Conflict
In a hierarchy of interacting control systems, different systems at one level can send conflicting goals to one lower system. When two systems are specifying different goals for the same lower-level variable, they are in conflict. Protracted conflict is experienced by human beings as many forms of psychological distress such as anxiety, obsession, depression, confusion, and vacillation. Severe conflict prevents the affected systems from being able to control, effectively destroying their function for the organism.
Higher level control systems often are able to use known strategies (which are themselves acquired through prior reorganizations) to seek perceptions that don't produce the conflict. Normally, this takes place without notice. If the conflict persists and systematic "problem solving" by higher systems fails, the reorganization system may modify existing systems until they bypass the conflict or until they produce new reference signals (goals) that are not in conflict at lower levels.
When reorganization results in an arrangement that reduces or eliminates the error that is driving it, the process of reorganization slows or stops with the new organization in place. (This replaces the concept of reinforcement learning.) New means of controlling the perceptions involved, and indeed new perceptual constructs subject to control, may also result from reorganization. In simplest terms, the reorganization process varies things until something works, at which point we say that the organism has learned. When done in the right way, this method can be surprisingly efficient in simulations.
Read more about this topic: Perceptual Control Theory
Famous quotes containing the word conflict:
“Managing a tantrum involves nothing less than the formation of character. Even the parent’s capacity to cope well with conflict can improve with this experience. When a parent knows he is right and does not give in for the sake of temporary peace, everybody wins. The parent learns that denying some pleasure does not create a neurotic child and the child learns that she can survive momentary frustration.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress. One might call the first the Asiatic, the second the European principle.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)