Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

What is connectionism? is it something of the past or of the future? Connectionism, in the words of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is "an approach to the study of human cognition that utilizes mathematical models, known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks. Often, these come in the form of highly interconnected, neuron-like processing units." I have mentioned it before in this blog, but only in passing. The point is to abstract from the actual functioning of the human brain to study a hypothetical brain that humans can model, in the way that a planetarium may suffice when the night sky is obscure. The IEP suggests that connectionism had a "heyday," in the late 20th century, but that the heyday is now past. This doesn't mean the approach turned out to be a dead end. Quite the contrary, IEP says that the idea has passed its heyday (few scientists call themselves by the label anymore) because its central insights have been ...

Yesterday I discussed Damasio's book Descartes' Error, and the use it made of the James-Lange theory of emotion. As I promised, I move now to Damasio's 1999 book, The Feeling of What Happens, which moves on from matters of emotion and rationality to the related but distinct issue of consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is a chain rather than a single link. It is the collective noun for a number of closely related facts, each more rare in the natural world than the one before. The following are the links in the chain: 1) non-conscious neural signalling gives rise to 2) a proto-self, which permits the development of 3) a core self, which is only here-and-now, but which when added to memory becomes 4) an autobiographical self, which finally permits something that may be distinctively human ... 5) extended consciousness, (which he also calls "consciousness post-language") and finally, 6) conscience. Damasio devotes a good deal of effort to giving separ...