The theory of connectionism seeks to explain the human intellectual activities with the aid of artificial neural networks which are also called neural nets or networks. These neural networks are simply models of the brain that are made up of larger units. They help with weights that are used to measure the connections between units. Connectionism offers an alternative approach to the classical theory of the mind and philosophers are interested in connectionism because through it it is easier to learn skills such as reading and face recognition.
Connectionism offers the principle of explaining how mental phenomena can be studied and described by the use of interconnected networks of simple units (Aizawa 469). There are different kinds of units that represent neurons and synapses. Atoms are then dispensed without paying much attention paid to separating simple and complex representations in any given model. Individual units determine the representations, and hence, no specific coding of any atom to represent a specific symbol (Connectionism 8).
The brain’s input as received from the sensory neurons and subsequent output to other neurons is equated to vectors, and the brain becomes a vector processor. But at the same time, it is doubted whether this philosophy is viable when it comes to explaining and understanding the mind (Aizawa 470). The connectionism philosophy is very accurate at processing associations. There is belief that neural networks can perform any task that symbolic processors can do. The connectionist models can indeed account for higher cognition and the fact that they offer solutions to problems of determining what the brain is stating. The neural activations involved offer intrinsic properties that are able to fix the meaning. According to the connectionist model, mental processes can be described by simple interconnected networks as long as they are uniform.
Work Cited
Aizawa, Kenneth. “Representations without Rules, Connectionism and the Syntactic Argument,” Synthese, 1994, 101: 465–492.
Connectionism. PDF File
