Over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy an update has recently been posted of the entry on mental representation by David Pitt.
When reading these kinds of articles, I look for a couple of things: (a) discussion of the importance of different levels of description and that they may be mapped onto each other; (b) clear language separating personal and sub-personal level descriptions.
It’s not bad. He notes for instance Smolensky’s arguments that “certain types of higher-level patterns of activity in a neural network may be roughly identified with the representational states of commonsense psychology”. BUT two issues to be separated here: classical notions of representation and how these relate to connectionist representations—and models even closer biologically; and also how phenomenology could arise from, e.g., connectionist networks.
Worth a read.
