Connectionists like Smolensky are right to emphasise dynamics and complex activity patterns. However, Smolensky's notion of subsymbolic representation carries connotations—of registration, storage, retrieval, and backpropagation—that do not appear to play a role in the complex neural dynamics of animals, like rabbits.
Furthermore, connectionists rely too heavily on the simple dynamics of equilibrium attractors. In doing so, they ignore the more complex dynamics of limit cycles and chaos, which play important roles in the neural dynamics of animals.
Walter Freeman, 1988 |