Feedback Regulation As Self-Adjustment

Feedback regulation as self-adjustment is the episode’s reading of the mushroom scene in 《爱丽丝梦游仙境》. In 179.爱丽丝梦游仙境：世界多荒诞，我也是自己的主宰（上）, the Blue Caterpillar / 蓝色毛毛虫 tells Alice / 爱丽丝 that one side of the mushroom makes her taller and the other makes her shorter, even though the mushroom is round.

Alice’s responses overshoot: she becomes too short, then has a neck so long that a pigeon mistakes her for a snake. The episode reads her later left-right nibbling as a negative-feedback process: test, observe the direction of error, correct, and converge toward a workable size.

Key Claims

• Self-adjustment can work without full understanding when the person can observe error and correct directionally.
• Feedback can be comic and bodily, not only technical or managerial.
• Overshoot and undershoot are part of learning when the control surface is ambiguous.
• The scene connects identity to practical regulation: Alice does not solve who she is abstractly, but she regains enough scale to keep acting.

Connections

• Alice / 爱丽丝, Blue Caterpillar / 蓝色毛毛虫, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / 爱丽丝梦游仙境 - source anchors.
• Size Change Identity and Rule-Shifting Mathematics - body and rule-space concepts.
• Fast Feedback Loops and Observation Before Inference - adjacent learning and correction concepts.
• Female Self-Possession - agency expressed as iterative self-command.