Related papers: Cultural Evolution Entails (Creativity Entails (Co…

The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…

In biological systems, the capacity of anticipation--that is, entertaining a model of the system within the system--can be considered as naturally given. Human languages enable psychological systems to construct and exchange mental models…

This article explains how natural selection works and how it has been inappropriately applied to the description of cultural change. It proposes an alternative evolutionary explanation for cultural evolution that describes it in terms of…

We outline the rationale and preliminary results of using the state context property (SCOP) formalism, originally developed as a generalization of quantum mechanics, to describe the contextual manner in which concepts are evoked, used and…

The Semantic Theory of Evolution (STE) takes the existence of a number of arbitrary communication codes as a fundamental feature of life, from the genetic code to human cultural communication codes. Their arbitrariness enables, at each…

The infrastructure upon which the functioning of society depends is composed of complex ecosystems of systems. Consequently, we must reason about the properties of such ecosystems, which requires that we construct models of them. There are…

Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…

The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact upon the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of…

This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…

We show the presence of genuine quantum structures in human language. The neo-Darwinian evolutionary scheme is founded on a probability structure that satisfies the Kolmogorovian axioms, and as a consequence cannot incorporate quantum-like…

Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…

The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…

One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…

The mathematical formalism of quantum theory exhibits significant effectiveness when applied to cognitive phenomena that have resisted traditional (set theoretical) modeling. Relying on a decade of research on the operational foundations of…

Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or…

Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…

We derive the Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics from epistemic principles. A key assumption is that a physical theory that relies on entities or distinctions that are unknowable in principle gives rise to wrong predictions. An…

Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines…

Cultural algorithm is a kind of evolutionary algorithm inspired from societal evolution and is composed of a belief space, a population space and a protocol that enables exchange of knowledge between these sources. Knowledge created in the…

Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…