You're asking RichardKennaway to recapitulate a very complex physical description in a short comment. But "Behavior: The Control Of Perception" actually describes almost a dozen different modeling layers to get from simple intensity perception all the way up to high-level concepts and long-term goals, each building on the last, and taking 18 chapters to do it. The inferential gap between non-PCT thinking and PCT-thinking is way too big for condensing to a comment. Try arguing evolution to a group of creationists, and see how far you can get in one comment, without being accused of handwaving and tautology!

Hell, I just finished writing a primer on PCT-thinking for my subscribers, specifically regarding self-help applications: it's 30 pages long. And I skipped all the meat of PCT's neural-level predictions, the math, the experimental results, etc.

There's a better (more detailed) way to explain mate tracking in PCT, that's covered in the B:CP book, and it applies to all instinctual appetites. It's called "intrinsic error", and I'm a bit surprised Richard hasn't mentioned it.

I'm thinking that maybe one difference between me and Richard, though, is that he's a robotics researcher, and therefore very focused on the lower rungs of the PCT hierarchy. I'm interested in people, so I'm focused on the higher rungs, and how the rungs connect, especially to wired-in intrinsics. The elegant bit for me is that the intrinsic error model shows how easy it is to get (evolutionarily speaking) from instinctual behavior to controlled behavior to intelligent behavior, in incremental steps. (It also shows a likely connection to Ainslie's conditioned-appetites model.)

But I'm not gonna sit down and rewrite a chapter of B:CP here in this comment to explain the bloody thing, because your inevitable follow-on questions will then require me to recapitulate the prior 10 or 11 chapters of B:CP, as well.