History and Philosophy of Neural Networks

This chapter conceives the history of neural networks emerging from two millennia of attempts to rationalise and formalise the operation of mind. It begins with a brief review of early classical conceptions of the soul, seating the mind in the heart; then discusses the subsequent Cartesian split of mind and body, before moving to analyse in more depth the twentieth century hegemony identifying mind with brain; the identity that gave birth to the formal abstractions of brain and intelligence we know as ‘neural networks’. The chapter concludes by analysing this identity of intelligence and mind with mere abstractions of neural behaviour by reviewing various philosophical critiques of formal connectionist explanations of ‘human understanding’, ‘mathematical insight’ and ‘consciousness’; critiques which, if correct, in an echo of Aristotelian insight, suggest that cognition may be more profitably understood not just as a result of [mere abstractions of] neural firings, but as a consequence of real, embodied neural behaviour, emerging in a brain, seated in a body, embedded in a culture and rooted in our world; the so called 4Es approach to cognitive science: the Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, and Ecological conceptions of mind.