Humancomtrol's blog

The Test goes like this:
1. Select a variable you think the person might be maintaining at some level. In other words, guess at an input quantity.
2. Predict what will happen if the person is not maintaining the variable at a preferred level.
3. Apply various amounts and directions of disturbance directly to the variable.
4. Measure the actual effects of the disturbances.
5. If the effects are what you predicted under the assumption that the person is not acting to control the variable, stop here. The person is indeed not acting to control it; you guessed wrong about the variable.
6. If an actual effect is markedly smaller than the predicted effect, look for what the person might be doing to oppose the disturbance. Look for a cause of the opposition to the disturbance which, by its own varying, can counterbalance variations in the input quantity. That cause may be caused by the person's output. You may have found the feedback function.
7. Look for the way the person can sense the variable. If you can find no way the person could sense the variable, the input quantity, stop. People cannot control what they cannot sense.
8. If you find a means of sensing, block it so that the person cannot now sense the variable. If the disturbance continues to be opposed, you have not found the right sensor. If you cannot find a sensor, stop. Make another guess at an input quantity.
9. If all of the above steps are passed, you have found the input quantity, the variable the person is controlling. Read more »

Reorganization, the second kind of learning, revises what is worth memorizing, which goals are worth pursuing, which programs are worth building-which internal standards, in short, are worth matching by controlling perceptual input. Reorganization is the kind of learning that shows us new meanings: new relationships between ourselves and others, new programs for organizing our routines, and new boundaries and new vistas concerning the systems within which we conceive ourselves to be working. It is the kind of learning through which we transcend the mechanical and routine effects of experience. It does not necessarily require conscious thought. It can occur quietly, while we are not looking, so to speak, or it can occur like the blast of trumpets or the singing of angels--as insight and aha! This kind of learning often makes us feel regenerated, enlarged, inspired, in command of new powers. Read more »

Any action is an intended goal, continuously achieved, and a variable means adjusted according to the requirements of higher-order goals and external disturbances. The degree of volition one senses depends on whether he is focusing on the intended action (as the goal state of a perception of action) or on the higher-order reason for the action, the higher-order goal served by the action. When attention is on the higher-order goal, the lower-level action is sensed as output; when the attention is focused on the intentional nature of the lower-level action, the same action is sensed as an input, a perceived and controlled consequence of an output of still lower level (say, "effort").

What can be said about the higher levels is mostly negative. We do not know the basis on which the highest-level goals are set. We are incapable of tracing them to any specific external circumstances, particularly not present-time circumstances. We can offer some reasonable conjectures about how biochemical and genetic factors enter, particularly in connection with learning, but we can by no acceptable scientific means show that those factors are "ultimate" determinants, not in any sense. It is time to stop trying to make everything fit nineteenth-century ideas of physical determinism, which are based on little more than an allergic reaction to religion. The upper regions of human organization are a mystery which we have barely begun to approach; we will never understand them on the basis of a jab-and-jerk model of behavior. Read more »

Humans are complicated. We are full of control systems, layers upon layers of them. We control perceptions having to do with eating, walking, talking, working, loving, getting information, fighting, and all the rest of our doings. There must be many connections among the individual systems in the circuitry of the neural net, and the connections can be neither haphazard nor of equal sway. Some control systems must set standards for others. An internal standard for wanting to perceive yourself having arrived at the library can require perceptions that your legs are carrying out the right motions for walking. But the internal standards for walking properly cannot very well require the perception that you are heading for the library; you wouldn't be able to walk to any other place. So there must be a hierarchy of control. Intelligent students buy essay online because they knowledgeable that buying essays online is not risky. All essays are written by educated writers. Read more »