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Do software-generated "connections" really generate inspiration?
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Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Oct 27, 2007 at 05:43 PM
The disagreement, Manfred, is that while you take pains to emphasize that linking is _not_ a privileged form of thinking, I assert that writing *is* privileged that way, and acts of writing down one’s thoughts _in sentences_ have uniquely enhanced thinking itself.
I have not in fact supplied much by way of argument for this view, partly from lack, partly from appropriateness to the forum. But truly my main basis is experience, introspection, and the reported experience of others.
I gave a ‘historical’ argument, more rhetoric than real argument, to help clarify that when I say ‘writing,’ I mean to define it specifically. Peoples without a written language can draw diagrams.My hypothesis is murky because I cannot specify a mechanism by which writing accomplishes its amplification. Remember, I am trying to abstract away the memory function. Even though I cannot specify a mechanism, I can conjecture one, and it might clarify my meaning. I think spoken language lies close to our language of thought (see Jerry Fodor’s book by that title). Written language encodes the same stimuli _using the same code_ in a different medium, giving the mind another dimension from which to triangulate on a thought.
Any way, I’m not trying to deride your position, which is entirely sensible. My view is the radical one, and all it really has going for it is the congruence of its recommendations with a particular sub-genre of how-to books concerning composition.
Connectionist doctrine doesn’t require a connectionist phenemonology, as we agree, and I would further agree with what I think you imply: a connectionist phenomenology should be regarded as the default position of a connectionist psychology. Prima facie, they go together. And I think our difference here does reflect the divide in cognitive psychology between the advocates of connectionism and the advocates of the computational theory of mind.