Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 16:05:03 EST
From:         mmt@BEN.DCIEM.DND.CA
Subject: Re: Complex perceptions

[Martin Taylor 921123 16:00]
(Bill Powers 921120.1300)

This should have been part of my earlier posting of today...

>The HPCT view is that the pattern is imposed from above. When a
>higher perceptual function becomes organized, it receives signals
>that are lower-level perceptions, puts them through some sort of
>computing function, and delivers a perceptual signal carrying the
>scalar value of that function.
>...
>We do not learn to perceive patterns that are "really there." We
>learn to perceive patterns that are useful to control. Somewhere,
>way off in the philosophical distance, there may be a deep principle
>involved, to the effect that the patterns that prove to be the most
>useful to control, in terms of the effect of doing so on critical
>variables, happen to relate in some way to something that is in some
>sense "really there." But organisms do not know what is really
>there.

The second of these quotes leaves the first as something of a mystery.  How
can an ECS be developed that controls something "useful to control," if, at
the same time, "the pattern is imposed from above."  I have assumed that
the perceptual signals being controlled have developed through some form
of random reorganization, whereas "imposed from above" seems to suggest
that there is some kind of direction or supervision involved.  But the
hint of that suggestion caused you to take off against Avery the other day.
So there is a bit of bewilderment here.

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, and though we may
at some point learn to control for many things, we retain those which it
is useful to control.  What we control against is as important as what we
control for, in the sense that reorganization of the output connections
allows effective, resource-limited actions that (usually) counter the
disturbances that affect the perceptions we are controlling for.  Different
kinds of reorganization probably apply to the perceptual input functions
and to the output connections, but both, presumably, must operate without
magical knowledge of their optimum form.

Correlations among the disturbances imposed by the world provide opportunities
for increasingly effective ECSs.  Take those "correlations" in a more
general sense, and you get the opportunity for different kinds of perceptual
input functions; these "kinds" define the eleven levels of the hierarchy.
As you said in your example of the balloon being blown up and then bursting,
as seen by an organism with no transition level: "This new signal is the
sense of transition, of growing. It has no other character."

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.  Only
when the pattern has been developed into an ECS in control of its higher-level
perceptual signal is there any sense in which the pattern is "imposed from
above."  It is in the operation of a mature hierarchy, not in its growth.

I have sometimes talked about the "mirror world" of perceptual signals and
CEV's (Complex Environmental Variables).  A perceptual input function cannot
be stable unless the corresponding CEV has some (perhaps temporary) stability.
It is not "useful to control" something that isn't there the next time you
provide the pattern of outputs (actions) that have been reorganized.  Even
though actions are not controlled, they are another word for the outputs
of an ECS, as seen by an outside observer.  And if the actions sometimes
lead to negative feedback, sometimes do nothing, and sometimes lead to
positive feedback, that perceptual input function is not (at present) useful
to control.  Something needs further reorganization, and it may well be that
the CEV just is not a stable aspect of the outer world.  Then the perceptual
input function will have to change before any control can be maintained.
But this does not mean that the signals (perceptual signals of lower levels)
that enter the perceptual input function also have to be changed.  They,
by assumption, are being very well controlled, thank you very much.

>I think that the idea of complex perceptions, vectors that have
>meaning in themselves, is a vestige of an older way of modeling
>behavior based on a realist epistemology.

Perhaps you can see that I am not talking about vectors that have meaning
in themselves within the perceiving organism, whether that organism be
the analyst or the analysand.

Do I still miss some point you are making?  Or do you get my point any
differently from before?  Does it matter?

Martin
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