Living Control Systems III: The Fact of Control

Bill Powers terms this elegant little book..."my last chance to persuade my peers on this planet that prior to the 1930s we human beings had an entirely wrong idea, only partly supplanted at the time of this writing, of who we are, how we are constructed, and why we do what we do. I hope to do this persuading by showing each person who reads this book a mirror in which certain commonplace phenomena of human behavior can be seen from a new angle.

The computer age has provided a tool that allows me to create a small universe which each of you can experience and act upon directly, as if for a time you can ride with me inside my brain, doing what I do, seeing the same results I see, checking my observations against your own, and-if all goes well—reaching the same conclusions I have reached.…so you can see and feel [the fact of control] for yourself, have that joyful shock of discovery, and understand it."

Two distinghished scholars, both educators and scientists with outstanding credentials, have contributed in important ways to this work:

Dr. Bruce Abbott, Faculty, Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne, co-author of Research Design and Methods: A Process Approach (McGraw-Hill, 7th printing), has updated Powers' original demos, and designed and developed a handsome new user-cordial interface for them.

Dr. Richard Kennaway, a mathematician engaged in research in computer science at the school of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK, in the areas of programming language theory and design, virtual reality, control theory, robotics and biocomputing, developed the mathematical proofs of the models and simulations and presents them in an illustrated Appendix.

ISBN 978-0-9647121-8-8 - 200+ text pages, including Appendix, context-oriented index, and more than 50 illustrations, many in full color. The companion disc contains 13 colorful, amusing and educational open-source programmed demonstrations of perceptual control theory (PCT) at work. Quality paperback/CD $65 USD + shipping/handling. Benchmark Publications 2008.

FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK!

Behavior: The Control of Perception [2nd Edition, Revised and Expanded] introduces William T. Powers’ revolutionary theory of the behavior of living organisms (now known as Perceptual Control Theory), a robust system of ideas that has stood up to more than 30 years of rigorous testing and modeling by the scientific and academic communities. Includes glossary, bibliography, index, table of figures, both historic and contemporary commentary, and the previously omitted chapter on Emotion. First published in 1973 by Aldine deGruyter, B:CP has become integral to Life Sciences curricula all over the world. In 1973, Thomas Kuhn, legendary philosopher/educator and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote this about B:CP:

“[This manuscript] is among the most exciting I have read in some time. The problems are of vast importance, and not only to psychologists; the achieved synthesis is thoroughly original and the presentation is often convincing and almost invariably suggestive. I shall be watching with interest what happens in the directions in which Powers points.”

332 pages, illustrated, paperback, $34.95 + s/h ISBN #9647121-7-2.

180 pages, paperback. $19.95 + s/h ISBN #9647121-5-6

"Some of the best science is done by people who refuse to take the obvious for granted. Copernicus didn't take the sun's daily trek across the sky for granted, and Einstein didn't take the regular tick of time for granted, and William T. Powers didn't take the appearance of behavior for granted."  

–From the Foreword by Richard S. Marken

295 pages, paperback. $19.95 + s/h ISBN #9647121-3-X

"Control theory explains how organisms control what happens to them. This means all organisms from the amoeba to Humankind. It explains why one organism can't control another without physical violence....It explains why it is so hard for groups of people to work together even on something they all agree is important. It explains what a goal is, how goals relate to behavior, how behavior affects perceptions, how perceptions define the reality in which we live and move and have our being. Control theory is the first scientific theory that can handle all these phenomena within a single testable concept of how living systems work."  

–W.T. Powers, November, 1991.

275 pages, paperback. $19.95 + s/h ISBN #9647121-4-8