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.)
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.)