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LIT-1188: A General Feedback Theory of Human Behavior: Part I

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-954) in full, from the authorized reprint in Living Control Systems (1989), pp. 1–24, with Part II (LIT-1197, NOTE-959); worth reading as the first statement of perceptual control and the only one the record holds with its memory and imagination: references are replayed recordings of past perceptions, an imagination connection lets a higher system perceive the references it sends instead of their outcome, and a "mixing control" the authors cannot specify sets how much of perception is imagination. Read it knowing that the imagination loop changes nothing in the perceiver; that what does change perception is the N-system, which forms new input functions ("tentative definitions of new variables", p. 14) at random under intrinsic, bodily error and keeps those whose behaviour lessens that error; that the hierarchy is "of the external-loop type" (p. 21); and that the sensory-deprivation remark is one uncited sentence. A rival to CLAIM-341 that contains its ingredients, and a scoring channel for QUESTION-121.
Version2
Tagscognition, behavioral-integration
Extended byLIT-1197 — A General Feedback Theory of Human Behavior: Part II
SupportsCLAIM-341 — The loop that keeps a lucid agent's model in touch with what it models runs between judgement and observation: each judgement reshapes the observer whose later observations it then judges, and action on the world is not part of that loop, so active inference's action–perception cycle misplaces where the agent is active
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-954 — Powers, Clark & McFarland — General Feedback Theory, Part I

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Powers, W. T., Clark, R. K. & McFarland, R. L. (1960). Perceptual and Motor Skills 11(1):71–88. doi:10.2466/pms.1960.11.1.71. Reprinted in Living Control Systems: Selected Papers of William T. Powers (Control Systems Group, 1989), pp. 1–24.

Read in full in NOTE-954, from the reprint, with Part II (LIT-1197, NOTE-959). Page numbers are the reprint’s.

Why this is here

For CLAIM-341 and QUESTION-121. Perceptual control theory has an internal loop with no action: “The imagination-signal makes it possible for our system to perceive reproductions of past perceptual signals … to plan an action ‘mentally’ without actually performing it, to hallucinate, and as mentioned, to dream” (reprint p. 20). That loop is the synchronic, self-satisfying form, in which the reference “substitutes for the feedback-signal” and the “match” is “automatically ensured”, the form CLAIM-341 does not claim. The same passage gives the anchor problem: “the hierarchy could not perform very reliably in a real and sometimes dangerous environment if its actions were completely ‘short-circuited’ by the imagination connections”. It also gives a remark on sensory deprivation, under which the imagination connection “apparently provides a great deal of information”, which bears on CASE-107.

The full reading qualifies this in one respect. The imagination loop does not change the perceiver, but the theory has a mechanism that does: the N-system forms new perceptual input functions, “tentative definitions of new variables” felt as “tentative formulation of hypotheses” (p. 14). What drives it is error in inherited “intrinsic signals … measures of a set of physiological states” (p. 14), not judgement, and an organization persists when it “produces behavior which results in a lessening of the intrinsic error” (pp. 15–16). So the contrast with CLAIM-341 is not that Powers’s sensors are constant, which is the 1973 paper’s assumption, but that what reshapes them is the body’s error, kept by behaviour. The mixing control, which would have to keep imagination from confirming itself, is unspecified: “We are open to suggestions” (p. 20).

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