Feedback Regulation As Self-Adjustment
Feedback regulation as self-adjustment is the episode’s reading of the mushroom scene in [[AliceInWonderland|《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 [[BlueCaterpillar|Blue Caterpillar / 蓝色毛毛虫]] tells [[AliceWonderlandCharacter|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.