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Date:         Tue, 15 Sep 1992 11:38:11 -0600
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Really real sex; HPCT; purposeful influence

[From Bill Powers (920915.1000)]

Penni Sibun (920914.2100) --

>i've been trying to establish that ``what they [sexes] REALLY are''
has >two answers, and that these answers are distinct (sex-by-
chromosomes
>doesn't always match sex-by-judgement).  i've further insinuated that
>the answer that is used 99.99% of the time is the one by judgement.
>and i've left the conclusion to be drawn that the judgement answer is
>in fact the really real one (unless you're a doctor or scientist and
>have some reason to muck about in somebody's chromosomes).

A theorizer about human nature lives a strange life. If not 99.99% of
the time, then 90% of the time it lives life exactly as you describe.
What appears to be the case is taken without question as if it is the
case. Judgment, in other words, is based on unanalyzed perceptions and
is trusted. So 90% of the time, the theorizer is just as sane as
anyone else.

But the other 10% of the time the theorizer is mad. It's only when you
begin viewing your own experiences in a way that departs significantly
from the norm that you begin to see beneath the surface, to question
what normal people take for granted or don't even notice.

Take the category "sex." If you base your notions of sex strictly on
external appearances -- habits of speech or dress, mannerisms, length
of hair, use of makeup, pitch of voice, attitudes toward children,
roles in relationship to people in a disjoint category, and so on --
you will base your expectations and wants on those appearances. If,
for scientific or other reasons, you decide to base your concepts of
sex on chromosomes, skeletal conformity, organ configuration, and the
like, you will base your expectations and wants on these appearances
instead.

Which one of these ways of categorization is "right?" To me it's
obvious that this is a non-question. "Sex" is just a word. We can
attach it to any perceptual category we like. We could even use it to
mean a number, 6. It's the category, the way of lumping different
perceptions together and treating them as "one thing," that makes the
difference, not the word. When you strip away the word, it becomes
obvious that what the scientist is looking at is one collection of
perceptions, while what the normal person is looking at is a different
collection.

What the world does is different depending on how you categorize its
components. Even the relationships among categories will be different
if you draw the boundaries differently. And what you DO in the world
-- what you control for, what you try to make happen and try to
prevent from happening, is entirely shaped by how you perceive the
world. You can interact intentionally with the world only AS YOU
PERCEIVE IT.

So NONE of the ways of perceiving sex is the "really real" way.
There's no arbiter sitting up on a high stool beside the net
interpreting the rules and informing the players whether the ball was
REALLY "in" or "out." The players have to work out a common set of
rules between themselves for the purposes of the game. Of course all
the players are subject to the laws of physical dynamics, gravity,
elasticity, aerodynamics, and other things -- or however you want to
express the nature of That Itself, the Immanent Order. All the rules
that anyone can possibly invent must be played out on that stage. The
only "really real" aspects of the game are the consequences of our
actions that occur whether we think about them or not, whether we want
them to occur or not. The mad theorist is trying to figure out mostly
the nature of the stage, and only incidentally the particular rules
that two or three generations of players have brought into the game
with them. In a century they'll all be dead and all those rules will
be different anyway.

In the meantime, or 90% of it, the theorist is just like anyone else.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Greg Williams (920915) --

>One: I have observed that various PCTers put forth highly technical
>usages of terms such as "control" and "autonomy" in contexts where
the >fact that they ARE being used technically, in "PCT-senses," is
not made >clear explicitly. By doing this, PCT-novices and laypersons
are misled >into thinking that PCT supports notions which it doesn't
support.

I agree that this is a problem, particularly in a public discussion
where we may understand each other but others will misinterpret. Not
that we necessarily agree on everything, which is another
complication.

>Two: I have observed a tendency among PCTers to treat PCT/HPCT as a
>monolith, as if all its aspects were equally well-supported. It seems
>undeniable to me that the basic tenets of PCT are virtually
>unassailable (there is no other even plausible candidate "overall"
>mechanism for accomplishing ends consistently in a disturbance-filled
>world). But I find no such rock-solidity in HPCT (particularly at
>higher levels) and reorganization theory.

Again, agreed. When we talk about higher levels, however, there are
certain threads that follow through from what we know more solidly
about the lowest levels. One is the concept of viewing all experience
AS PERCEPTIONS rather than in the naive realist fashion. The HPCT
model doesn't totally deny the underlying concepts of realism, because
it uses models of the external world just as if they were a true
representation of that world. So an independent external world is
assumed. The main difference is that the HPCT model shows perception
of that world as an activity in a brain, with (as far as we know so
far) completely aribtrary perceptual transforms creating each new
level of representation. So the brain literally "makes sense" of the
world -- creates a self-consistent network of representations that
depends on the world but has no one necessary relationship to that
world.

We can see this relationship of perception to our physics-models of
the world very clearly at the lower levels of the nervous system. This
provides a plausible justification for the general concept of
experience as experience of perceptual signals, not of the world
directly. By applying that principle to higher levels of perception
(without, of course, the relatively detailed circuit-tracing that we
can do in the spinal-cord systems) we can come to understand the
experienced world at those levels in a new way. We can see that the
principle of controlling perception rather than reality applies at the
higher levels as well, and indeed makes more sense of those kinds of
experiences than any other point of view can provide. I think this
counts as reasonably "solid" knowledge, on any practical scale of
solidness.

There are other isolated islands of solidness in the HPCT concept. We
can pick any particular behavior that seems to be of a kind that
belongs in the higher levels -- behaviors relating to morals, for
example -- and set up experimental conditions under the assumptions of
PCT (not HPCT). And generally we find exactly what we expect:
variations in behavior that oppose disturbances and maintain constant
some aspect of a variable like a moral aspect of behavior. So we can
demonstrate that the PCT model works with a great variety of
behaviors, varieties that range over what we vaguely see as "levels."
Control of morals is clearly of a different level than control of
muscle tension, which is clearly of a different level from control of
posture, and so on.

The "H" part of HPCT then shows up when we examine the MEANS by which
"higher" control processes are carried out. Invariably, they are cast
in terms of variables which themselves can be tested as controlled
variables in the usual PCT way. And they, too, prove to be resistant
to disturbance through actions of a still more detailed sort. Although
investigations like these have never been carried out in a systematic
and exhaustive way (that will take organization and money), we can see
that when such research is finally started, there will be organization
there to find, and that it will almost undoubtedly resemble the
hierarchy in HPCT.

There's one final aspect of HPCT that seems reasonably solid: private
experience. When you look at your own life in terms of a hierarchy of
controlled perceptions, you can make sense of it in a way that's
intuitively satisfying. The HPCT meaning of a goal structure shows up
clearly in at least some segments of private experience: I want this
in order to get that, and when I get that I will satisfy something
even more important, and so on. With the HPCT model in mind, you can
put these goals into some kind of order that seems real; they really
do seem to be related as HPCT claims, in general if not in detail.
This isn't "objective" verification, but if you think about it, when
many differerent people agree that they are observing the same
phenomenon, does it matter where they are observing it? We can't
really PROVE that two people are seeing the same meter-reading; we
take the agreement itself as indication of objectivity if there aren't
too many dissenters.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to the argument.

I don't want to stretch this post out much more so I'll be brief

Whenever I hear you saying something like "the experimenter DOES HAVE
AN
INFLUENCE ON WHAT THE 'CONTROLLED' ORGANISM DOES (just as the organism
has an influence).." I become uncomfortable. It appears to me that
you're classing two things together that are not alike. One of the
things is simply "having an influence," which just means bumping into
someone or getting in the way or otherwise disturbing the other's
perceptions. That naturally leads to actions that keep the effect of
the disturbance small, in those respects that matter to the
influencee. The other thing is "VARYING an influence so as to produce
a CONSISTENT EFFECT on the other's behavior." That's a completely
different matter. That's control, and only control can be called
purposeful. Of all the influences that affect what a person does, only
a very tiny fraction of them is used intentionally by someone else to
produce a preselected effect.

In its first meaning, "having an influence" is a sure bet. Practically
anything that is done by a person or a natural event influences
perceptions, and results in changes of action that counteract
incipient changes in controlled variables. Just being in the world
means being constantly influenced by external processes. That's the
whole reason that control exists.

The second meaning, however, brings in purposeful influence, which
means influence that is organized not around the physical actions
taken by the influencer, but around the behavior of the influencee.
Purposeful control means having a goal for the behavior of another
person, and taking _whatever action is required_ to make that desired
behavior appear. No particular action can be influential in the sense
of control; control produces consistent ends by VARIABLE means. There
is no way to tell whether a given disturbance is part of someone
else's control process, not just by looking at the disturbance. There
is no difference between an intentional disturbance and an
unintentional one. It's just a disturbance.

It often seems to me that you are lumping together "having an effect"
with "having a particular intended effect." But simply showing that
one person's action results in a change of action by another is not
sufficient to show purposeful control, even if the person doing the
disturbing wanted to see the action that the other took, even if that
action satisfied a goal in the disturber. That wanting, that goal, is
completely irrelevant -- it's just a lucky guess -- unless the
controller can VARY the disturbance and KEEP the other's action in the
form desired, either for a long time or on repeated occasions.

You say " The organism doesn't 'work' (thanks, Dennis) autistically!"
But this means nothing with respect to PURPOSEFUL influence. If an
organism is in an environment, it must control in order to keep its
perceptions as it wishes them to be, whether the disturbances that
interfere were generated purposefully or naturally (that is, not by
control systems). Autism, behavior without regard to environmental
happenings or properties (as I understand your meaning), has no
bearing on the subject of purposeful influence. It isn't true that in
the absence of purposeful influences there are no influences, nor that
behavior will be autistic unless the influences are purposeful. There
are far more influences unrelated to anyone's goals than influences
aimed at producing a particular intended change in behavior.

The question before us is not whether disturbances of perceptions can
alter actions, but the extent to which an external agent can use
disturbances in a systematic way to make other people behave to suit
the disturber's goals. You claim that this extent is far greater and
far more significant than I am yet willing to admit (absent coercion,
which I do see as a serious problem). That's what we're arguing about,
in my opinion.

I'll comment on only one more thing from your post -- this is getting
too long, and anything I miss will come up again.

>>So in order to retain control in general, the external agent has to
>>give up control of that action and pick a higher-level aspect of
>>behavior to control.

>No, the external agent just has to be skilled enough to not NEED to
>pick a higher-level aspect.

That's impossible. If you're controlling at one level, there is no way
you can keep a higher system from changing the reference signal in the
system you're taking advantage of. It's impossible from another
standpoint, too. To be "skillful enough" to avoid disturbing any
variable of the same or higher level that matters to the controllee,
the controller would have to understand the controllee in complete
detail, and also predict every independent disturbance that is going
to happen. I don't think this will ever happen, but more to the point,
I don't think it is likely to HAVE HAPPENED. Neither can you get out
of this by saying that a person can have "sufficient" knowledge to do
this -- that's merely asserting that such control has happened, so it
must be the case that the knowledge was sufficient, then using the
supposed sufficiency of knowledge to "prove" that such control
happens. And lastly, I think that anyone with enough understanding of
human nature to know another person's hierarchy in the necessary
detail (not to mention predicting all events in the natural world that
could disturb the process) would be wise enough to have given up the
goal of controlling other people.

One last general observation. I've seen the term "controlling for"
being used inappropriately on the net. If your enemy trips and falls
down, you oughtn't say you're happy because you're controlling for
misery for your enemy. Wishing and controlling aren't the same thing.
If you're controlling for A, then you're acting in a way designed to
bring A to some reference level A*. You're not just hoping A will turn
into A* all by itself. If you mean hoping for or wishing for, say
hoping or wishing, not controlling. Let's not dilute our technical
language.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Best to all,


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