From: POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU (William T. Powers)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Subject: Lever analogy; Rick's strategy; misc
Date: 8 Oct 92 15:03:31 GMT
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[From Bill Powers (921008)]

Greg Williams (921008) --

>The big problem FROM YOUR POINT OF VIEW (as I see it) is that the
>analogy doesn't speak to what you have been claiming REALLY
>matters: CHANGES in the control apparatus. So, how did the smart
>lever come to be so smart? With absolutely NO environmental
>influence?

In the lever analogy, the shifting of the fulcrum was meant to be
analogous to a CHANGE in the system parameters resulting from
reorganization (with a systematic rather than an E. coli method of
"reorganizing" fulcrum position). The response of the lever at the
load end to the manipulator's actions at the other end was meant to be
analogous to the response of an acquired control system's output
action to a disturbance of its controlled quantity (no control system
is involved here in the analogy, but the relationship is that of
disturbance to opposing action). The lever itself and its control
system was meant to be analogous to the inherited body (the physical
lever) and the reorganizing control system which has a fixed
organization during a given lifetime.

>So, how did the smart lever come to be so smart? With absolutely NO
>environmental influence?

The smart lever itself is a product of evolution, which is a more
basic reorganizing process with reference signals pertaining to
critical variables closer to the level of DNA. Through evolutionary
trial and error, it was found that levers subject to less than one
pound of manipulating force preserved the next more detailed level of
critical variables better than levers which allowed greater forces to
be applied. This chain of reorganizing levels proceeds through an
unknown number of steps back to the original reorganizing process
that, by active self-induction of mutations, protected against
disturbances that could alter the process of replication. That
original reorganizing process represented a major step beyond merely
resisting such replication-altering disturbances in the primordial
soup and evolving through externally-driven mutation and natural
selection. Somewhere in there, Genetic Algorithms would fit -- sexual
reproduction as another step in developing more and more effective
modes of reorganization.

It is the reorganizing system and its ancestors, not the acquired
behavioral systems which are rebuilt from scratch in each new
lifetime, that constitute the link that extends back through
evolutionary history. And throughout this chain of evolving systems,
the basic parameter-changing output is RANDOM, so that the environment
has no influence on the behavior that controls critical variables. Of
course the environment, plus the physical organism as it existed at
any time, had a great influence on which internal variables would come
to be treated as critical variables. Critical variables are simply
those on which, in fact, the continuation of life depends. At no
point, however, did the environment have any effect on the most
fundamental critical variable of all: accuracy of replication.
Controlling that is the point of the whole shebang.
------------------------------------------------------------------
(Penni Sibun (921007.1400), Rick Marken (921007.1230), Bruce Nevin
921008.0646) --

There are some good suggestions for strategy here. I suspect, Rick,
that in trying to make the "behavior of perception" make sense to
psychologists, you made it make TOO much sense. The shorter the
distance between a new way of understanding something and an old one,
the easier it is for the listener to conclude that the new one is
nothing but the old one. I'm sometimes amazed at the way people can
take a perfectly simple and clear explanation, and read all the words
so they add up to a totally different explanation. We even have this
trouble here, on the net. Every one of us has gone through this sort
of misreconstruction of meaning.

I think you may have to go into great detail. You may have to pick
out, for each point you make, the nearest conventional idea you can
think of and show exactly what the difference is. Did the reviewers
get specific enough for you to include their remarks and use them in
the paper to spell out the differences? If so, and considering the
not-unfriendly reception, this might well be worth doing. You might
even consider writing a new paper that deals with just a few of the
most important differences. Leading people all the way to what you
mean by "behavior IS perception" may involve too big a jump. Maybe
you're trying to do in one paper what will really take three or four
papers. Pick the size of the wedge to fit the amount that the door is
cracked open. This door can be opened only from the inside.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Avery Andrews (several posts) --

I'd like to see that paper on rules and language.

The meeting on simulating societies is a bit premature for us. We
really need our Institute for the Study of Living Control Systems, so
people can put in the kind of work needed to meet a challenge like
this.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Isaac Kurtzer (921007) --

ECS: Elementary Control System.  CEV: complex environmental variable.
Both thanks to Martin Taylor.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Nevin (921007) --

Blindsight seems a little easier to understand in terms of levels of
perception. Do things perceived this way always exist as low-level
perceptions? That is, would one ever blindly perceive a relationship
as opposed to an object?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Best to all,


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