History and Philosophy of Neural Networks

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Bishop, Mark (J. M.). 2015. History and Philosophy of Neural Networks. In: Hisao Ishibuchi, ed. EOLSS: Computational Intelligence. UNESCO. ISBN 9781780215204 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

This chapter conceives the history of neural networks emerging from two millennia of attempts to rationalise and formalise the operation of mind. It begins with a brief review of early classical conceptions of the soul, seating the mind in the heart; then discusses the subsequent Cartesian split of mind and body, before moving to analyse in more depth the twentieth century hegemony identifying mind with brain; the identity that gave birth to the formal abstractions of brain and intelligence we know as ‘neural networks’.
The chapter concludes by analysing this identity - of intelligence and mind with mere abstractions of neural behaviour - by reviewing various philosophical critiques of formal connectionist explanations of ‘human understanding’, ‘mathematical insight’ and ‘consciousness’; critiques which, if correct, in an echo of Aristotelian insight, sug- gest that cognition may be more profitably understood not just as a result of [mere abstractions of] neural firings, but as a consequence of real, embodied neural behaviour, emerging in a brain, seated in a body, embedded in a culture and rooted in our world; the so called 4Es approach to cognitive science: the Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Ecological conceptions of mind.

Item Type:

Book Section

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, Connectionism, Embodiment, Neural Networks, Mind.

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Computing

Dates: