Abstract
Objective
To demonstrate that the human brain, as a connectionist system, has the capacity to become a free, rational, moral, agent—that is, the capacity to become a self—and that the brain becomes a self by engaging second-order reflection in the hermeneutical task of constructing narratives that rationalise action.
Structure
Section 2 explains the connectionist brain and its relevant capacities: to categorise, to develop goal-directed dispositions, to problem-solve what it should do, and to second-order reflect. Section 3 argues that the connectionist brain constitutes a self by constructing rational narratives. Section 4 replies to the objection that the connectionist self cannot be free.
Conclusion
Treating the brain as a connectionist system provides a way to explain the free rational agency of the “connectionist” self.
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Notes
According to Churchland (1995), in feedforward models,
the distinct neural populations or layers are connected in a spatial sequence of axonal projections that feeds forward, always forward. The brain shows this pattern prominently enough, but it also displays massive axonal projections from “later” or “higher” populations back to “earlier” populations. The familiar feedforward pathways are called “ascending” pathways. The feedbackwards pathways are called “descending” or “recurrent” pathways. The brain must love them: it grows so very many of them. It is a rare neural population that sports no descending projections at all (p. 99).
Bechtel and Abrahamsen (1991) suggest that concepts can be viewed as stable patterns of activation across an ensemble of units which determine further processing (p. 138). “There is a fairly clear sense”, they argue, “in which connectionist networks are making similarity judgments: the similarity structure is implicit in the weight matrix. The weights are the means of treating similar inputs similarly” (p. 121).
Again, Bechtel and Abrahamsen (1991):
[T]he learning procedure also gives the network a goal: maximizing the fit of its states to those of the environment (by minimizing error in producing outputs to inputs). Thus a teleological component is added. As a result, the representations developed in the hidden units subserve goals, and so can be thought of as representing information about things external to the system for the system. Hence, these representations are about the entities supplying the input (p. 128).
Bechtel and Abrahamsen here suggest that the activation patterns of the hidden units in a trained connectionist system are intentional states, for such representations are produced by the system in order for the system to pursue its ends.
Dennett (1991) comments:
Notice what has happened in the progression from the von Neumann architecture to such virtual architectures as production systems and (at a finer grain level) connectionist systems. There has been what might be called a shift in the balance of power. Fixed, predesigned programs, running along railroad tracks with a few branch points depending on the data, have been replaced by flexible—indeed volatile—systems whose subsequent behavior is much more a function of complex interactions between what the system is currently encountering and what it has encountered in the past (p. 269).
According to Dennett (1991),
Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardware that nature has provided for us. [...] [This] is accomplished, we can surmise, by thousands or millions or billions of connection-strength settings between neurons, which all together in concert give the underlying hardware a new set of macrohabits, a new set of conditional regularities of behavior (p. 218).
Johnson (1993) explains,
A central part of our moral development will be the imaginative use of particular prototypes in constructing our lives [...]. Many of our moral problems stem from questions about permissible metaphorical extensions from the prototype to noncentral members [...]. Our moral deliberations will be about whether, for instance, certain “higher” mammals ought to be understood metaphorically as persons, and therefore accorded certain rights (pp. 192, 195).
See Flanagan (1996b). Here Flanagan discusses Churchland’s prototype activation model designed to explain moral learning, leaning heavily on Churchland (1989). See also Churchland (1998). “Prototypes” correspond to the learned, goal-directed, stable activation patterns that constitute connectionist categorisation, as I described in Sect. 2.
The relevant passage reads as follows:
One might think that it is a problem for a [connectionist] network theory that it will explain the acquisition of moral prototypes in such a way that character is just a hodgepodge of prototypes. I do not think this is a consequence of moral network theory. One idea is to emphasize the fact that the human organism is having its natural sense of its own continuity and connectedness reinforced by the social community. A self, a person, is being built. The community counts on the individual developing a sense of his own integrity, of seeing himself as an originator of agency, capable of carrying through on intentions and plans, and of being held accountable for his actions (Flanagan 1996a, p. 137).
Robert Kane disagrees. Kane (1996) is a very good defense of incompatibilism. I think he would agree with me that freedom requires the abilities to give reasons for what one does, to identify one’s self with one’s actions, and “to keep one’s actions in sync with one’s story” (as I put it in the following section). See Kane’s Chap. 8, and his theses T22, T37, and T48 in particular. He even tries to explain how a free self might be embedded in the neural nets of the brain; but as an incompatibilist, he insists that those nets operate with some element of indeterminacy. This seems unnecessary to me. For all I know, there may be indeterminacies lurking in the brain; but, as I have argued, they are not a necessary condition of freedom. It is Kane’s ultimate responsibility principle (p. 35) that forces him into incompatibilism. I simply do not believe that one must be responsible for all the forces that shape one’s character in order to be free in one’s actions. Owen Flanagan shares my view; see his compatibilist arguments in Flanagan (1996d).
See for example Davidson (1963).
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DeMoss, D. The connectionist self in action. Mind & Society 6, 19–33 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-006-0021-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-006-0021-3