hink of the mind. Dreyfus’ work with connectionism seems to provide an alternative but according to one school of thought it is merely restating the basic assumption of computationalism, “This has repeated the computationalist assumption that cognition is the transformation of one set of representational symbols into another. The only real difference between this form of connectionism and computationalism is that the former uses a vector algebra, rather than scalar, to manipulate its symbols,” (Brains 2003, 8).
Van Gelder’s dynamical hypothesis attempts to replace the computation limited paradigms of connectionism and classicism. However, his theory is not plausible as a total answer to the nature of the mind. This is mainly because his replacement of the dynamicist Turing Machine with the Watt Governor and his use of Motivational Oscillatory Theory (MOT) as a basis for dynamicism fails to repudiate the claims of computational or connectionist models. However, his dynamical hypothesis does illustrate the importance of dynamical systems as a tool for helping describe complex, systemic behaviors.
The work of Hume can be said to have motivated the formulation of the computational model of the mind. Hume wanted to develop a psychology of the mind in which mathematical laws would govern the mental realm. Hobbes furthered this thinking by speculating tha
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