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:
“Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“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)
“It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
—Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921)