Competence Level

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For better or for worse, skills always change. Think of any skill you enjoy -- music, sports, driving, teaching, police work.-- tomorrow your performance will be different from today. Changing tissue health and variable brain connections alone dictate it.

On any given day your response could be worsened or improved. You might miss a signal, imagine something that didn't happen, lesson or heighten your attention, or raise or lower your energy level. You could be injured or in recovery. There are too many variables in skills and their environment not to expect a difference. It's to be expected.

Change also occurs through learning, either bad or good. You can learn to be more efficient. You can also learn to make mistakes. Memory can be faulty, as well. You can forget things required for proper performance. You might alter your sequencing of component behaviors. Or you can add stuff that doesn't belong to a procedure. And if you don't understand what you're trying to do or how you should go about doing it, even heightened interest and concentration can be fruitless or counter-productive. The changes might only be temporary, or they could be more permanent. And they can be more, or less, significant.  Those are the negatives.

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If changes that occur in your skills are more or less long-lasting and reasonably significant, it is meaningful to say there's been a change in your level of competence. I see no hard and fast rules, here, but there are times when you wouldn't quarrel with a change in level designation. Yor can create higher levels of skill.

Competence level is stated in terms of the nature and quality of the skills. In tennis, for instance, there are many skills and many competence categories, as well as an overall category. You can define one with regard, say, to the way you track and intercept the ball. In my thesis I specified three levels of competence in the intercept category: moving forward, running laterally, or moving back. The skill levels are, respectively, advanced, intermediate, and beginner.

You can define competence levels similarly in music or drawing or golf or math. As a musician or a vocalist, your competence level depends on your ability to play or sing the right notes, phrase a melodic or rhythmic line, or generally perform the musical dynamics. The levels could distinguish among advanced, intermediate, and novice, for instance. Any of a variety of methods might be used.

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Skills have their own socially defined contexts for their performance, involving specific technologies. I've mentioned tennis. As you know, this game is played on a tennis court -- there's no tennis in a phone booth, for example. The arena is designed to accommodate tennis skills. The court, with tennis ball and racket and net, determines the skills. And don't forget the boundary lines! They put limits on where the ball is permitted to land. These and other factors, like the kind and quality of equipment or the court surface, define what we mean by a tennis court. They define the conditions that classify tennis skills. They determine the environment. (It is this context that I simulate.)

And of course we mustn't forget the player, who also has a hand in defining the environment. Each player has physical characteristics, or bio-mechanisms, that allow tennis movements and enable the skills, permitting the player to compete and create a tennis environment. Unlike your pet cat or dog, whose capabilities in that direction are a bit limited.

There is no tennis game without competing players. One property of the game is the speed of the ball relative to the player moving to intercept it. If a player doesn't observe the ball, there is no such speed and so no game is being played. But there is also no tennis court without the players. Just as there are no tennis players without a court. We understand the meaning of a "court" through the participants who play on it. Each defines the other. The players and the court are linked to form the tennis environment. The linkage is the set of tennis skills. Remove any of the elements and you negate the rest.

Changes in tennis skills alter the environment. And changes in the environment alter the skills. The tennis environment, like other environments, is created through perception. It is what you observe as a player. The court is recognized as such by the tennis player, who creates the environment. It is the player's personal virtual reality. Without observation there can be no tennis environment.

The nature of the created environment depends on the quality of the individual's reading skill. And this depends on the individual's skill level, on what he or she understands about the game, and on the kind and quality of shots, tactics and strategy he or she can make. The factors affect how the game is viewed. Changes in skill level therefore change the tennis environment.

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What if all who had competence in certain skills no longer practice the skills? Would the environment of the skills exist? If humans ceased to exist, would tennis no longer exist?

That's not an elegant way to state the question. The idea is, if a skills environment is determined by individuals as well as by the facilities, equipment, tactics, strategies, and active participation, but nobody participates any more, would it make sense to say that the bloody environment had objective reality? The question is also raised in quantum mechanics.

Quoting from Nick Herbert's book, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, in reference to the problem of measuring properties of atomic particles:

According to the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics (mainly Niels Bohr), the object of observation doesn't have (classical) independent properties. Applying the idea to tennis, for example, the characteristics of the ball are given relative to the player observing and running to intercept it. The relevant characteristics are properties of the relations between player and ball and don't belong to either. Similarly, the way you perceive the stock market is strictly your observation. If we were to stop there and accept the Bohr doctrine, the ball and tennis environment or stock prices and market environment would have no independent (objective) attributes. And neither would competence levels.

But do we stop there? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

On one side, all the attributes of the tennis environment -- or any other environment -- come down to attributes observed by some observer. Even the meaning of a tennis ball comes down to the insight gained through perception by some human being. Without that perception, the ball wouldn't exist as such. (Do you think a cat can recognize a tennis ball?) What "it" would then be is hard to imagine, because there would be no human perception. You can't even say 'look like,' because that terminology implies human observation.

Bohr argues against the reality of the attributes on the grounds that the quantum experience is an unqualified unity and can't be analyzed into components. Attributes like position and velocity are relative values in the measurement situation and can't be assigned in parts -- to the electron and the measuring equipment (the observer), so no analysis is possible.

In the tennis example, though, position and velocity for both ball and player can be analyzed in terms of -- or relative to -- the tennis court, which is what I actually did in my study. This would seem to argue for the reality of the court arena -- except for the fact that putting the values in terms of the "court" still has a perceptual attachment, which makes the reality suspect, again. Nor can you test the analysis, because doing so requires observing the court. In fact, you can't do anything without perception of some kind.

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