


Paperback
Published: 6th January 1994
ISBN: 9780631191315
Number Of Pages: 272
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
Country of Publication: GB
Dimensions (cm): 225.15 x 155.57
x 18.13
Weight (kg): 0.44
Edition Number: 1