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Single Idea 18562

[filed under theme 17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 4. Connectionism ]

Full Idea

Connectionists typically do not distinguish between processes and memory stores, and, more importantly, it is unclear whether connectionists can draw a distinction between the knowledge stored in a concept and the background.

Gist of Idea

Connectionists cannot distinguish concept-memories from their background, or the processes

Source

Edouard Machery (Doing Without Concepts [2009], 1.1)

Book Ref

Machery,Edouard: 'Doing Without Concepts' [OUP 2009], p.13

A Reaction

In other words connectionism fails to capture the structured nature of our thinking. There is an innate structure (which, say I, should mainly be seen as 'mental files').

The 14 ideas with the same theme [mind is the sum of many associations/connections]:

3075 Could a cloud have a headache if its particles formed into the right pattern? [Harman]
2490 Modern connectionism is just Hume's theory of the 'association' of 'ideas' [Fodor]
2447 Hume has no theory of the co-ordination of the mind [Fodor]
12624 Only the labels of nodes have semantic content in connectionism, and they play no role [Fodor]
2991 Hume's associationism offers no explanation at all of rational thought [Fodor]
4998 Instead of representation by sentences, it can be by a distribution of connectionist strengths [Kirk,R]
3200 Pattern recognition is puzzling for computation, but makes sense for connectionism [Rey]
3201 Connectionism explains well speed of perception and 'graceful degradation' [Rey]
3202 Connectionism explains irrationality (such as the Gamblers' Fallacy) quite well [Rey]
3199 Connectionism assigns numbers to nodes and branches, and plots the outcomes [Rey]
2984 Perceptions could give us information without symbolic representation [Lyons]
7511 Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker]
7512 There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG]
18562 Connectionists cannot distinguish concept-memories from their background, or the processes [Machery]