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Single Idea 3075

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

Full Idea

If the right pattern of electrical discharges occurred in a cloud instead of in a brain, would that also be a headache?

Gist of Idea

Could a cloud have a headache if its particles formed into the right pattern?

Source

Gilbert Harman (Thought [1973], 3.2)

Book Ref

Harman,Gilbert: 'Thought' [Princeton 1977], p.38

A Reaction

The standard objection to functionalism is to propose absurd implementations of a mind, but probably only a brain could produce the right electro-chemical combination.

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]