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Human Control in Psychology

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.

The higher levels of control must set standards for lower levels; the output quantities of the upper levels must be signals that alter standards lower in the hierarchy. (The outputs of the higher systems do not activate muscles; they become inputs to the internal standards of the lower-level systems that do.) The lower levels must, in return, keep the higher levels informed about perceptions coming in. The lower levels must not only send perceptions to their own comparators, but must also forward the perceptions upward, as in Figure 11.6 in the next chapter.

Powers postulates eleven levels of control system in the human. The list that follows differs somewhat from an earlier version; I took this from a sheet he handed out at the 1988 meeting of the Control System Group. The level numbered "1st" is the "lowest," and the "11th" the "highest."
Levels of Control Systems and Internal Standards
1st. Intensity.
2nd. Quality of sensation.
3rd. Configuration, position, perception of invariants.

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The first three levels deliver static perceptions. The higher levels organize perceptions over time. 4th. Transition, change, tracking, control of movement and other changes of
configuration, sensation, and intensity.
5th. Event.
6th. Relationship.
7th. Category.
8th. Sequence, routines, episodes.
9th. Program, rationality, language. Working your way to a goal along a path containing choices among sequences.
10th. Principle, strategy, heuristics. Values in the sense of what one puts consummatory goodness on. Going by intermittent evidence. Averaging instances.
11th. System conception, perceiving organized entities. Images of what the world is like.