pjeby comments on Controlling your inner control circuits - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 26 June 2009 05:57PM

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Comment author: pjeby 30 June 2009 04:33:15PM -1 points [-]

While I can look up "symptom substitution", I'll to know more specifically what you mean by this.

Specifically, find a "commonsense" explanation that explains why symptom substitution takes time to occur, without reference to PCT's notion of a perception averaged over time.

Comment author: CronoDAS 30 June 2009 05:24:47PM 0 points [-]

Googling "symptom substitution" lead me to a journal article that argued that people have tried and failed to find evidence that it happens...

Comment author: pjeby 30 June 2009 09:18:53PM 0 points [-]

Googling "symptom substitution" lead me to a journal article that argued that people have tried and failed to find evidence that it happens...

That's Freudian symptom substitution, and in any case, the article is splitting hairs: it says that if you stop a child sucking its thumb, and it finds some other way to get its needs met, then that doesn't count as "symptom substitution". (IOW, the authors of the paper more or less defined it into nonexistence, such that if it exists and makes sense, it's not symptom substitution!)

Also, the paper raises the same objection to the Freudian model of symptom substitution that I do: namely, that there is no explanation of the time frame factor.

In contrast, PCT unifies the cases both ruled-in and ruled out by this paper, and offers a better explanation for the varying time frame issue, in that the time frame is governed by the perceptual decay of the controlled variable.