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:         Thu, 3 Sep 1992 11:32:35 -0600
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Interactions; bit-blitting;Mind reading & chaos

[From Bill Powers (920903.1000)]

Avery Andrews (920903.2000) --

A likely story -- it's 920903.1000 here. This time warp is sort of
fascinating.

>I'd put it like this.  You can have any perceptual functions you
like,
>but if you don't perceive the right things, you lose.

Right. Absolutely. I'm probably reacting to something that nobody here
is saying. The idea that needs dumping is that there are aspects of
social organization that exist apart from the people in them, which is
the old sociological view, still extant, and the current economic
view.

People have properties and physical environments have properties. By
interacting with them we learn what's important and possible to
perceive about them (invariants) and then what's possible and
important to control about them (as we perceive them). Each of us
learns to do this. So the interaction between people is particularly
complicated, in that as we learn perceptions of other people and learn
to control the perceptions, we change our properties as other people
experience us. They, in turn, have to alter how they perceive us and
what they can control about us or their relation to us. When this
process converges, we get a stable pattern of interactions in which
each person is controlling for the things that matter to that person,
while allowing others to do the same, within reason. The result can be
seen, I suppose, as an "institution." Bruce Nevin sees language this
way, and so do I.

I guess I'm pushing the idea that you have to understand the basic
principles that make individuals work before you can even start to
understand the consequences of interactions among individuals, or
between individuals and the physical environment. As our model for
individuals improves, so will our ability to run social models
consisting of many individuals.

>My suspicion is that you can't understand the non-individualistic
>phenomena without understanding the relevant properties of the
>individuals first, but that you also can't understanding them without
>going beyond the individuals.

... so we agree completely. Going beyond the individuals means letting
two more more models of individuals interact with each other and their
common environment (which will be especially interesting when they
don't perceive the common environment in the same way).
-------------------------------------------
RE: Chapman.

>... what's wrong with bit-blitting?  It seems like perfectly sensible
thing for sheets of neurons to be able to do.

What I read was an idea that a wave of "activation" spreads from some
test point until it is stopped by a closed boundary. Another test
point far from the purported object is reached by the spreading wave
(if the boundary isn't closed). If it's not reached, the original test
point was "inside" the boundary. So by perceiving the state of the
remote test point, we can perceive whether the initial point was or
was not inside the boundary -- or inside SOME boundary.

This is how you'd have to do it on a computer screen using standard
polygon-filling software and hardware. As all graphics programmers
know, this is a slow process.

It seems to me that a much simpler way to determine inside or outside
would be to compute the direction of the radius vector from a point
that travels once around the boundary to the stationary point, which
can be done in terms of x-y coordinates. If the direction makes one
complete 360-degree rotation during a complete scan, the point is
inside. If the final direction angle is the same as the initial one,
the point is outside.

This way feels much more like the way I do it. I run my attention (or
my eyes) around the boundary, to see if my scan wraps all the way
around the object or unwraps again before it's finished.

                         ******************
                         *                *
                         *                *
                         *                *
                         *        A       *  Wrap = 360 degrees
                         *                *
                         *                *
                         ******************

                         ******************
                         *                *
                         *      ***********
                         *      *
                         *      * A          Wrap = 0 degrees
                         *      ***********
                         *                *
                         ******************

Note also that you can say that A is inside or outside even though the
figure is "leaky" -- has holes between the points defining it.

My way uses far less computing activity than Uhlmann's.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
>if you
>have a whole bunch of input lines coming into a perceputal system,
>different patterns on the lines can signal different things being
>perceived, but the signals get their significance from where they
>come from and what they're going to, just like in PCT.

In the pandemonium model, these input lines form a bus, with many
perceptual functions hanging off of it. Each perceptual function
applies its own input process to its copy of the information,
generating a single perceptual signal. So all the perceptual signals
are alike, representing only magnitudes, the momentary values of the
functions. The meaning of a given signal is determined by the function
which derives it from some or all of the signals on the bus.

Of course ALL POSSIBLE FUNCTIONS of the bus signals are implicit in
the bus signals. Implicit functions, however, accomplish nothing and
produce no perceptions. Only those functions explicitly computed by
neurons are perceptually real, have any existence for higher systems.

So to say that the different patterns on the lines signal different
things states only part of the truth. The whole truth is that they
signal infinitely many different things, and so signal nothing in
particular. Even a single static set of signals on the bus could lead
to an infinity of different perceptual signals, each a different
function of those bus signals. If there are n signals on the bus, then
at most n different functions of the signals could be independently
controlled at a given instant. But over time, there is no limit to the
number of different sets of n functions that can be computed and
controlled, starting with n signals on the bus.

I think that even a model in which the patterns of signals are
supposed to be meaningful runs afoul of this same consideration. There
is no "pattern" of signals until a receiver passes the signals through
weighting or other processes. Pattern "detection" is really pattern
CREATION. The receiving device contains a definition of a pattern, and
its output simply reports the degree to which that definition is met
by the current distribution of magnitudes in the set of input signals.
One set of input signals can be the input for many simultaneous and
quite different pattern-sensing devices. There is no one inherent
pattern in the input signals. Pattern is in the eye of the beholder.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Harry Erwin (920902) --

Welcome to CSGnet, Harry!

>I've learned over the years to read minds. This is _not_ ESP, but
>rather a four-stage process as follows:
>
>1. Instantiate a personality model,
>2. Calibrate it based on observation,
>3. Do a process switch into the calibrated model,
>4. Observe the model.

One of our PCT freaks who is a psychotherapist, David Goldstein, has
been working recently with a "straight" therapist named Maher. David
and I have been exploring a "method of levels" that uses a principle
of awareness saying that awareness never registers the level of
perception that it's working FROM, but only the information reaching
that level from lower systems.

One of the tasks involved in conducting this method is for one person
to listen carefully to what another is saying (on practically any
subject), and try to get a feel for the attitudes, opinions,
interpretations, and so forth that the other is using "behind the
scenes" in talking about the surface subject matter. This involves a
technique very much like the one you describe in your post. The
conductor of this process basically has no thoughts of his own; the
whole point is to understand the other's background thoughts, at least
well enough to ask questions that bring them to attention. It's not
true, of course, that the conductor's thoughts aren't his own, but
they are a model of the other's thought processes, and exclude the
sorts of thoughts and attitudes that the conductor would normally
bring into a conversation.

The interesting thing about Maher is that he has developed something
very close to this technique quite independently of PCT (as you appear
to have done). Maher speaks of it as being the other person as nearly
as you can. I'll let David Goldstein describe Maher's approach in more
detail, as he is now intimately familiar with it.

The point I would like to make is that your mind-reading method has
one shortcoming, which is the shortcoming of any model that is
plausible but has not been tested. The method of levels, the PCT
version of psychotherapy, does involve making a model of the other
person -- I hadn't thought of it exactly that way until you said it.
But it also involves continually TESTING that model. The testing is
quite simple: you propose to the other person that some background
thought is going on, and the other person agrees, disagrees, or comes
back with a modified version of your suggestion that's closer to
right. This helps you modify your model, so the next suggestion or
question is more likely to be fruitful.

I've used this method with a lot of people on a teaching/demonstration
basis (I'm certainly not a psychotherapist), and I concur with you
that it's an exhausting procedure. You should try it, however, with a
friend, organized as an exploration as we do with the method of
levels. When you're on the receiving end, you find that you can do "up
a level" more than once, and that when you carry this procedure to its
termination point (where, in effect, there is no more mind left to
read at a higher level), the resulting state is most interesting.

-------------------------------------------
Concerning Chaos, it may be that chaotic processes are cheap to
control, but it's even cheaper to control non-chaotic processes and
the result is much more precise control. Chaotic processes are
hypersensitive to small changes in critical variables, which is what
makes control cheap. But they are also subject to disturbance just as
easily by extraneous variables, so they need a lot of controlling.
Furthermore, using a controlled chaotic process to control something
else, as in a hierarchy, is not likely to work very well, because the
chaotic process can't be  loaded much by contact with an environment
without losing its character.

I think that "chaotic" is often used when it would be just as correct
to say "random." Random processes can lead to systematic results when
employed in the context of a control system -- our perennial example
is the mode of steering of the intestinal bacterium E. coli (which
can't steer, but can only swim in straight lines or tumble randomly to
create a new direction of swimming unrelated to the previous one).

The proponents of chaos as a factor in perception are, no doubt,
thinking of the way chaotic oscillators go from one organized state to
another by way of chaotic intervening states. This suggests some
natural way of settling into stable perceptual modes with a sort of
random reorganization leading to the transitions. My own opinion,
which isn't worth much in this field, is that there may be an analogy
here, but the real mechanism is quite different. I don't see, for
example, any signs that perception has an oscillatory component.
Perhaps there is some other sort of physical phenomenon that would
mimic the behavior of chaotic oscillators, but I don't think an
oscillator is a very useful model of a perceptual function.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Greg Williams--

OK on the figure: we'll wait. I'll send for permissions to the editor
too, just in case.

This is about getting the Little Man paper ready to ship out, folks.
We're almost there.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Best to all,\


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