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Date:         Sat, 5 Sep 1992 11:39:33 -0600
From:         "William T. Powers" <POWERS_W%FLC@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Subject:      Imagination, social control

[From Bill Powers (920905.0930)]

Penni Sibun (920204.1200) --

>i didn't say control theory was about solipsism.  you said everyone
>``out there'' is imaginary.  i don't think that has explanatory
power.

Imagination, in PCT, is a technical term and has explanatory power. A
control system of level n is in the "imagination mode" when its
output, instead of serving as a reference signal for systems at level
n-1, loops back into its own perceptual function. Normally, sending
the output downward as a reference signal results in the lower system
matching its perceptual signals to that reference signal by acting on
still lower systems. Since the higher system constructs its
perceptions from the lower perceptual signals, its perception then
matches its own reference signal.

So the effect of the imagination connection is as though the lower
systems had acted instantly and perfectly. The level-n system,
however, is supplying its own perceptual signal. It is "imagining" the
perception instead of receiving it from sensory inputs and achieving
it through action on lower systems and the world.

When I say I am imagining you and Rick and Chuck, this does not mean
that THEY are imaginary. It means that I am supplying my own picture
of them to myself. In your case, as I have never seen you, there is no
way to tell if I am imagining correctly. For example, is your beard
really curly and blond?

Imagination is confusing only when we believe that our perceptions are
really outside us. If what we experience were really outside, it would
be hard to explain how we can experience things that aren't there, or
instead of what is there. Normal perception contains a large component
of imagination at all times. We imagine that there is a back on the
terminal we're looking at. We imagine that the table extends
continuously underneath the keyboard, and is of the same color there.
In thousands of tiny ways we fill in what is actually missing from the
picture of reality we get through our sensors, treating incomplete
perceptions as if they were complete.

Note that the imagination connection explains both perception and
imagination (and remembering, dreaming, planning, creating, and so on)
by means of one simple switched connection, and does not require a
separate perceptual system for things imagined and things "really
seen." All experience, real and imagined, results in signals in the
same perceptual channels. Imagination can take place at different
levels; at low levels it is vivid and realistic because it includes
imagined sensations. When the short-circuit connection occurs at
higher levels, we experience only from that level up, without the
realism. We call that imagining "in the abstract" or "imagining THAT"
xyz is occurring without, in fact, imagining x,y, or z.

I've always been amused when scientists say things like "You're just
imagining that" as if that dismisses the subject. Imagination is a
phenomenon like any other, and requires explanation in any model of
the brain.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Taylor (probably too late)(920904) --

>Perhaps the problem is that we have a different sense of "alerting."
>The way you use it, it sounds as if you make some connection with
>consciousness.

No, I wasn't thinking of consciousness. I was just wondering what
effect those signals were supposed to have on the other control
systems.

>I take "alerting" to describe the marking of df as being probably
>useful to control, and don't put any more on it than that.

Then in your diagram you have to include the perceptual functions that
perceive "possible usefulness" and say what it is that they are
perceiving that tells them about usefulness, and you have to say how
an output of the alerting system "puts a marker on" something, and
what effect that marker has, and what knows about that effect, and so
on. You're really proposing an arrangement with a lot of hidden
complexities even at the block diagram level, not to mention the
implementation level. It seems to me that you're proposing dormitive
principles, to use Bateson's image [for those who don't know it, a
sleeping draught makes you sleepy because it contains a dormitive
principle].

>On other occasions I have proposed gain functions with dead zones as
>being a way that ECSs can perform the alerting function on
themselves.  >In that case, there is no overt mechanism, but the df
shift occurs as a >consequence of conflict between the "alerted" ECS
and previously active >ones with correlated perceptual functions.

This is NOT a dormitive principle, but a perfectly good model.
However, I don't see the necessity of classifying it as an "alerting"
function. When you've said it has a dead zone and that a large enough
error can wake it up and cause conflict, you've completely described
the relation of this system to the others. To say that it's an example
of an alerting function implies that this classification adds
something to what is happening. And I fear that by creating such a
class, we would be tempted to include other quite dissimilar processes
in it, and leave the impression that there is something common to all
the processes in this class. Classification is arbitrary. The way we
classify things isn't what makes them work.

>As a related topic, it seems to me probable that there are usually
far >fewer output degrees of freedom used in active control than are
>available, because the use of all available ones seems rather like a
>very high workload condition.

I think that all the 600 plus or minus 200 muscles are always part of
active control systems at least while we're awake. Muscles are always
in a state of nonzero tonus. The tendon and stretch receptors are
always connected and ready to respond if not already responding. If
you're standing, you can't raise an arm without producing an
adjustment in the tension of a toe muscle.

"Active control," as I said to Rick Marken, is a somewhat ambiguous
concept. A balanced pair of control systems receiving a zero error
signal and not being disturbed is not varying its outputs, but it is
still connected and "live" even though it's not "doing" anything
(i.e., no derivatives).

In considering output degrees of freedom, don't we have the same
problem in counting them that we have with input degrees of freedom?
As soon as you introduce the time dimension, the number of degrees of
freedom multiples greatly. A pianist can play music on an 88-key
keyboard with only 10 fingers and a foot-pedal. And if absolutely
necessary, a nose.

>Symbolic PCT is surely easier to program than is distributed PCT, but
I >doubt it is as robust or as true to life.

Show me.

RE: your rectifier model.

Very clever. This would indeed pick up AC variations, which would
qualify as a perception of variability. You just need a resistor to
ground on the rectifier side of the series capacitor.

Neural signals are natural rectifiers, as they can represent only one
sign of frequency. If you subtract the average value of a signal from
the signal, and use a long-time-constant neuron as the receiver,
you'll also get RC-smoothed rectification of variations.

Speaking compulsively, this would be a transition-level perceptual
function, wouldn't it? I wonder if perception and control of
variability would naturally occur at that level and not higher ones.
(????).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Greg Williams (920904) --

>I also think Bill's IDEOLOGY of radical autonomy wrongly (because he
>can't get as far as he could otherwise in explaining behavior)
>downplays what has happened up to now.

I don't really want to be an ideologue or downplay anything that
should be up-played. I'm not sure what you mean by "what has happened
up to now." The model surely contains mechanisms for change, for the
organism to alter itself as well as the environment, so at least some
aspects of "what has happened up to now" are included in the overall
picture. What is missing?

Where I resist is where you seem to be pushing for "control without
control" which makes no sense to me. I've acknowledged that there are
ways to affect people's ACTIONS (their outputs) without specific
consent of the system being affected, and that a manipulator can
produce such effects intentionally. If the effects are produced
accidentally I just call this a disturbance, with the controlled
variable being corrected as usual by the change in the action. If
they're produced intentionally (which would be hard to do in any more
than a trivial way, but admittedly can be done by a person who devotes
enough attention and time to observing an individual), there is still
no problem for the person affected unless some internal goal is
disturbed, hierarchical or intrinsic. I think it's unlikely that an
external agent could intentionally violate another person's inner
goals without creating direct resistance. That, of course, takes us
into a different universe of discourse.

Another aspect of this debate that seems to have been overlooked is
what I have said about the time-scale involved. Fool me once, shame on
you; fool me twice, shame on me. Anything is possible in a brief
encounter with a con-man. If you follow the con-man around, you'll get
the impression that people are gullible fools who are easy to control
through deception and so forth. But if you follow the person who was
conned, you'll find someone who is far less likely to be conned again.
And if you follow the much smaller population that has been conned
twice, you'll find even fewer whose gullibility has not been replaced
by a deep suspicion even of their friends. The minute few who go
through life being conned again and again can't blame the con-men any
more: they're malfunctioning.

It is possible that large numbers of people are malfunctioning. One
kind of malfunction is to adopt and try to live under a conception of
human nature that is incompatible with the way people are actually
organized.

>PCT SCIENCE -- again, not IDEOLOGY -- IS, I think, adequate. Skinner
>was model-less; PCT is based on models. And those models, aside from
>confirming folk notions of how organisms "work," are constructed in
>such a way as to make the two mutually incompatible "complementary"
>world-views described above fit together in a plausible way. I think
>the science could heal that ideological rift, and lead to a new sort
of >ideology noting the importance of BOTH history and the present
>situation.

Perhaps what's bothering you is that PCT in itself has nothing to say
about social interactions. It has seemed to me that you are looking
for way in which the society affects individuals, including their
processes of reorganization, in a way that is purposive or at least
directed. So the properties of a society in one sense DETERMINE how an
individual must become organized in order to live in it. This, of
course, creates an unavoidable image of the individual against The
System, with the system inevitably winning by direct force or subtle
and untiring influences.

What is wrong with this image (which may be a straw man, but never
mind) is that there is no System. There are only the interactions
among individuals. These individuals are ALL adapting themselves to
the worlds in which they find themselves, in service of their own
deepest needs, their intrinsic reference levels that only heridity can
influence.

This means that the System is not an entity with goals and purposes;
it is only the consequence of ALL people continually adjusting to the
presence and actions of ALL other people. The shape of the social
system is in constant flux; it isn't going anywhere by itself; it's
just changing form and drifting as the individuals each look for a
state of minimum internal error. Furthermore, there isn't just one
System; there are thousands of overlapping systems of different sizes,
even inside what we think of as a single culture. There are small
groups of people within which each person has found a local minimum of
internal error; take a person out of the local group and transplant
him or her into a different one, and the pushing and jostling will
recommence as EVERYONE has to seek a new equilibrium. There is a large
overall system only in a few regards, a few threads that run through
all the smaller ones.

I react with alarm to the prevalence of social control through the use
of force. But I also see this not as a concerted plot, a conspiracy to
control people, but as a malfunction. When you grow up in a society
that has not progressed beyond competition, you are growing up amid
people who see no alternative but to push back as hard as they are
pushed. That's how they treat you; and by pushing back you learn how
to become a pusher of others. The company that locks out the workers
and posts armed guards at the gate is run by people who are afraid,
with justification, that without the armed guards the strikers would
break down the gates and destroy the livelihoods of the decision-
makers. Each person selects and justifies his or her own actions on
the basis of what the other people are perceived as doing and wanting.
The compassion of the rich for the poor is greatly circumscribed by
their fear of the poor, and by anything that threatens to make them
one of the poor. And the poor do not behave in any way calculated to
reassure the rich because they are convinced, quite correctly, that
the rich need poor people to support the life-style of the rich at
sufficiently low cost. There are simply not enough resources, material
or physiological, for everyone to live on the tail of the curve.

I don't see the solutions to these problems as coming out of
continuing in the same vein. If you tell some people to stop
controlling other people by force, and use force to make them do it,
you threaten to remove their only means of defense against force. You
will be ignored or removed. Our whole society is in a state of minimum
internal error, but that minimum is not very low. It entails fear,
misery, and pain. It's just that a move in any so-far-imagined
direction away from this state of equilibrium entails even more fear,
misery, and pain. People say "Yeah, but what's the alternative?" All
the alternatives they know about would be even worse, and have been.

The only cure I can see is to fix the malfunction. Teach people how
they work. Make it comprehensible to people that when they push on
someone else, the natural and inevitable result is a push back. This
result is under the control of the pusher. It is not perversity or
ambition or hostility that makes others push back: it is you, trying
to make people work in a way contrary to their natures. Make sure that
each person grows up understanding exactly why others react as they
do, and who is reponsible for what.

This understanding will make it possible to find a new equilibrium in
which all the errors are lower. Maybe not zero; maybe still not what
we would want. But surely lower than they are now. This is a direction
not tried; in this direction lies something better. So there is
nothing to prevent our moving that way.

The problem I see, Greg, is that people ARE autonomous, but they keep
trying to behave as if all the other people are not. That is the
malfunction.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Your paragraph seems fine to me. No error.

My only proviso is that we agree on this:

You say:

> Another person's output variables (actions) can be so controlled (I
>have been calling this "manipulation") if you have appropriate
>knowledge (or adequate prediction) of the person's control structure,
>without the threat of or direct use of overwhelming physical force by
>you.

This is true, but I maintain that if such appropriate knowledge
actually existed, the malfunction of which I speak would have been
cured, and the desire to control other people would all but vanish. It
is not likely that anyone now classed as a "manipulator" has anything
approaching the kind of knowledge of even one other person to
accomplish what you describe. The kinds of non-coercive manipulation
we see around us now could easily be avoided by anyone with a modicum
of self-understanding, if avoiding them were necessary to maintain
one's inner integrity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Curt McNamara (920904.1730) --

Well, this discussion seem to be tempting some of our silent
listeners. Nice to hear from you, Curt.

>	BTW it appears to me that some CSG-L folks don't believe in
>manipulation because they think everyone's control structures are
>perfectly aligned with their highest principles.  In fact, I would
>guess that none of us are actually organized this well.  The
>non-alignment is what allows manipulation to occur.

A person who is in internal conflict can be manipulated in the sense
that control of some variable has been lost or crippled, so someone
else can control it without much effective resistance. But there is a
defensive mechanism, in that if the controlled variable gets pushed
far enough to one side, the inner effort that was helping in that
direction will relax, leaving the other side to push back. So the
controller can control only in the region where the person's inner
conflict prevents any net action at all.

I do agree that when internal conflict is removed, people become MUCH
harder to control. Paradoxically, however, they see fewer situations
as threatening their control, and so become less unwilling to be used
for another's purposes if there's no serious inconvenience involved. I
think that people who are afraid (with justification) that they have
few defenses against control learn to avoid getting into situations
where others can take advantage of their handicap.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU