Talk:Connectionism
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Sorry but i corrected a lot of spelling mistakes, and also substituted 'cognitivism' for 'symbolic computationalism' a phrase of which i must confess i had not heard. BScotland
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[edit] PDP methods
The hyperlink associated with "Parallel Distributed Processing" under "Behaviorism" merely links back to this same page.NStone
- Agree with NStone, 'connectionism' is a methodology and should separate into two categories - 'Neural Networking' and 'Parallel Distributed Processing'. NN is a method of more accurately modelling neurophysiology, whereas PDP methods are agnostic as to whether the models should reflect neurophysiology accurately or not. Therefore, 'PDP' should not redirect back to 'connectionism' in this manner.
[edit] Suspected Excessive Promotion of Herve Abdi et al
Four obscure refs to Herve Abdi! Inserted by an anonymous user with ip address 129.110.8.39 which seems to belong to the University of Texas at Dallas. Apparently the only editing activity so far has been to insert excessive references to publications by Herve Abdi (of the University of Texas at Dallas) and his co-authors. The effect is that many Wikipedia articles on serious scientific topics currently are citing numerous rather obscure publications by Abdi et al, while ignoring much more influential original publications by others. I think this constitutes an abuse of Wikipedia. As a matter of decency, I suggest to 129.110.8.39 to remove all the inappropriate references in the numerous articles edited by 129.110.8.39 , before others do it. Truecobb 19:58, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
- I have waited for a long time; now I'll delete the four obscure references. Truecobb 20:05, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Too Strict
Memory is created by modifying the strength or the architecture of the connections between neural units (hence the name connectionism). The connection strengths, or "weights", are generally represented as a (N×N)-dimensional matrix. Connectionists generally stress the importance of learning in their models. As a result, many sophisticated learning procedures for neural networks have been developed by connectionists. Learning always involves modifying the connection weights. These generally involve mathematical formula to determine the change in weights when given sets of data consisting of activation vectors for some subset of the neural units.
This page is too restrictive I think, connectionism does not apply solely to neural networks and training through backprop. This is one type of connectionism. For example, "learning always involve modifying connection weights" is not completely false per se, but is too restrictive of a statement, ie many algorithms change the network topology among other things. I'm not positive what exactly to change, but connectionism is a more abstract idea and should be worded as such rather than in terms of specific NN terms and methods. --Freshraisin 15:09, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Fair bit of work
I have tried to address the concern that the article was too restrictive by adding quite a bit to expand on connectionism as a general framework. I have also changed "cognitivism" to "symbolism" as cognitivism is too broad and "symbolism" is often the phrase used within the debate.
[edit] Activation 'values'
From the article: "Any given mental state can be described as a (N)-dimensional vector of numeric activation values over neural units in a network." the idea of 'numeric activation values' is not mentioned before this point in the article, only the concept of 'activation'. As a result it's not clear to me what the relationship between activation and activation 'values' is. Someone who knows something please clarify this.
[edit] Reductionsm bad?
Reductionism is for those (us) with a positivist leaning a good thing. The claim that explaining cognition as neural firing and communication does not allow for rational thinking or feelings seem to presuppose a lot of things (antimaterialsm, soul) without any argument or reference. It is certainly not a neutral stance —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.182.25.36 (talk) 09:12, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Additional forms?
The article as it is now refers to multiple forms of connectionism, but doesn't even list others. Instead the only one mentioned is neural networks, and that is discussed in detail without any mention of alternative models/forms. FliesLikeABrick (talk) 13:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
