Aristotle, Connectionism, and the Brain :: Philosophy Psychology Papers

Aristotle, Connectionism, and the creative thinkerCan a mass of networked neurons produce lesson human agents? I shall argue that it lot a brain can be chastely excellent. A connectionist key of how the brain works can explain how a someone faculty be goodly excellent in Aristotles mind of the term. According to connectionism, the brain is a maze of interconnections trained to recognize and act to patterns of stimulation. According to Aristotle, a morally excellent human is a a lot wise person trained in good habits. What an Aristotelian possibleness of ethics and a connectionist hypothesis of mind have in usual is the assumption that the successful mind/brain has the disposition to behave appropriately in appropriate circumstances. According to Aristotle, the good person knows the right end, desires and chooses to affiance it, and recognizes the right means to it. Thus the good persons brain must be able to form certain moral concepts, develop appropriate behavioural dispositions, and learn practical reasoning skills. I shall argue that this collection of the brains cognitive capacities is best accounted for by a connectionist theory of the mind/brain. The human delineate is both material and moral we are brain-controlled bodies with ethical values. My essay seeks to comprehend the relationship between our brains and our values, between how the brain works and how we make moral decisions. How can the brain be a mind, a conscious person? Recently, some philosophers have argued that human consciousness and cognitive activity, including even our moral cognition and behavior, can best be explained utilise a connectionist or neural network model of the brain (see Churchland 1995 Dennett 1991 and 1996). (1) Is this right? Can a mass of networked neurons produce moral human agents? I shall argue that it can a brain can be morally excellent. A connectionist account of how the brain works can explain how a person might be morally excellent in Aristot les sense of that term.1. ConnectionismThe brain receives commentary and somehow transforms it into output. How does it do it? In part because of the extraordinary technological feats achieved using digital processing computers, the brain has often been interpreted as a symbol manipulator and its cognitive activities as the transformation of symbols according to rules. By contrast, recent successes with parallel distributed processing computers have encouraged a connectionist theory of mind which regards the brain as a pattern recognizer and its cognitive activities as the transformation of neuronal activation patterns however, these pattern transformations are not legitimate processes, but straightforwardly causal processes in which networked units (neurons) excite and inhibit distributively others activation level.