Attitudes, Chaos and the Connectionist Mind

The central theme of this book is how we form and organize our attitudes. The author traces more traditional views of attitudes from the philosophy of Hume through early psychological writings to more recent research in connectionism and cognitive science. 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. This book presents a broad-ranging and fascinating examination of attitudes: how we form them; how we organize them towards others; and whether they are inherently human or could also be developed by computers. Professor Eiser suggests there are fundamental objections to the idea of a computer having a sense of self or a set of attitutdes.