Perceptual control theory (PCT) is a psychological theory of animal and human behavior. PCT postulates that an organism's behavior is a means of controlling its perceptions. The model is based on the principles of negative feedback [1]. It is to some extent an application of the ideas used in the engineering discipline of control theory to the modeling of the human mind and behavior.
PCT postulates that layers of control systems, which have access to a metric to optimize and some policies or actions, can maintain balancing-acts for difficult, high-abstraction things without developing any explicit model for how those actions relate to the metric being tracked. The brain is postulated to be one of these multi-layered PCTs.
Physical movements are a favorite case-study, with the theory postulating that a change in the perception of where your hand should be sets off a series of sub-actions to minimize that "error."
It's unclear whether PCT is a valid theory. It doesn't significantly constrain the space of possible minds that could be built from it, and the advocates of the theory on the blog were unable to make a clear case for it. Experimental results seemed lackluster; see these critical comments about the paper version of this technical report, which claim that the correct results may have been achieved more through parameter-fitting than PCT.
Some found it more useful for explaining bugs in human behavior than functional behavior.
This seems to be a common category of complaints about Perceptual Control Theory.
This blog post called out that PCT "has no theory of information or how that information comes to be made," and this post grappled with a similar problem: struggling to find a place for implicit models, priors, and updates when working with a PCT framework. (This comment may have made a case for at least some embedded implicit priors.)...