Mihai Vacariu

University of Adelaide, Adelaide, .

E-mail: trimite un mesaj.

Pagina web a instituţiei: http://www.adelaide.edu.au

Nascut(a) in: 1967

Interese: cognitive science, philosophy of mind, representations, dynamical systems

Details:
I am currently working with Dr. Gerard O’Brien and Dr. John Opie on an ARC project entitled Rethinking the Mind: Connectionism, Consciousness and Mental Content. My main interest concerns the nature of mental representations and the information processing in the brain from a connectionist perspective: how the mind represents the world through mental representations and how they are computed in order to generate intelligent behavior. I intend to articulate an account of mental content that coheres with both the connectionist vehicle theory of consciousness and the connectionist conception of mind more generally. Connectionism impels us to think of mental content, not in terms of causal relations between the brain and the environment, but in terms of resemblance relations between structural properties of the brain’s representations and features of the environment. My research involves the use of biologically plausible neural networks (PDP) to simulate brain activity in order to determine the representational properties of patterns of activation within the neural networks. Significantly, PDP networks achieve their computational power not by performing rule-governed manipulations of symbols, in the manner of digital devices, but by constructing (via a learning regime) and exploiting structural isomorphism between their representational vehicles and their task