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Tuesday March 21, 2000.
A mini-conference at Macquarie University.

Held by the Philosophy Department
and by MACCS, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science,
Macquarie University.

What are the implications of new connectionist or neural network models of the mind for our view of consciousness? Can they explain the apparent unity of the self? Are they compatible with clinical evidence, on the one hand, and neuroscientific evidence, on the other? Can a connectionist perspective be extended from the individual to the social level, offering the prospect of a cultural dimension to cognitive science? How can theories of cultural cognition deal with the flexibility and plasticity of self-concepts and other representations? These papers explore the linked ideas of distributed representation within connectionist networks, of consciousness as distributed across many networks within an individual, and of cognition as distributed across many individuals within cultures. Between Durkheim and Damasio, from polyphonic conceptions of consciousness to cognition in the wild, the two papers in this mini-conference will be of interest to social and clinical psychologists, cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, anthropologists, sociologists, and others interested in consciousness, culture, and personal identity.

For further details contact John Sutton.
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Gerard O’Brien
Department of Philosophy
University of Adelaide
Email: gerard.obrien@adelaide.edu.au
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Abstract
In a recent work Jonathan Opie and I have defended a connectionist theory according to which conscious experience is identical to the vehicles of explicit representation in the brain. This theory suggests that human consciousness is manifold and distributed. It is manifold because our instantaneous experience is a very complex aggregate state composed of a large number of distinct and separable phenomenal elements. And it is distributed because there are multiple sites of consciousness-making scattered throughout the brain. We refer to this as a multi-track model of consciousness, by analogy with the recording technology that enables music to be distributed across numerous physically distinct tracks of a tape. A multi-track model treats instantaneous conscious experience as an amalgam; a collection of phenomenal elements, each generated by a distinct mechanism or process in the brain. A single-track model, by contrast, assumes that conscious experience is the product of a single (central) process or mechanism that binds all the various contents of consciousness together.

Multi-track models, while certainly not in the majority in cognitive neuroscience, are increasingly popular, largely because the neuroscientific evidence militates against a privileged locus of consciousness-making in the brain. But when it comes to locating the subject of experience (the self) in the activity of the brain, multi-track models appear to suffer from a serious problem. If consciousness is not a stream but a mass of tributaries running in parallel, what is it that binds the various phenomenal elements together to form a single subject? In this paper, after rehearsing the evidence in favour of a multi-track conception of consciousness, I address this problem by examining a number of suggestions as to how the collective and cooperative activity of many networks in the brain could construct a self to whom all of these experiences belong.

[N.B. You can find the recent O'Brien and Opie paper referred to, 'A Connectionist Theory of Phenomenal Experience', here (JS).]

Yoshi Kashima
Department of Psychology,
The University of Melbourne
y.kashima@psych.unimelb.edu.au

Abstract
In psychology, culture has been conceptualized in two contrasting ways: culture as a meaning system and culture as meaning making processes. One emphasizes culture’s enduring systemicity and the other highlights its production and reproduction through concrete individuals’ situated activities. Echoing the micro-macro or agency-structure problem in social sciences in general, these conceptions provided contrasting approaches from which psychologists conducted psychological research on culture in recent times. I contend that a central question of cultural dynamics is how both can be true at the same time. That is, how situated activities can construct an enduring system-like “entity” called culture.

The general issue of cultural dynamics emerged in recent research on culture and self. Taking the culture-as-meaning-system perspective, cross-cultural studies have shown that national cultures differ in the prevalence of people’s self-conceptions, generally suggesting that independent or individualist self-concepts predominate West European-based cultures including Australia whereas interdependent or collectivist self-conceptions are more prevalent in East Asian cultures. However, this research has failed to shed light on how these cultural differences have been maintained through situated meaning-making activities of interacting social agents.

I suggest in this talk one way of approaching the cultural dynamics of self-conceptions is to take both parallel distributed processing and distributed cognition perspectives seriously. I will show that this doubly distributed approach can explain some of the empirical findings in the literature. In addition, it gives one solution to the question of how to conceptualize Durkheim’s collective consciousness from the perspective of a budding field of cognitive science of culture.