Connectionism

8 important questions on Connectionism

Propositional modularity (Ramsey, Stich, Garon, 1991)

This is the claim that the folk use of propositional attitude talk implies a commitment to "functionally discrete, semantically interpretabele states that play a causal role in the production of other propositional attitudes and ultimately in the production of behaviour.

Distributed connectionist processing does not support such propositional modularity and hence that if human minds work like such devices, then the folk vision is fundamentally inaccurate.

The most famous argument against connectionist models of human thought:

Thought is systematic;
So internal representations are structured;
Connectionist models lack structured internal representations;
So connectionist models are not good models of human thought  

-> Fofor & Pylyshyn

Recursive autoassociative memory (RAAM) Chalmers, 1990

Recursive autoassociative memory (RAAM) is a neural network model introduced by Chalmers in 1990. Its key features include:
  1. Hierarchical structures for representing information.
  2. Recursive processing of data to learn patterns.
  3. Efficient storage and retrieval of sequences.
  4. Applications in language understanding and cognitive science.
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Connectionisme vs Folk Psychology kort:

  • Folk psychology: verklaart gedrag via beliefs en desires.
  • Connectionisme: verklaart gedrag via activatiepatronen in neurale netwerken (subsymbolisch niveau).
  • Relatie: connectionisme kan laten zien hoe folk-psychologische toestanden emergent ontstaan, maar stelt ook de vraag of die begrippen wel nodig zijn.
    → Alternatief verklaringskader naast of in plaats van folk psychology.

Connectionisme en mental causation (Clark, H4)

  • Folk psychology ziet beliefs en desires als oorzaken van gedrag.
  • Connectionisme laat zien dat deze oorzaken corresponderen met gedistribueerde activatiepatronen in neurale netwerken.
  • Mental causation = legitiem, maar op een hoger verklaringsniveau: beliefs en desires zijn emergente oorzakelijke beschrijvingen, geen aparte “dingen” in het hoofd.

2 varieties of the computational view of mind:

1. Classical physical symbol system variety (symbolic atoms, serial processing and expressive resources)
2. Connectionism, parallel distributed processing and artificial neural networks

Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

  • Kind of posttraining analysis Elman used in 2nd gen connectionism to determine what the network learned
  • Cluster analysis stresses relations of silimilarity and difference between static states (snapshots), PCA reflects the ways in which being in one state (in a recurrent network) can promote or impede movement into future states

Dynamic representations (Elman)

There is no separate stage of lexical retrieval. There are no representations of words in isolation. The representations of words (the internal states following input of a word) always reflect the input taken together with the prior state. The representations are not propositional and their information content changes constantly over time. Words serve as guideposts which help establish mental states that support (desired) behavior.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

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