8 tweets · March 2023 · 43 likes · 4 retweets · read on Twitter
Brilliant articulation of why understanding control systems is so important and in some sense counterintuitive. (which is part of why I'm so hype about PCT (Perceptual Control Theory)—it applies this same insight to your own intentionality) worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_can…
The way the PCT folks summarize this is something like "it's hard/impossible to figure out what someone is controlling* from looking at their behavior." *ie what they care about, what state of the world they're acting to achieve/maintain
From a behaviorist perspective, you can observe that the behavior comes after a particular stimulus, but this is missing the *why*, and except for *reflexes* there's some higher-level thing being controlled for by the behavior, and the stimulus is something that perturbed that.
From that perspective you might naively conclude that actually it's opening the door that causes the furnace to run... which it *does*, but only because it's cold outside and the thermostat is set to warm the house!
This is obvious here because we know the door & furnace aren't hooked up (except via the thermostat), but less obvious looking at behavior—ours or others. Why do you do the things you do? What thermostat has you on twitter at the moment? Do you know?
There are some practical puzzles here, like "what makes an intention suddenly become active due to salience?" I can be fasting in the morning & not craving food, but then I see/smell/imagine food, and suddenly I get urges to eat. Some opportunistic system?
I recorded this video awhile back that's reflecting on this puzzle: youtube.com/watch?v=aLn6Ue…
And this video just this week, that offers an opportunity to notice your own intentionality and how intentions can sort of get injected unexpectedly. youtube.com/watch?v=Zzn4Tx…