Aristotle, Connectionism, and the Brain

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Aristotle, Connectionism, and the Brain

Can a mass of networked neurons produce moral human agents? I shall argue that it can; a brain can be morally excellent. A connectionist account of how the brain works can explain how a person might be morally excellent in Aristotle's sense of the term. According to connectionism, the brain is a maze of interconnections trained to recognize and respond to patterns of stimulation. According to Aristotle, a morally excellent human is a practically wise person trained in good habits. What an Aristotelian theory of ethics and a connectionist theory of mind have in common is the assumption that the successful mind/brain has the disposition to behave appropriately in appropriate circumstances. According to Aristotle, the good person knows the right end, desires and chooses to pursue it, and recognizes the right means to it. Thus the good person's brain must be able to form certain moral concepts, develop appropriate behavioral dispositions, and learn practical reasoning skills. I shall argue that this collection of the brain's cognitive capacities is best accounted for by a connectionist theory of the mind/brain. The human condition is both material and moral; we are brain-controlled bodies with ethical values. My essay seeks to understand the relationship between our brains and our values, between how the brain works and how we make moral decisions.

How can the brain be a mind, a conscious person? Recently, some philosophers have argued that human consciousness and cognitive activity, including even our moral cognition and behavior, can best be explained using a connectionist or neural network model of the brain (see Churchland 1995; Dennett 1991 and 1996). (1) Is this right? Can a mass of networked neurons produce moral human agents? I shall argue that it can; a brain can be morally excellent. A connectionist account of how the brain works can explain how a person might be morally excellent in Aristotle's sense of that term.

1. Connectionism

The brain receives input and somehow transforms it into output. How does it do it? In part because of the extraordinary technological feats achieved using digital processing computers, the brain has often been interpreted as a symbol manipulator and its cognitive activities as the transformation of symbols according to rules. By contrast, recent successes with parallel distributed processing computers have encouraged a connectionist theory of mind which regards the brain as a pattern recognizer and its cognitive activities as the transformation of neuronal activation patterns; however, these pattern transformations are not rule-governed processes, but straightforwardly causal processes in which networked units (neurons) excite and inhibit each other's activation level.

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