Attitudes, Chaos and the Connectionist Mind

This work brings together ideas not only from the traditional social psychological literature but also from cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, computer science and chaos theory. As such, it presents a perspective which challenges many traditional theoretical approaches to attitudes. The central theme of the book is how we form and organize our attitudes - not themes which have so far featured prominently in discussions of chaos or artificial intelligence. 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. Despite the lessons to be learnt from computer simulations of human social and cognitive processes, there are fundamental objections to the idea of a computer having an attitude. The having of an attitude is something inherently social - that is, it depends on our communication with other people and our consciousness of other minds. As such, attitudes may prove an important test of differences between machine intelligence and human consciousness.
The author argues that it is impossible for a computer to develop a sense of self and a set of attitudes without the continuity of experience and of social relationships with other minds that makes us who we are.