The reason why expressing the connection between not having a mate and seeking a mate in terms of PCT is so difficult is because “not having a mate” is not a perception, and because “seeking a mate” is not a behavior. Rather, these are an abstract world state with multiple perceptual correlates, and a broad class of complex behaviors that no known model explains fully. Given such a confusing problem statement, what did you expect if not a confused response?
The second problem, I think, is that you may have gotten a somewhat confused idea of what (non-perceptual) control systems look like. There was a series of articles about them on LW, but unfortunately, it stopped just short of the key insight, which is the PID controller model. A PID controller looks at not just the current value of its sensor (position, P), but also its recent history (integral, I) and rate of change (derivative, D).
If you want to test PCT, you need to step back and look at something simpler. The most obvious example is motor control. Most basic motor control tasks, like balancing, are a matter of generating some representation of body and object position, figuring out which neurons trigger muscles to push it in certain ways, and holding position constant; and to do that, any organism, whether it’s a human or a simple invertebrate, needs some neural mechanism that acts very much like a PID controller. That establishes that controllers are handled in neurology somehow, but not their scope. There’s another example, however, which shows that it’s considerably broader than just motor control.
Humans and animals have various neurons which respond to aspects of their biochemistry, such as concentrations of certain nutrients and proteins in the blood. If these start changing suddenly, we feel sick and the body takes appropriate action. But the interesting thing is that small displacements which indicate dietary deficiencies somehow trigger cravings for foods with the appropriate nutrient. The only plausible mechanism I can think of for this is that the brain remembers the effect that foods had, and looks for foods which displaced sensors in the direction opposite the current displacement. The alternative would be a separate chemical pathway for monitoring each and every nutrient, which would break every time the organism became dependent on a new nutrient or lost access to an old one.
Moving up to higher levels of consciousness, things get significantly more muddled. Psychology and clear explanations have always been mutually exclusive, and no single mechanism can possibly cover everything, but then it doesn’t need to, since the brain has many obviously-different specialized structures within it, each of which presumably requires its own theory. But I think control theory does a good job explaining a broad enough range of psychological phenomena that it should be kept in mind when approaching new phenomena.
Moving up to higher levels of consciousness, things get significantly more muddled.
I disagree, but that’s probably because I’ve seized on PCT as a compressed version of things that were already in my models, as disconnected observations. (Like time-delayed “giving up” or “symptom substitution”.) I don’t really see many gaps in PCT because those gaps are already filled (for me at least), by Ainslie’s “conditioned appetites” and Hawkins’ HTM model.
Ainslie’s “interests” model is a very strong fit with PCT, as are the hierarchy, sequence, memory, and imagination aspects of HTM. Interests/appetites and HTM look just like more fleshed-out versions of what PCT says about those things.
Is it a complete model of intelligence and humans? Heck no. Does it go a long way towards reverse-engineering and mapping the probable implementation of huge chunks of our behavior? You bet.
What’s still mostly missing, IMO, after you put Ainslie, PCT, and HTM together, is dealing with “System 2” thinking in humans: i.e. dealing with logic, reasoning, complex verbalizations, and some other things like that. From my POV, though, these are the least interesting parts of modeling a human, because these are the parts that generally have the least actual impact on their behavior. ;-)
So, there is little indication as to whether System 2 thinking can be modeled as a controller hierarchy in itself, but it’s also pretty plain that it is subject to the System 1 control hierarchy, that lets us know (for example) whether it’s time for us to speak, how loud we’re speaking, what it would be polite to say, whether someone is attacking our point of view, etc. etc.
It’s also likely that the reason we intuitively see the world in terms of actions and events rather than controlled variables is simply because it’s easier to model discrete sequences in a control hierarchy, than it is to directly model a control hierarchy in another control hierarchy! Discrete symbolic processing on invariants lets us reuse the controllers representing “events”, without having to devote duplicated circuitry to model other creatures’ controller hierarchies. (The HTM model has a better detailed explanation of this symbolic/pattern/sequence processing, IMO, than PCT, even though in the broad strokes, they’re basically the same.)
(And although you could argue that the fact we use symbols means they’re more “compressed” than control networks, it’s important to note that this is a deliberately lossy compression; discrete modeling of continuous actions makes thinking simpler, but increases prediction errors.)
The reason why expressing the connection between not having a mate and seeking a mate in terms of PCT is so difficult is because “not having a mate” is not a perception, and because “seeking a mate” is not a behavior. Rather, these are an abstract world state with multiple perceptual correlates, and a broad class of complex behaviors that no known model explains fully. Given such a confusing problem statement, what did you expect if not a confused response?
What a pitiful excuse.
Let’s get some perspective here: the model I’m trying to understand is so vague in the first place (in terms of what insight it has to offer), despite all of my efforts to understand it with basic questions about what it does to replace existing models. Of course my questions about such an ill-supported paradigm are going to look confused, but then again, it’s not my responsibility to make the paradigm clear. That burden, currently unmet, lies on the person presenting it.
If you’re familiar with the tools of rationality, it is a trivial task to handle “confused” questions of exactly the kind I just asked—but that pre-supposes you have a clue what you’re talking about. All you have to do is identify the error it makes, find the nearest meaningful problem, and show how your model handles that.
A confused response is neither appropriate, nor deserved, and only reflects poorly on the responder.
Let me show you how it works. Let’s say I’m some noble defender of the novel Galilean model, trying to enlighten the stubborn Ptolemaic system supporters. Then, some idiot comes along and asks me, “Okay, smarty, how does the Galilean model plot the epicycle for Jupiter?”
In response, do I roll my eyes at how he didn’t use my model’s terminology and hasn’t yet appreciated my models beauty? Do I resign myself to giving a “confused response”? No.
And do you know why I don’t? Because I have an actual scientific model, that I actually understand.
So in response to such a “hopeless” dilemma, I marshal my rationalist skills and give a non-confused response.
Ready to have your mind blown? Here goes:
“When you ask me about Jupiter’s epicycle, what you’re really looking for is how to plot its position relative to earth. But my point is, you don’t need to take this step of calculating or looking up epicycles. Rather, just model Jupiter as going around the sun in this well-defined eilliptical path, and the earth in this other one. We know where they will be relative to the sun as a function of time, so finding Jupiter relative to the earth is just matter of adding the earth-to-sun vector to the sun-to-jupiter vector.”
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But, I had it easy in that I’m defending an actual model that actually compresses actual observations. Richard, OTOH, isn’t so lucky.
Notice what I did not say: “You find Jupiter in the sky and then you draw an epicycle consistent with its position, but with the earth going around the sun”, which is about what I got from Richard.
Moving up to higher levels of consciousness, things get significantly more muddled.
Yeah, that’s the point. Those higher levels are exactly what pjeby attempts to use PCT for, which is where I think any usefulness (of the kind seen in biochemical feedback loops) loses its compression abilities, and any apparent similarity to simple feedback control systems is superficial and ad-hoc, which is exactly why no one seems to be able to even describe the form of the relationship between the higher and lower levels in a way that gives insight. That is, break down “finding a mate” into related controllable values and identify related outputs. Some specification is certainly possible here, no?
Given such a confusing problem statement, what did you expect if not a confused response?
What a pitiful excuse.
[...]
A confused response is neither appropriate, nor deserved, and only reflects poorly on the responder.
Neither the problem statement, nor any of the confused responses were mine. My post was meant to clarify, not to excuse anything.
If you’re familiar with the tools of rationality, it is a trivial task to handle “confused” questions of exactly the kind I just asked—but that pre-supposes you have a clue what you’re talking about. All you have to do is identify the error it makes, find the nearest meaningful problem, and show how your model handles that.
No, that is not the correct way to handle confused questions. The correct way to handle them is to back up, and explain the issues that lead to the confusion. In this case, there are many different directions the question could have been rounded in, each of which would take a fairly lengthy amount of text to handle, and people aren’t willing to do that when you could just say that wasn’t what you meant. I should also observe that pjeby gave you a citation and ducked out of the conversation, specifically citing length as the problem.
At some point, you seem to have switched from conducting a discussion to conducting a battle. Most of the parent post is not talking about the supposed topic of discussion, but about the people who participated in it before. Unfortunately, the history of this thread is far too long for me to read through, so I cannot respond to those parts. However, I am strongly tempted to disregard your arguments solely on the basis of your tone; it leads me to believe that you’re in an affective death spiral.
Neither the problem statement, nor any of the confused responses were mine.
I know. Still a pitiful excuse, and yes, it was an excuse; you insinuated that my confused question deserved the flippant response. It didn’t. It required a simple, clear answer, which of course can only be given when the other party actually has a model he understands.
No, that is not the correct way to handle confused questions. The correct way to handle them is to back up, and explain the issues that lead to the confusion.
We’re bickering over semantics. The point is, there are more helpful answers, which one can reasonably be expected to give, than the “confused reply” you referred to. Richard knows what “finding a mate” means. So, if he actually understands his own model, he can break down “finding a mate” into its constituent references and outputs.
Or say how finding a mate should really be viewed as a set of other, specific references being tracked.
Or somehow give a hint that he understands his own model and can apply it to standard problems.
Was my epicycle example not the kind of response I could reasonably expect from someone who understands his own model?
The reason why expressing the connection between not having a mate and seeking a mate in terms of PCT is so difficult is because “not having a mate” is not a perception, and because “seeking a mate” is not a behavior. Rather, these are an abstract world state with multiple perceptual correlates, and a broad class of complex behaviors that no known model explains fully. Given such a confusing problem statement, what did you expect if not a confused response?
The second problem, I think, is that you may have gotten a somewhat confused idea of what (non-perceptual) control systems look like. There was a series of articles about them on LW, but unfortunately, it stopped just short of the key insight, which is the PID controller model. A PID controller looks at not just the current value of its sensor (position, P), but also its recent history (integral, I) and rate of change (derivative, D).
If you want to test PCT, you need to step back and look at something simpler. The most obvious example is motor control. Most basic motor control tasks, like balancing, are a matter of generating some representation of body and object position, figuring out which neurons trigger muscles to push it in certain ways, and holding position constant; and to do that, any organism, whether it’s a human or a simple invertebrate, needs some neural mechanism that acts very much like a PID controller. That establishes that controllers are handled in neurology somehow, but not their scope. There’s another example, however, which shows that it’s considerably broader than just motor control.
Humans and animals have various neurons which respond to aspects of their biochemistry, such as concentrations of certain nutrients and proteins in the blood. If these start changing suddenly, we feel sick and the body takes appropriate action. But the interesting thing is that small displacements which indicate dietary deficiencies somehow trigger cravings for foods with the appropriate nutrient. The only plausible mechanism I can think of for this is that the brain remembers the effect that foods had, and looks for foods which displaced sensors in the direction opposite the current displacement. The alternative would be a separate chemical pathway for monitoring each and every nutrient, which would break every time the organism became dependent on a new nutrient or lost access to an old one.
Moving up to higher levels of consciousness, things get significantly more muddled. Psychology and clear explanations have always been mutually exclusive, and no single mechanism can possibly cover everything, but then it doesn’t need to, since the brain has many obviously-different specialized structures within it, each of which presumably requires its own theory. But I think control theory does a good job explaining a broad enough range of psychological phenomena that it should be kept in mind when approaching new phenomena.
I disagree, but that’s probably because I’ve seized on PCT as a compressed version of things that were already in my models, as disconnected observations. (Like time-delayed “giving up” or “symptom substitution”.) I don’t really see many gaps in PCT because those gaps are already filled (for me at least), by Ainslie’s “conditioned appetites” and Hawkins’ HTM model.
Ainslie’s “interests” model is a very strong fit with PCT, as are the hierarchy, sequence, memory, and imagination aspects of HTM. Interests/appetites and HTM look just like more fleshed-out versions of what PCT says about those things.
Is it a complete model of intelligence and humans? Heck no. Does it go a long way towards reverse-engineering and mapping the probable implementation of huge chunks of our behavior? You bet.
What’s still mostly missing, IMO, after you put Ainslie, PCT, and HTM together, is dealing with “System 2” thinking in humans: i.e. dealing with logic, reasoning, complex verbalizations, and some other things like that. From my POV, though, these are the least interesting parts of modeling a human, because these are the parts that generally have the least actual impact on their behavior. ;-)
So, there is little indication as to whether System 2 thinking can be modeled as a controller hierarchy in itself, but it’s also pretty plain that it is subject to the System 1 control hierarchy, that lets us know (for example) whether it’s time for us to speak, how loud we’re speaking, what it would be polite to say, whether someone is attacking our point of view, etc. etc.
It’s also likely that the reason we intuitively see the world in terms of actions and events rather than controlled variables is simply because it’s easier to model discrete sequences in a control hierarchy, than it is to directly model a control hierarchy in another control hierarchy! Discrete symbolic processing on invariants lets us reuse the controllers representing “events”, without having to devote duplicated circuitry to model other creatures’ controller hierarchies. (The HTM model has a better detailed explanation of this symbolic/pattern/sequence processing, IMO, than PCT, even though in the broad strokes, they’re basically the same.)
(And although you could argue that the fact we use symbols means they’re more “compressed” than control networks, it’s important to note that this is a deliberately lossy compression; discrete modeling of continuous actions makes thinking simpler, but increases prediction errors.)
What a pitiful excuse.
Let’s get some perspective here: the model I’m trying to understand is so vague in the first place (in terms of what insight it has to offer), despite all of my efforts to understand it with basic questions about what it does to replace existing models. Of course my questions about such an ill-supported paradigm are going to look confused, but then again, it’s not my responsibility to make the paradigm clear. That burden, currently unmet, lies on the person presenting it.
If you’re familiar with the tools of rationality, it is a trivial task to handle “confused” questions of exactly the kind I just asked—but that pre-supposes you have a clue what you’re talking about. All you have to do is identify the error it makes, find the nearest meaningful problem, and show how your model handles that.
A confused response is neither appropriate, nor deserved, and only reflects poorly on the responder.
Let me show you how it works. Let’s say I’m some noble defender of the novel Galilean model, trying to enlighten the stubborn Ptolemaic system supporters. Then, some idiot comes along and asks me, “Okay, smarty, how does the Galilean model plot the epicycle for Jupiter?”
In response, do I roll my eyes at how he didn’t use my model’s terminology and hasn’t yet appreciated my models beauty? Do I resign myself to giving a “confused response”? No.
And do you know why I don’t? Because I have an actual scientific model, that I actually understand.
So in response to such a “hopeless” dilemma, I marshal my rationalist skills and give a non-confused response.
Ready to have your mind blown? Here goes:
“When you ask me about Jupiter’s epicycle, what you’re really looking for is how to plot its position relative to earth. But my point is, you don’t need to take this step of calculating or looking up epicycles. Rather, just model Jupiter as going around the sun in this well-defined eilliptical path, and the earth in this other one. We know where they will be relative to the sun as a function of time, so finding Jupiter relative to the earth is just matter of adding the earth-to-sun vector to the sun-to-jupiter vector.”
There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But, I had it easy in that I’m defending an actual model that actually compresses actual observations. Richard, OTOH, isn’t so lucky.
Notice what I did not say: “You find Jupiter in the sky and then you draw an epicycle consistent with its position, but with the earth going around the sun”, which is about what I got from Richard.
Yeah, that’s the point. Those higher levels are exactly what pjeby attempts to use PCT for, which is where I think any usefulness (of the kind seen in biochemical feedback loops) loses its compression abilities, and any apparent similarity to simple feedback control systems is superficial and ad-hoc, which is exactly why no one seems to be able to even describe the form of the relationship between the higher and lower levels in a way that gives insight. That is, break down “finding a mate” into related controllable values and identify related outputs. Some specification is certainly possible here, no?
Neither the problem statement, nor any of the confused responses were mine. My post was meant to clarify, not to excuse anything.
No, that is not the correct way to handle confused questions. The correct way to handle them is to back up, and explain the issues that lead to the confusion. In this case, there are many different directions the question could have been rounded in, each of which would take a fairly lengthy amount of text to handle, and people aren’t willing to do that when you could just say that wasn’t what you meant. I should also observe that pjeby gave you a citation and ducked out of the conversation, specifically citing length as the problem.
At some point, you seem to have switched from conducting a discussion to conducting a battle. Most of the parent post is not talking about the supposed topic of discussion, but about the people who participated in it before. Unfortunately, the history of this thread is far too long for me to read through, so I cannot respond to those parts. However, I am strongly tempted to disregard your arguments solely on the basis of your tone; it leads me to believe that you’re in an affective death spiral.
I know. Still a pitiful excuse, and yes, it was an excuse; you insinuated that my confused question deserved the flippant response. It didn’t. It required a simple, clear answer, which of course can only be given when the other party actually has a model he understands.
We’re bickering over semantics. The point is, there are more helpful answers, which one can reasonably be expected to give, than the “confused reply” you referred to. Richard knows what “finding a mate” means. So, if he actually understands his own model, he can break down “finding a mate” into its constituent references and outputs.
Or say how finding a mate should really be viewed as a set of other, specific references being tracked.
Or somehow give a hint that he understands his own model and can apply it to standard problems.
Was my epicycle example not the kind of response I could reasonably expect from someone who understands his own model?