Consciousness and Connectionism: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on:

                A CONNECTIONIST THEORY OF PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE
                
                by Gerard O'Brien and John Opie

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please send EMAIL to:

        bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

          or write to:

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.
____________________________________________________________________

        A CONNECTIONIST THEORY OF PHENOMENAL EXPERIENCE

            Gerard O'Brien and John Opie
            Department of Philosophy
            The University of Adelaide
            South Australia 5005
            AUSTRALIA

        KEYWORDS: computation, connectionism, consciousness,
    	dissociation, mental representation, phenomenal experience

	ABSTRACT: When cognitive scientists apply computational theory to the
	problem of phenomenal consciousness, as many of them have been doing
	recently, there are two fundamentally distinct approaches available.
	Either consciousness is to be explained in terms of the nature of the
	representational vehicles the brain deploys, or it is to be explained
	in terms of the computational processes defined over these vehicles.
	We call versions of these two approaches VEHICLE and PROCESS theories
	of consciousness, respectively. However, while there may be space for
	vehicle theories of consciousness in cognitive science, they are
	relatively rare. This is because of the influence exerted, on the one
	hand, by a large body of research which purports to show that the
	explicit representation of information in the brain and conscious
	experience are dissociable, and on the other, by the classical
	computational theory of mind: the theory that takes human cognition
	to be a species of symbol manipulation. Two recent developments in
	cognitive science combine to suggest that a reappraisal of this
	situation is in order. First, a number of theorists have
	recently been highly critical of the experimental methodologies
	used in the dissociation studies -- so critical, in fact, that
	it is no longer reasonable to assume that the dissociability of
	conscious experience and explicit representation has been
	adequately demonstrated. Second, computationalism, as a theory
	of human cognition, is no longer as dominant in cognitive
	science as it once was. It now has a lively competitor in the
	form of connectionism; and connectionism, unlike
	computationalism, does have the computational resources to
	support a robust vehicle theory of consciousness. In this paper
	we develop and defend this connectionist-vehicle theory of
	consciousness. It takes the form of the following simple
	empirical hypothesis: phenomenal experience consists in the
	explicit representation of information in neurally realized pdp
	networks. This hypothesis leads us to reassess some common
	wisdom about consciousness, but, we will argue, in fruitful and
	ultimately plausible ways.

--------------------------------------------------------------
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.obrien.html
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.obrien
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.obrien
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
   or
ftp 128.112.128.1
   When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
   Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
   yourlogin at yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
   To show the available files, type:
ls
   Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.howe
   When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit