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SilasBarta comments on Ask LessWrong: Human cognitive enhancement now? - Less Wrong
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After taking a few days to read up on PCT and MOL, here's my summation:
PCT is the Deep Theory behind mindhacking, hypnosis, and all other forms of self-help or therapy that actually work. It explains monoidealism and ideomotor responses, it explains backsliding, it provides a better conceptual basis for Ainslie's model of "interests", and it does an amazing job of explaining and connecting dozens of previously-isolated principles and techniques I've taught, and that I learned by hard experience, rather than deriving from a model. It explains the conflict-resolution model I've been posting about in the Applied Picoeconomics thread. And just grasping it almost instantly boosted my ability to self-apply many of my own techniques.
Most of the techniques and methods I've taught in the past have been effectively on the level of cutting the "wires" between different control systems, treating the actual control systems as fixed invariants. Now, I also see how to also connect wires, change the "settings", and even assemble new control systems.
PCT explains the Work of Byron Katie, the Law of Attraction, a sizable chunk of Tony Robbins, T. Harv Eker, and Michael Hall's work, and even Robert Fritz's "structural consulting" model.
I have never seen anything that connects so much, using so little. And every time I think of another previously-isolated model that I teach, like say, how self-conscious awareness is an error correction mechanism, I find how PCT ties that into the overall model, too.
Hell, PCT even explains many phenomena Richard Bandler describes as part of NLP, such as non-linear and paradoxical responses to submodality change, and his saying that "brains go in directions" (seek to establish ongoing constant levels of a value or experience, rather than achieving an external goal and then stopping).
All I can say is, why haven't you posted MORE about this? Your post about control systems seemed to mainly be an argument against brains having models, but PCT doesn't demand a lack of models, and in any case it's obvious that brains do model, and they model predictively as well as reflecting current states. And you didn't mention any of the things that make PCT actually interesting as a behavioral description in human beings. PCT pretty much explains everything that I would've wanted to cover in my post sequence on what akrasia really is and how it works, only from a different angle and a better conceptual connection beween the pieces.
Whew.
(Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: by contrast to PCT, MOL barely seems worth the electrons it's printed with. Many others have described essentially the same thing, with better practical information about how to do it, in more precise, more repeatable ways. The only thing novel is its direct link to PCT, but given that, one can make the same theory link to the other modalities and techniques.)
Wow, you seem pretty satisfied with it. Now, I haven't done nearly enough reading on any of those topics to dispute anything you've said, but, as a poster on LW I'm obligated to check that you haven't entered an "affective death spiral" by asking the following:
Are there any non-phenomena that PCT can "explain"? That is, could you use PCT to "prove" why certain conceivable things happen, which don't really happen? Could I e.g. use PCT to prove why thinking hard about whatever I'm procrastinating about will make me motivated to do it, when you already know that doesn't work?
I have to admit, the first bit of PCT literature I read (a sampler of papers and chapters from various PCT books) was a bit off-putting, since most of the first papers seemed a little too self-congratulatory, as if the intended audience were already cult memebrs. Later papers were more informative, enough to convince me to order a couple of the actual books.
I can't presently imagine how you could do it without distorting the theory. It'd be like trying to equate atheism and amorality. In a sense, PCT is just stimulus-response atheism.
It would depend on a far more specific definition of "thinking hard", and an adequate specification of the other control systems involved in your individual brain. For certain such definitions and specifications, it would work.
To be precise, if "thinking hard" means that you are actually envisioning a specific outcome or actions, linked to a desired reference value, and you do not have any systems that are trying to set common perceptions to match conflicting reference values, then "thinking hard" would work.
This is not the usual definition of "thinking hard", however, and PCT makes some very specific predictions about inner conflict that essentially say you are 100% screwed unless you fix the conflicts, because we are control systems (i.e. thermostats) "all the way down".
If it sounds like I'm saying it depends on the individual and some people are screwed, that's only sort of the case. Everyone can identify when they're conflicted, and resolve the conflicts in some fashion. Plenty of people have already noticed this and taught it, PCT simply gives a plausible, testable, physical, 100% reductionistic explanation of how our hardware might produce the results we see.