Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Tue, 1 Sep 1992 23:21:00 GMT
From:         Dag Forssell <0004742580@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Promo, Martin, Science
X-To:         csg-l <CSG-L@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>

[From Dag Forssell (920901-1)]

Hank Folson (920830)   on promotion:

>I won't embarrass Dag by listing all the different things he has tried
>to get me interested in over the years, but there were many.

Would it embarrass me?  Was I trying to interest you (focus on you), or
just bubbling along about what interested me at the time (focus on me)?
I got no error signal from your refusal to take my expert advice, did I?

Most of us are much more concerned with ourselves than with others.
Control of self comes before control of others?!
------------------------------------------------------------

Martin Taylor's Paris paper:
PRINCIPLES FOR INTELLIGENT HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION.
(Version control - My copy printed July 30, 1992)

I have read your 50 page paper, with emphasis on the PCT parts. Very
interesting to learn some of your personal background and to see many of
the issues you have brought to the net in your context.

A few, nitpicky, comments:

In fig 2.: "The ECS has as its purpose to match the Perceptual Signal to
its Reference Signal which comes from a higher level ECS."

As I see it, the Reference Signal IS the purpose. The matching happens
automatically because the ECS is a control system. It has no purpose of
its own.

Since you are jumping in with both feet into the (PCT concept) ECS
anyway, you might consider inserting (distributed, local) memory (BCP p.
218, 221) as a source for the reference signal. Then say that this is
implied in subsequent simplistic representations of ECS's.

Rick's paper: "The behavior of perception" deals with this and shows
clearly (as I recall) that it is memories of perceptions that "behave."
In our daily lives, most of our behavior is simply the repetitious
recreation of past perceptions. A capable person has many past
perceptions to choose from. These memories become purposes when they are
specified by higher level ECS's. I witnessed a discussion between Ed Ford
and Bill P. a year ago about why it is that Quality Time works. In a
broken marriage, the spouses have no fresh recollections of pleasant
perceptions together. So they cannot recreate pleasant experiences in the
present either. They do not know what to do. By asking them what they
individually enjoy, then prescribing the common denominator as a joint
activity - quality time - Ed coaches the couple to create recent
perceptions of each other with a pleasurable content. They can then keep
on recreating these perceptions, restoring affection, love and marriage.

The reference signal from memory can of course be quite complex in a
human, made up of temporal and spacial patterns and several sensory
components. Equivalents for the computer Claude that I imagine are
"subroutines," "algorithms," "matrixes" and many other things computer
scientists talk about and I don't know much about.

Fig 3.: Putting words to the levels of perception so the concept is
intuitively grasped without explanation is hard. This looks like a good
start.

Kent McClelland provides a good narrative in his paper (several levels
of cruise control), which I plan to graph out in the next several weeks.

P. 9: "But the central point is that the only aspects of the world that
can be perceived are those that can potentially come under control."

I vaguely recall not paying attention as you discussed this on the net.
Offhand, it does not make any sense. Look at the stars! Perhaps a
reformulation can convey what you are trying to say. The following two
sentences make sense, but do not add up to the one above.

Fig 4 & 5: I can see that the mirror diagram makes intuitive sense. You
have left the control diagram out of the boxes in the environment, which
is a nice, subtle touch.   (Should they be put back in Fig 9).

Fig 9: This shows me what you are driving at with this paper, right? With
the other intelligent entity being a computer, you demonstrate the
utility of matching the computer's layers perceptually with those of the
human it is interfaced with. The human is existing, the computer must
conform. The implication that computer designers should look at the
design of humans is compelling.

P 15: "There is very little to choose...  I don't follow the english or
meaning of this sentence.

Fig 14: The imagination loop would make much more sense with the
recognition of memory references fed into perception, as shown in BCP.
You can show the address signal and memory box in the loop shown.

P 32: I shall remember the principle of reorganization shown here, with
autumn leaves accumulating where they are left alone; moving at random
where they are not sheltered. Thanks!

It is nice to have a fellow student of PCT addressing an application and
audience where this ingenious insight can be welcomed and put to good
use. Keep up your hard work.

Hope this is helpful.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Powers (920830.1545)

Thanks for your nice comment. Glad you liked articles. Scanning it is.
A flatbed scanner and Omnipage character recognition software do a good
job fast. Spell check does the rest. I am not patient to type this
quantity of stuff without very good reason.

Re: Soft and Hard science.

It occurs to me that a more useful terminology for the distinction
between soft and hard might be Descriptive and Explanatory.

With "Descriptive," there is no expectation of prediction.

With "Explanatory," testing of predictions is implied.

----------------------------------------------------
Best to all,      Dag
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