Attitudes, Chaos and the Connectionist Mind

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By: J. Richard Eiser

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Published: 6th January 1994

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Attitudes, Chaos, and the Connectionist Mind presents a broad ranging and fascinating examination of attitudes: how we form them: how we organize them towards others. Beginning with more traditional views of attitudes from the philosophy of Hume through early psychological writings to more recent research in connectionism and cognitive science, Professor Eiser argues that human attitudes should not be regarded as simple evaluative judgements but rather as part of a more complex dynamic system. Attitudes are something inherently social - closely tied in with our own self-identity and with our communication with others- and, as such, they may prove an important test of differences between machine intelligence and human consciousness. This ambitious and wide-ranging book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in how the human mind operates.

List of Figures	p. xi
Preface	p. xii
A Brief History of Attitude Research	p. 1
The concept of attitude	p. 1
Attitudes can be measured	p. 2
Attitudes have meaning	p. 4
Attitudes can be changed	p. 10
Attitudes can be organized	p. 14
Attitudes can be reappraised	p. 17
Attitudes (sometimes) predict behaviour	p. 19
Attitudes involve selective information-processing	p. 25
Affect and cognition can influence each other	p. 27
Mind and Body	p. 32
Knowing oneself	p. 32
Reason and evidence	p. 32
Descartes and the search for certainty	p. 35
'Clear and distinct' ideas	p. 38
A mind 'wholly distinct from the body'?	p. 41
Disembodied thoughts?	p. 42
A mind that 'has need of no place'?	p. 43
Mind--brain identity	p. 45
Levels of description	p. 46
Brain functions and mental statements	p. 47
In search of post-dualist theories	p. 49
Experience and Identity	p. 52
Truth and observation	p. 52
Locke and the reality of experience	p. 53
Continuous existence and identity	p. 55
Hume and the principles of association	p. 58
No simple idea of self	p. 61
The self: distinctive or elusive?	p. 65
The self and the stream of consciousness	p. 66
Identity and change	p. 68
Mind and Behaviour	p. 72
A penny for your thoughts	p. 72
The behaviourist challenge	p. 73
How much do I get for a penny?	p. 76
Attribution and inference	p. 78
Dualism and behaviourism in attribution theory	p. 80
Inferring feelings: A fallacy in one act	p. 83
Are our feelings real?	p. 87
Observation and Reality	p. 89
Is there anything out there?	p. 89
Berkeley's cherry	p. 90
The discontinuity of energy	p. 92
The uncertainty principle	p. 94
Quantum metaphysics	p. 96
The two-slit experiment	p. 99
Schrodinger's cat	p. 102
Common sense and common reality	p. 107
Expression and Shared Experience	p. 110
Aboutness	p. 110
Describing experience	p. 113
The relativity of experience	p. 114
Meaning and context	p. 116
Bodily sensations	p. 118
Thinking about and thinking that	p. 119
Knowing that and knowing how	p. 122
Knowledge and shared reality	p. 126
Attitudes and Social Reality	p. 129
The social and the individual	p. 129
The acquisition of attitudes	p. 131
The acquisition of verbal expressions of attitude	p. 132
The acquisition of expectancies	p. 134
Attitudinal experience	p. 136
Evaluation and description	p. 137
The relativity of attitude measurement	p. 141
Evaluative language and attitude judgment	p. 143
The expression of attitude	p. 145
Language and categorization	p. 147
Consistency as a social product	p. 148
Self-consistency	p. 150
Changing Shapes	p. 153
The patterning of attitude	p. 153
Attitude space	p. 156
Semantic space	p. 156
Phase space	p. 157
Attitudes: singular or multiple?	p. 159
Humean attitudes	p. 160
Curves and contours	p. 163
Dynamics and attractors	p. 164
Stability and instability	p. 167
Multiple attractors and the route to chaos	p. 168
Natural complexity	p. 171
Fractals	p. 173
Infinite outlines in a finite space	p. 176
The fractal mind	p. 180
Attitudes as attractors	p. 182
The Makings of Mind	p. 186
Minds and machines	p. 186
Serial processing	p. 187
How the brain works	p. 189
Parallel processing	p. 191
Neural nets	p. 193
Multiple layers and hidden units	p. 195
Rules and recognition	p. 197
Nets that can be trained	p. 199
Content-addressable memory	p. 201
Nets that find things out	p. 202
Patterns and dynamics	p. 204
Attractors and neural networks	p. 205
The need for chaos	p. 207
Non-linearity in neural networks	p. 209
Carving the landscape	p. 210
The Emergent Self	p. 214
Social connections	p. 214
Simulating social impact	p. 215
Personal boundaries	p. 218
Transmitting thoughts	p. 220
Mental action at a distance	p. 221
Patterns of experience	p. 223
Which dimensions?	p. 225
Points on the map	p. 227
Synchrony	p. 229
The coordination of awareness	p. 231
Fictitious identity	p. 234
Self-reflection	p. 236
Attitudes: a final word	p. 241
References	p. 244
Subject Index	p. 249
Author Index	p. 253
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 9780631191315
ISBN-10: 0631191313
Audience: Professional
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 272
Published: 6th January 1994
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Country of Publication: GB
Dimensions (cm): 225.15 x 155.57 x 18.13
Weight (kg): 0.45
Edition Number: 1