I was being flippant. I mean, what were you expecting?

I was expecting you to show me how the controls paradigm does a better job of explaining behaviors than the prevailing, but messy, model of evolutionary psychology. (Not that they would contradict, but your model would have to be simpler and/or more precise.)

That was the challenge I had presented to you before: show how "humans are control systems" is better at compressing a description of our observations.

If it seems hard to do, it's probably because it is hard to, because it's not a better model, because the behavior is so hard to express in controls terminology. Finding a mate is simply not like making sure one line is under another.

Imagine that the person who first had the idea that thinking is done by neurons has just published it, and you ask them what you asked me.

If I were the first person to publish the neuron theory, it would include an actual model with actual moving parts and therefore have actual explanatory power over actual observations that actual other people can make. It would not say, as you have essentially done, "people think with neurons, so like, when you think, it's all ... neurony. Are you thinking about sex? Yeah, the neuronal model has that. Neurons cause that thinking too. See, once I know what you're thinking about, I can predict, using the neuronal model, what you're thinking."

The leg work to discover just how those neurons are organised to do it is the problem, and finding a mate isn't the place to start,

But human behavior is where you've started, hence my confusion of what exactly the "humans as controllers" model accomplishes.

Likewise, I'm not passing off "it's done by control systems" as the solution of a problem, but as a basic insight that gives the beginning of a way to study living organisms.

But it's not an insight unless it makes the problem easier. Everything you've presented here simply shows how you could rephrase the solution to predicting organism behavior into a controls model once it's been solved. So where does the ease come in? What problem becomes easier when I approach it your way?

The place to begin that study and establish exactly what control systems are present and how they work is in studies like the one that you dismissed as a trivial game.

I dismissed it as a trivial game because it is a trivial game. From the fact that I use proportional feedback control to keep two lines together, it does not follow that this is a useful general model of all organism activity.

Believe it or not, I have put a lot of work (in terms of fraction of my spare time) into exploring PCT. I've completed demo1 on the site pjeby linked, and have run it and four others in DOS Box. I've read some of the pdfs expalining feedback systems at the cellular level. I am going far out of my way to see if there's anything to PCT, so please do not write me off as if I'm making you hold my hand.

I am making every effort to make things easy for you. All that's left for your is to have a real model that you actually understand.

That, in turn, would rebut my strongly justified suspicion that the model's "predictions" are ad hoc and the parallels with control systems superficial.