and thus
many POTENTIAL CEVs. But there is no guarantee that the next level up
will pick out any particular potential CEV -- x + 1/2 y^2 instead of x +
1/3 y^2.

>it might often be more efficient for the organism to have an ECS
>that directly controlled the sum,

You still miss my point. The choices for definition of a CEV are not
just between "sum" and "difference." They are between 0.9a + 1.1b, 0.95a
+ 1.2b, and so on over a continuum of possible coefficients, an infinite
number of possibilities. If you set the coefficients to one pair of
values and control the sum, you will experience one sort of
consequences. If you set the coefficients a litte differently, the
consequences will be a little different. So there is a scale ofconsequences that
 goes with a range of coefficients, and you have to
find the place on that scale that is consistent with controlling other
variables. We find a more or less useful setting of the coefficients
through reorganization. But usefulness is judged in terms of the overall
error in the whole system.

>This is one version of "leaning on the world."

Yes, it is. But I try to stay away from saying what it is specifically
about the world that this process leans on. It's enough for me to know
that there is probably a "best" setting for the corefficients in one
perceptual function, given the settings of coefficients in all the
others, and given the inborn definitions of critical variables and their
reference states. I'm not ready to say that the result of all this is
knowledge about the world.

>Many parallel perceptual signals may be components of a "belief,"
>even if there is no actual control of the belief as such--no single
>perceptual input function to which it corresponds.  There is only
>control of the multiplicity of scalar perceptual signals, all of
>whose related error signals are to be brought near zero.

When you say that these signals are "components of a belief," you
produce two objects of awareness in one stroke: the components, and the
belief. You are adding something to the components other than their
coexistence. The moment you identify something unitary in the
collection, you have gone up a level; you can now talk about degrees of
a single unitary belief. If you had not introduced, even unknowingly, a
higher-level perception function you would only talk about a signal, and
a signal, and a signal, and a signal, as your attention moved among
them. They would not be components because there would be no perception
for them to be components of. It takes a higher-level perceptual
function to attend to many of them at once and produce a judgment: this
is a belief, and the individual signals are components of it. In fact,
to make those statements (if you follow me) actually requires THREE
levels: the individual signals, the belief, and the perception that the
signals are related to the belief by being components of it.

It's very easy to focus on a collection of perceptions and not realize
that you are perceiving them from a higher level.
----------------------------------------------
>How can an ECS be developed that controls something "useful to
>control," if, at the same time, "the pattern is imposed from >above."

My point is that among the detailed signals of lower level, there are
infinitely many possible functions of those signals, and any function
could be controlled if its value could be affected systematically by
acting on lower-level reference signals. There is no inherent "best"
function of the lower signals. What makes one function more useful to
control than another is in the side-effects of controlling it -- side-
effects such as being able to eat or breathe. The side-effects, too, are
judged relative to reference signals.

So the signals being perceived do not determine which function will
ultimately be chosen. They are simply what they are.
The effects of Boss Reality get into this act, of course. The organism
doesn't determine the external effects of controlling one function of
lower variables rather than another. It has to discover those
consequences. It doesn't even determine internal effects, such as mutual
exclusion of certain perceptual functions (faces vs. vases). So there
are constraints on what is possible to perceive, and among those things
that are possible to control, what is desirable control in terms of
effects on other control systems. I think that in part you're trying to
get those constraints into the argument; if so, I agree with you.

>My way of looking at it is to say that the second of these quotes
>is correct. We learn to perceive only that which we learn to
>control

I would much rather say that we learn to perceive in the process of
learning to control. That is not inconsistent with your experimental
evidence. You can't control something if you can't perceive it, but you
can perceive many things that you can't control. However, this does not
obviate the observation that what you learn to perceive is strongly
influenced by the process of learning to control it. As a control system
comes into being, all parts of it change shape.

>But never would I say that these patterns are "imposed from above."
>The world provides the opportunity for higher-level patterns to be
>developed out of structured perceptions, and this opportunity comes
>from below.

The world does not provide just ONE opportunity for ONE pattern to be
developed. It provides a large range of possibilities (as well as
impossibilities). It is not what determines in the end which possibility
will be realized by a perceptual function.

>... do you get my point any differently from before?  Does it
>matter?

It probably doesn't matter. We aren't yet at the point in our
experiments and theorizing where we are forced to the only conclusion
that makes current sense. I would like to get back down to the levels
where there is more chance of that happening.

The next CSG meeting, to answer a private query, is indeed from July
28th through August 1, a Wednesday evening through a Sunday morning.
What a treat to be able to meet you!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Oded Maler (921123) --

>consider the case when there is no explicit signal representing z,
>but rather two low-level ECS controlling independently for x* and
>y*, such that ax*+by*=z*.

In this case, we will have x = x* and y = y*, because x and y are being
controlled independently, per hypothesis. To be sure, there will always
be a value z equal to ax+by, but it will not be controlled at any
particular value z*. The only way to constrain the values of x and y tosatisfy
 ax + by = constant would be to constrain x* and y* to fit the
same condition. And to do that, a higher system would perceive a copy of
x, a copy of y, and combine them to perceive p = ax+by. With a constant
reference signal p* we would be back to controlling along a diagonal
line. Without this higher-level control, however, there is nothing to
keep x* and y* set so they specify a point on a diagonal line.

I think you made a mistake in referring to "two low-level ECS
controlling independently for x* and y*, such that ax*+by*=z*." What
would enforce that relationship between x* and y*? If there is such a
relationship, x* and y* are not independent.

There is a simple way to tell the difference between two systems
controlling independently for x* and y* and a single system controlling
for z = ax+by = z*. In the first case, disturbing either x or y will
result in direct opposition, preventing a change in the disturbed
variable. The other variable will not change. In the second case,
applying a disturbance to x will result in some resistance to the change
in x, but will also result in a change in y. If the output function is
an integrator, so the output keeps changing as long as any error is
left, the second case will result in the disturbance of x being
unopposed, and all of the correction being produced by a change in y.
Thank you. I will put that in the Primer series.
---------------------------
>... according to the current dogma in neurobiology (please correct
>me if I'm wrong) the changes in the connectivity patterns of
>neurons cease at some stage, so how are new controlled perceptual
>variables acquired?

As I now understand it, dendritic synaptic connections continue to form
and break up throughout life, in human beings. No _new neurons_ are
formed, as far as I know (neurons do not divide), but both ends continue
to wiggle around making new connections --  and even old synaptic
connections change their weights. I think that the extent of the changes
in an adult is far less than it is early in development, when neurotaxis
is leading filaments toward connection sites many thousands of microns
away. I'm not an expert on this subject, however. Ask a real
neuroscientist.
----------------------------------------------
>If I were you, I would, in parallel to the development of a full
>version for Biol. Cyb., send the rejected stuff to Nature (it's
>already in a similar format, so it costs you nothing).

Good suggestions. If the current interaction with Science doesn't
produce anything, I think we will follow it. But the paper still have to
be rewritten to give it a more specific motivation.
------------------------------------------------
No more. Sleep.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Best to all,


Bill P.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU