🚀 go-pugleaf

[From Rick Marken (990428.1950)]

Bruce Abbott (990428.1750 EST)

> He [Herb Simon] conjectured that the complexity of this figure
> was due mainly to the complexity of the environment

And that's just dandy. But it tells us nothing about why that
might be true (why the complexity of the action is "due mainly to"
the complexity of the environment in this case). And what about
other cases where the complexity of the action is clearly _not_
"due mainly to" the complexity of the environment -- as in the
case of the position of the ant at each point in it's path, which
should be affected by the complexity of the slope and texture
of the terrain but is not.

As I said in my post, Simon noticed one aspect of control
(the aspect that most psychologists have noticed -- disturbance
resistance) but not another (controlled variables). We can see
both aspects of control in the crowd demo; we are usually most
impressed by the complex paths that result from disturbance
resistance (people avoiding others who disturb the variables
these people control); but we can also notice (if we look
carefully) that some variables -- such as minimum distance
and destination -- are not influenced much by these disturbances.
So some aspects of behavior seem to be due mainly to the
complexity of the environment (movements of other people in the
crowd, in this case) while other aspects of behavior seems to be due
mainly to complexity inside the behaving system itself. It's this
latter aspect behavior which Simon (along with all other
conventional psychologists) seems to have ignored; it's the aspect
of behavior to which PCT is trying to call people's attention.

> You write as if you had some authoritative knowledge of what
> Simon did or did not understand, did or did not know, yet I'll
> bet you've never even read what he had to say.

Well, I don't know if I have any "authoritative" knowledge of what
Simon did or did not understand; but I have read several papers
by him. I even refer to one in my "Blind men..." paper, which
you migh want to read again. It's at:

http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken/papers.html

Best

Rick
---
Richard S. Marken                 Phone or Fax:  310 474-0313
Life Learning Associates          e-mail: rmarken@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~rmarken/