A connectionist theory of phenomenal experience.
The Behavioral and brain sciences February 1, 1999 G O'Brien, J Opie
Two distinct approaches exist for explaining phenomenal consciousness in cognitive science: vehicle theories, which focus on the nature of the brain's representational vehicles, and process theories, which focus on computational processes over those vehicles. Vehicle theories have been rare due to dissociation studies suggesting conscious experience and explicit representation are separable, and due to the dominance of the classical computational theory of mind. However, recent critiques undermine the dissociation evidence, and connectionism now offers computational resources for a robust vehicle theory. The authors propose that phenomenal experience consists of the explicit representation of information in neurally realized parallel distributed processing (PDP) networks, a hypothesis that reassesses common assumptions about consciousness.