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- Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 09:56:49 EST
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- From: mmt@BEN.DCIEM.DND.CA
- Subject: Re: PCT is Newtonian?
- Lines: 33
-
- [Martin Taylor 930125 09:30]
- (Avery Andrews 930123.930)
-
- >One of the obstacles to PCT understanding is perhaps that it is a
- >,, while most people's world views
- >are pre-Newtonian, and the Newtonian picture is *hard* to acquire.
-
- (Rick Marken 930123.1100)
- >they assume that what THEY PERCEIVE about the organism's doings
- >s what the organism IS DOING (controlling).
-
- I have previously many times (outside CSG-L) compared Bill Powers' impact
- on psychology with Newton's on physics. But Bill's theory is NOT Newtonian.
- Newton matches Rick's view about the happy campers. Newton asserts that
- there is a publicly knowable universe. It was Einstein's contribution
- to note that we can only observe the informatin that gets to us, and to
- derive from that Relativity Theory and E=mc2.
-
- The big point about HPCT is that it takes Einstein's observation and sees
- where it leads for living things. The results are as revolutionary and
- as clarifying as Einstein's results in physics, and as hard to get one's
- mind around when one is tuned to a pre-Newtonian way of thinking. I have
- equated Powers' work with Newton's because it integrates for the first time
- areas of psychology that previously had their own little descriptions and
- models, just as Newton's laws integrates a physics that was in the same state.
- But the inspiration is Einsteinian, not Newtonian, which is what Rick's
- "PCT Motto number 1" from some months ago says: "You can't see what
- someone is doing by looking at what they are doing."
-
- So, HPCT is NOT a "profoundly Newtonian theory" at all. To say so is to
- misread Newton or to misread Powers.
-
- Martin
-