With that said, could you read Marken's paper and tell me whether you stand behind it in the terms I asked above?

Now that I've read it, I have to say I agree with you: it is not good evidence. At best, it's an application of PCT to generate an interesting hypothesis or two.

I would, however, find it much less probable that a similarly simple control circuit fits my pattern of working vs. procrastinating. (Since control circuits are apparently Turing-complete, of course there's going to be some control circuit that matches it, but in the case of balance I think there's probably one with few enough parameters that it compresses the data effectively, compared to other models; while in the case of akrasia I doubt this.)

I'm not sure why you'd expect akrasia to be a simple circuit. If it were a simple conflict, between exactly two things, you'd likely be able to resolve it consciously without much effort. A few weeks ago, I did a workshop where we charted a portion of one person's control structure in the area of not working on the iPhone app they wanted to write. It took a couple hours and filled most of a page with the relevant cognitive-level variables and their interconnections.

This is quite consistent with e.g. Ainslie's model of akrasia as involving multiple competing "interests"; I see PCT as an improvement over Ainslie in providing a straightforward implementation mapping, plus simplified management of Ainslie's notion of "appetites", which is not very well worked out (IMO) and a little too handwavy.

Replacing Ainslie's idea of "interests" having "appetites" with controllers measuring time-averaged variables seems like a straightforward win: instead of two entities, you have just one entity that's structurally similar to things we know our brains/nervous systems already have. (Also, Ainslie has no worked-out model for how prioritization and agreement between interests occur; PCT on the other hand has hierarchy and reference levels to account for them.)

I think it's fair to ask PCT for experimental evidence in the cognitive domain, since the way you diagnose and prescribe around here seems to presuppose some rather simple control circuits in cognitive phenomena.

Individually, the circuits are simple; collectively, the networks are not. I used to think things were simpler than they are, because I focused only on the things (functional beliefs) that were effectively connections between control circuits. I rarely addressed the settings of the circuits themselves, or used them as a springboard to identifying other beliefs or variables.

I'm rather mistrustful of what I consciously intuit about my own mind, since conscious awareness seems to be often distorted for signaling purposes, and since the false perception of religious experience (which I really wanted to be genuine) was one thing that kept me religious longer than I should have been.

There's a difference between having a false label applied to a true experience, and having a false experience. The existence of perceptions such as "how much work I've gotten done lately" or "how much fun I'm having" is certainly some evidence for PCT's notion of time-averaged perceptual variables that can influence decision-making. It's also parsimonious to assume that the brain is unlikely to have evolved specific circuits for these perceptions, rather than simply having a basis for acquiring new perceptions.

In effect, the PCT model of cognitive variables explains how we represent all the things we "just know" or "just feel", including expert intuition in specialized subjects. The PCT prediction would be that if someone is skilled enough in a subject to have a specific intuition about something, we should be able to find a specific neural signal whose intensity corresponds to the degree of that intuition, and which is a time-averaged function of other (possibly gated) input signals.

I don't see how any of this seems extraordinary or controversial in the slightest, on the perception side.

Control, perhaps, might be more controversial... especially given the implication that we don't control our own actions directly, but can only do so through interaction with the control network. But for me, that implication is uncontroversial, because I've been writing about that (independently formed) idea since 2005.

Powers hypothesizes that "awareness" simply is a debugger that can go in and inspect any part of the network, injecting settings or testing hypotheticals. Anything we do by direct conscious intention would therefore consist of "manually" setting control values in the network, which of course would have no long-term effect if a higher-level controller puts the settings right back when you're done. What's more, if your conscious meddling is interfering with something in an "important" (high) position in the network, it's likely to reorganize in such a way that you no longer want to meddle with the network in that particular way!

And that actually sounds like the most straightforward explanation of akrasic behaviors, ever, and is also 100% consistent with everything I've already previously observed about mind hacking.

That is, we really don't control our own behaviors: our networks do. Free will is really just a special case, even if it doesn't seem that way at first glance. PCT just offers a better explanation than my rough models had for why/how that works.