Eoin, your comment/question is:
> Just a thought . . .
>
> . . . but could the whole of humanity be behaving like
> millions of nodes in a complex connectionist network. I
> mean every human is an active element, and our interrelated
> connections are strengthened or given extra weight through
> learning and the principles involved in recurrent and feed
> foreward networks. Humanity, is after all, progressing (or
> foreward propagating), although to what stable state or
> outcome I don't know? Just as connectionism applies to
> humanity, it could just as well apply to the rest of the
> physical world from atoms to galaxies (I suppose).
How does this affect our study of cognitive science? - are you
contemplating a reductionist theory that cognitive science should
consider? How many of the processes could we begin to produce
hypotheses for, let alone test empirically?
But maybe, taking your point, at a reductionist level we ARE controlled
entirely by (impersonal)connections at (say)a cellular level. If this
is part of your hypothesis, what processes can we observe of which we
are aware that could provide evidence of causal link?
Dunsdon, Graham.
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