I’m quite happy to see PCT is a real thing. I always had trouble explaining my own mental model of behavior in traditional psychological terms and now I only need to point to PCT.
What I am missing is a treatment of the formation of the control loops. For the lower levels it is quite clear: These evolved. But what about the higher levels. I don’t think the whole hierarchy is fixed. It is fixed only on the lower levels (and I hear that even there is some plasticity in weights). The higher you get the more variable the control loops become. Sure there must be some main controls meshing in desires and values but how do these attach to the higher control loops? I mean it’s not like the top level control is some one-dimensional reward channel controlling fixed control loops for very abstract behaviors. This is only partly addressed by the treatment of conflict which implies multiple high level control signals.
We can look at a particular person and behavior and try to describe the control loops involved. But that doesn’t answer how these came about.
Consider habits. Apparently it is possible to establish very complex habits. Habits are basically control loops on a level above sequential actions. But the control loop comes into being without being pre-wired. It realizes some more or less successful behavior sequence that results in the satisfaction of some higher level control.
For example how does automatically locking the door when leaving the house come into being?
Sure it results in a feeling of security which is a higher level control—but that is not the reason the behavior evolved.
The behavior (the control loop causing the locking of the door) initially doesn’t exist as such. It started off with the chaining of the individual acts. But the brain is good at finding patterns also in its own behaviors and I see this locking the door as an aggregate that is pattern matched against the feeling of security after locking the door and again confirmed upon finding the door locked on return thus reinforcing the control loop as a whole that didn’t exist before.
Thus it appears to me that the complex mesh of behaviors may well be a deep hierachy of nested control loops but especially the higher levels of the hierachy are to a large degree ad-hoc instantiations of recognized patterns in ones own behaviors aquired earlier or later. Many primary behaviors originate during child development many of which are very strongly related to neccessary development that come into being in mostly comparable or at least recognizable form for most people. This surely resutls partly from the way some controls are pre-wired (hard-wired curiosity for certain stimuli surely causes lots of early parallel development; I can definitely confirm this from experience of my own children).
But I often see strange behaviors and I then I wonder how these strange control loops came into being and how one might modify them for everyones benefit. The hierarchy really is a big messy graph. Lots of local control loops working hard to reduce their error signal only to be abandoned (getting silent) when their applicability pattern doesn’t match any more.
There can be lots of control loops active at a time (conflict) and the steering effect of one loop can cause another loop to become active. Depending on how sensitive these loops are to circumstances the result may be not a chain of successor loops (which could be picked up and become a larger pattern) but cause a random or chaotic sequence of action.
Looking back I see this in arguments in relationships a lot (my own included). In a pair one incompatble habit leads to a (delayed) reaction by the other, say a kind of dissatisfaction response which then leads to one of multiple counter responses (multiple because it is aversive and if one control loop fails higher level control suggests that others might). Some may work in some circumstances. Each may be followed by multiple return responses. If enough compatibility exists the joint system will ultimately converge back (OK, it will almost always converge because in the end joint exhaustion becomes the dominant (and joint) control error).
I think one dark art lurking here is to find the patterns people’s control loops match on and use these.
This is related to framing. People behave different in different contexts. PCT-wise this means different control loops are active. Change the context and the behavior will follow.
Two examples:
My brother-in-low once applied geek-fu to deflect a threatening guy by saying: “cool sticker on your jacket, where did you buy it?” thus totally changing the frame and immediately relaxing the guy.
I have often trouble to prevent my recalcitrant son from wreaking havoc. Sometimes I succeed in changing the frame by pointing to some new thing, retreating and playing an interesting game with his brothers, asking him a question totally unrelated to the situation but inherently interesting to him.
I’m quite happy to see PCT is a real thing. I always had trouble explaining my own mental model of behavior in traditional psychological terms and now I only need to point to PCT.
What I am missing is a treatment of the formation of the control loops. For the lower levels it is quite clear: These evolved. But what about the higher levels. I don’t think the whole hierarchy is fixed. It is fixed only on the lower levels (and I hear that even there is some plasticity in weights). The higher you get the more variable the control loops become. Sure there must be some main controls meshing in desires and values but how do these attach to the higher control loops? I mean it’s not like the top level control is some one-dimensional reward channel controlling fixed control loops for very abstract behaviors. This is only partly addressed by the treatment of conflict which implies multiple high level control signals.
We can look at a particular person and behavior and try to describe the control loops involved. But that doesn’t answer how these came about.
Consider habits. Apparently it is possible to establish very complex habits. Habits are basically control loops on a level above sequential actions. But the control loop comes into being without being pre-wired. It realizes some more or less successful behavior sequence that results in the satisfaction of some higher level control.
For example how does automatically locking the door when leaving the house come into being? Sure it results in a feeling of security which is a higher level control—but that is not the reason the behavior evolved. The behavior (the control loop causing the locking of the door) initially doesn’t exist as such. It started off with the chaining of the individual acts. But the brain is good at finding patterns also in its own behaviors and I see this locking the door as an aggregate that is pattern matched against the feeling of security after locking the door and again confirmed upon finding the door locked on return thus reinforcing the control loop as a whole that didn’t exist before.
Thus it appears to me that the complex mesh of behaviors may well be a deep hierachy of nested control loops but especially the higher levels of the hierachy are to a large degree ad-hoc instantiations of recognized patterns in ones own behaviors aquired earlier or later. Many primary behaviors originate during child development many of which are very strongly related to neccessary development that come into being in mostly comparable or at least recognizable form for most people. This surely resutls partly from the way some controls are pre-wired (hard-wired curiosity for certain stimuli surely causes lots of early parallel development; I can definitely confirm this from experience of my own children).
But I often see strange behaviors and I then I wonder how these strange control loops came into being and how one might modify them for everyones benefit. The hierarchy really is a big messy graph. Lots of local control loops working hard to reduce their error signal only to be abandoned (getting silent) when their applicability pattern doesn’t match any more.
There can be lots of control loops active at a time (conflict) and the steering effect of one loop can cause another loop to become active. Depending on how sensitive these loops are to circumstances the result may be not a chain of successor loops (which could be picked up and become a larger pattern) but cause a random or chaotic sequence of action.
Looking back I see this in arguments in relationships a lot (my own included). In a pair one incompatble habit leads to a (delayed) reaction by the other, say a kind of dissatisfaction response which then leads to one of multiple counter responses (multiple because it is aversive and if one control loop fails higher level control suggests that others might). Some may work in some circumstances. Each may be followed by multiple return responses. If enough compatibility exists the joint system will ultimately converge back (OK, it will almost always converge because in the end joint exhaustion becomes the dominant (and joint) control error).
I think one dark art lurking here is to find the patterns people’s control loops match on and use these. This is related to framing. People behave different in different contexts. PCT-wise this means different control loops are active. Change the context and the behavior will follow.
Two examples:
My brother-in-low once applied geek-fu to deflect a threatening guy by saying: “cool sticker on your jacket, where did you buy it?” thus totally changing the frame and immediately relaxing the guy.
I have often trouble to prevent my recalcitrant son from wreaking havoc. Sometimes I succeed in changing the frame by pointing to some new thing, retreating and playing an interesting game with his brothers, asking him a question totally unrelated to the situation but inherently interesting to him.