Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The biology of neural networks: a few features for the sake of non-biologists
- 3 The dynamics of neural networks: a stochastic approach
- 4 Hebbian models of associative memory
- 5 Temporal sequences of patterns
- 6 The problem of learning in neural networks
- 7 Learning dynamics in ‘visible’ neural networks
- 8 Solving the problem of credit assignment
- 9 Self-organization
- 10 Neurocomputation
- 11 Neurocomputers
- 12 A critical view of the modeling of neural networks
- References
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The biology of neural networks: a few features for the sake of non-biologists
- 3 The dynamics of neural networks: a stochastic approach
- 4 Hebbian models of associative memory
- 5 Temporal sequences of patterns
- 6 The problem of learning in neural networks
- 7 Learning dynamics in ‘visible’ neural networks
- 8 Solving the problem of credit assignment
- 9 Self-organization
- 10 Neurocomputation
- 11 Neurocomputers
- 12 A critical view of the modeling of neural networks
- References
- Index
Summary
Mind as an emergent property of nervous systems
Three positivist approaches to mind
Mind has always been a mystery and it is fair to say that it is still one. Religions settle this irritating question by assuming that mind is non-material: it is just linked during the duration of a life to the body, a link that death breaks. It must be realized that this metaphysical attitude pervaded even the theorization of natural phenomena: to ‘explain’ why a stone falls and a balloon filled with hot air tends to rise, Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, assumed that stones house a principle (a sort of a mind) which makes them fall and that balloons embed the opposite principle which makes them rise. Similarly Kepler, at the turn of the seventeeth century, thought that the planets were maintained on their elliptical tracks by some immaterial spirits. To cite a last example, chemists were convinced for quite a while that organic molecules could never be synthetized, since their synthesis required the action of a vital principle. Archimedes, about a century after Aristotle, Newton, a century after Kepler, and Wöhler, who carried out the first synthesis of urea by using only mineral materials, disproved these prejudices and, at least for positivists, there is no reason why mind should be kept outside the realm of experimental observation and logical reasoning.
We find in Descartes the first modern approach of mind.
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- An Introduction to the Modeling of Neural Networks , pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992