Consciousness, connectionism, and cognitive neuroscience: A meeting of the minds

Journal/Book: Philos Psychol. 1996; 9: PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxon, England OX14 3UE. Carfax Publ Co. 61-79.

Abstract: Accounting for phenomenal structure - the forms, aspects, and features of conscious experience - poses a deep challenge for the scientific study of consciousness, but rather than abandon hope I propose a way forward. Connectionism, I argue, offers a bi-directional analogy, with its oft-noted ''neural inspiration'' on the one hand, and its largely unnoticed capacity to illuminate our phenomenology on the other. Specifically, distributed representations in a recurrent network enable networks to superpose categorical, contextual, and temporal information on a specific input representation, much as our own experience does. Artificial neural networks also suggest analogues of four salient distinctions between sensory and nonsensory consciousness. The paper concludes with speculative proposals for discharging the connectionist heuristics to leave a robust, detailed empirical theory of consciousness.

Note: Article D Lloyd, Trinity Coll, Dept Philosophy, Hartford, CT 06106 USA

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