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Date:         Sun, 11 Oct 1992 15:44:08 -0600
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      conceiving percepts; ignoring hoaxes

[From Bill Powers (921011.1500)]

I wrote a lot of longwinded responses to various stuff and decided that it's a
 waste of time. Brevity rules.

Wayne Hershberger (921010) --

>I would prefer something like this: "It is that the world we
>experience directly is ALREADY being shaped by the perceptual
>processes even as we are experiencing it."

What are these processes and how do they do this shaping?

>Thus, conceptual models of perception merely assert an equivalence
>between perceptual and conceptual realizations.  On this point I
>trust we are all agreed.

I would agree if I knew what you meant. What do you mean by "perceptual" and
 what do you mean by "conceptual?" Pretend I really don't know; you will be
 right. Are concepts not perceivable?

>The expression _conceiving a percept_ is an oxymoron because
>a percept conceived is a concept not a percept.

Does this suggest a hierarchical relationship? That is, perceiving processes
 produce percepts, from which a conceiving process can produce a concept?
---------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Williams (921011) --

>Hmmm. I know how to deal with obvious hoaxes: ignore them.

If you really received such a letter and actually believed it, would you still
 say "Thank you for the information" and simply alter your behavior? Or do you
 suppose there there might be a tad of affect attached to the situation?

>However, Bill must have thought this important to do for SOME >reason, if only
 to distract his own or others' attention away from >the main points of my post.

I was trying to show you by demonstration (which you foiled by dismissing the
 letter as a hoax instead of asking what would happen if you believed it) that
 your example was too intellectualized to be realistic. If you make up examples
 that have no relationship to real behavior I am going to call you on them.

>>Your proposals require a model entirely different from mine. How
>>about spelling it out?

>I'm not so sure my model is entirely different -- maybe not even
>different at all, though at least how I interpret the ideological
>upshot does appear to be different.

What starts and stops reorganization if critical error doesn't drive it? Why
 would reorganization take place in response to "Fire" if the person already had
 the goal of exiting upon hearing "Fire" and immediately did so? How can you be
 upset (experiencing critical error) without reorganizing? How can you control
 differently without acquiring a new control system or modifying an old one? How
 can new information lead to controlling something new without reorganization?
 How can a person use the fact that another person is reorganizing to control
 for a particular behavior by the other person? How can a person want another
 person to control his actions and at the same time want the consequence that
 those actions are already controlling? Or are you saying that there are actions
 which are not aimed at controlling anything?

If A is partly determined by B, then to predict A from knowing B you must also
 know the state of C and all other influences on A, known and unknown, present
 and future. How is your concept of "ceteris paribus" any different from the
 failed methods of behavioral science?

>>To say that A depends "in part" on B is also to make a clear
>>statement: given B, one can predict nothing about A.

>I don't think so (should we put it to a vote, or just ask a >professional
 philosopher?).

How about reasoning it out? If A depends not only on B but on other variables as
 well, and you do not know the states of all the other variables on which A
 depends and cannot predict future states of all those other variables, how can
 you predict anything about A? How can you determine that an apparent
 relationship is real? Assuming that you can get data anyway, and make
 predictions anyway, is the rock on which the ship of psychology has foundered.
 Why should this method work any better for us?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Taylor (921010.1540) --

>Well, I want to know how people work, even if you don't.  It isn't >enough for
 me to accept that behaviour is controlled perception.  I >want to know where
 the signals go (functionally), and what happens >if you block this of that
 path, how to deal with people suffering >from stroke, why we have focussed
 attention and what its >limitations are, whether we use internal feedback for
 short-term >memory, and all sorts of questions like that.

Wanting this isn't sufficient to make it possible. We have 50 years of
 groundwork to lay before any believable answers to such questions can be found.
 Before you can ask where signals go and what happens if you block this or that
 path, you have to have a model that is correct. Not just plausible, correct.
 Throwing together a bunch of suppositions and then using them to make
 deductions is a total waste of time. Do you want to know how people work, or do
 you just want to SEEM to know how people work?

Of your statements, Greg said

>Well said and worth repeating. Sadly, I predict no reorganization >resulting
 from these comments. I hope my prediction is wrong.

If you get sad ENOUGH, Greg, reorganization will result.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Best to all,

Bill P.

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