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djcb comments on Controlling your inner control circuits - Less Wrong
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I wasn't saying the post wasn't useful - at least it brought my attention to Richard Kennaway's post on the interesting concept of explaining brain functions in terms of control systems.
But, the thing is that every day brings us new theories which have great potential value - if true. But most of them aren't. Given limited time, we cannot pursue each of them. We have to be selective.
So, when I open that PDF linked in the first line of the article... that is, to put it mildly, not up to LessWrong-standards. Is that supposed to be 'more important than [...] 99% of what you or I have ever read'? It even ends in a sales pitch for books and workshops.
So while Control Theory may be useful for understanding the brain, this material is a distraction at best.
There are lots of PCT textbooks out there; I wrote based on two of them (combined with my own prior knowledge): "Behavior: The Control Of Perception" by William T. Powers, and "Freedom From Stress", by Edward E. Ford. The first book has math and citations by the bucketload, the latter is a layperson's guide to practical PCT applications written by a psychologist.
Wait a second. There's a guy who writes textbooks about akrasia named Will Powers? That's great.
It is in fact so great, that I suspect it might be a pen name.
It really is his name. I know him personally. (But he is informally known as Bill, not Will.)
Can you tell him that many of the links on this page are broken? http://www.brainstorm-media.com/users/powers_w/
"Behavior: The Control of Perception" has very little to say about akrasia actually. The chapter on "Conflict" does a wee bit, I suppose, but only from the perspective of what a PCT perspective predicts should happen when control systems are in conflict.
I haven't actually seen a PCT perspective on akrasia, procrastination, or willpower issues yet, apart from my own.
If I'm not mistaken, there is a little cottage industry researching it for years. See e.g.
Albert Bandura, Edwin A. Locke. (2003). Negative Self-Efficacy and Goal Effects Revisited. (PDF) (it's a critique, but there are references as well).
Fascinating. However, it appears that both that paper and the papers it's critiquing are written by people who've utterly failed to understand it, in particular the insight that aggregate perceptions are measured over time... which means you can be positively motivated to achieve goals in order to maintain your high opinion of yourself -- and still have it be driven by an error signal.
That is, the mere passage of time without further achievement will cause an increasing amount of "error" to be registered, without requiring any special action.
Both this paper and the paper it critiques got this basic understanding wrong, as far as I can tell. (It also doesn't help that the authors of the paper you linked seem to think that materialistic reduction is a bad thing!)