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17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 4. Connectionism

[mind is the sum of many associations/connections]

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