Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism

by John Sutton

• ISBN13: 9780521591942
• ISBN10: 0521591945
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-03-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science.

Table of Contents

List of figures	xi	(2)
Preface	xiii	(2)
List of abbreviations	xv
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history	1	(20)
Appendix: memory and connectionism	19	(2)
I Animal spirits and memory traces	21	(94)
Introduction	23	(2)
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits	25	(25)
3 Memory and `the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'	50	(65)
Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes	102	(4)
Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory	106	(9)
II Inner discipline	115	(108)
Introduction	117	(2)
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions	119	(10)
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory	129	(20)
6 Local and distributed representations	149	(8)
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self	157	(20)
Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27	174	(3)
8 The puzzle of survival	177	(12)
9 Spirits, body, and self	189	(25)
10 The puzzle of elimination	214	(9)
III `The phantasmal chaos of association'	223	(52)
Introduction	225	(3)
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline	228	(12)
12 Associationism and neo-associationism	240	(8)
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory	248	(12)
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge	260	(15)
IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory	275	(48)
Introduction	277	(3)
15 Representations, realism, and history	280	(18)
16 Attacks on traces	298	(19)
17 Order, confusion, remembering	317	(6)
References	323	(44)
Index	367