Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism

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Cambridge University Press, Mar 5, 1998 - Philosophy - 372 pages
Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids that rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are "stored" only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. John Sutton juxtaposes historical and contemporary debates to show that psychology can attend to culture, complexity, self, and history.
 

Contents

traces brains and history
1
Animal spirits and memory traces
21
Memory and the Cartesian philosophy of the brain
50
Inner discipline
115
Cognition chaos and control in English responses
129
Local and distributed representations
149
John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
157
The puzzle of survival
177
The phantasmal chaos of association
223
Associationism and neoassociationism
240
Hartleys distributed model of memory
248
Reid and Coleridge
260
Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
275
Attacks on traces
298
Order confusion remembering
317
References
323

Spirits body and self
189
The puzzle of elimination
214

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