Connectionism...

I've been reading some articles on Wikipedia about language and philosophies of the mind. Here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism

I haven't thought about it much before, but I think I subscribe to the connectionist philosophy. I may be a little biased, though, having studied artificial neural networks a lot recently.

The following quote from the connectionism article describes one of the main differences between connectionism and computationalism:

“Connectionists engage in "low level" modelling, trying to ensure that their models resemble the anatomy of the human brain, whereas computationalists construct "high level" models that do not resemble neurological structure at all...”

I hope to develop a connectionist system with Verve using only biologically-plausible components; however, this might not be the most practical approach. At first I might have to use some "high level models" that the neural architecture can learn to use, making the system part connectionist and part computationalist. The end goal would be to use only a neural architecture to control all behaviors at various levels of complexity.