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From: myke@gatech.edu (Myke Rynolds)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.neural-nets,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: request for philosophic reactions to connectionism
Keywords: connectionism philosophy materialism representations
Message-ID: <18496@gatech.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 89 14:07:48 GMT
References: <370@eurtrx.UUCP>
Reply-To: myke@gatech.UUCP (Myke Rynolds)
Organization: School of Information and Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta
Lines: 28

Hans Schermer writes:
>I am looking for philosophical papers, books or articles, with reactions
>to connectionism as a model for the mind. 

I think that BAMs (bi-direction associative memories) and it's conceptual
parent, ART (adaptive resonance theory) give a profound critique of the
connectionist models. Grossberg, the inventer of ART way back in '76, goes
into great detail about how nothing anyone in the connectist school of thought
has said is new, or even as powerful as what already exists! ART is proven
to converge on any complexity of input, no connectionist model can claim this.
They can learn only by limiting the complexity of the input, thus the failure
of bp to deal with large and complex systems.
For all its greater power, it is much much simpliar than these other models
that cloud the issue with ad hoc hockus pockus. Grossberg's model is nothing
more than matrix multiplication. You take a vector forward through a weight
matrix, then take it backwards through it. When it resonates on the correct
answer you're done. The most obvious way to get a weight matrix to satisfy
this problem on a series of such vectors is to stack them in a matrix and
do linear algebra. Walla!
An article on BAMs can be found in a Byte from last year.
BTW, Grossberg has three Ph.D's, two of which are in math and neurophysiology.
Connectionists are generally psychologists and computer scientists who do not
appreciate the deeper simplicity of math under the outer tremendous diversity.
-- 
Myke Rynolds
School of Information & Computer Science, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
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