Related papers: Culture, Computation, Morality
This paper studies the formation of logical operations from pre-logical processes. We are concerned with the reasons for certain mental processes taking form of logical reasoning and the underlying drives for consolidation of logical…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
Research on digital degrowth predominantly critiques digital expansion or presents alternative digital practices. Yet, analyzing the link between digital technologies and complexity is crucial to overcome systemic obstacles hindering…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
The dialogue develops arguments for and against adopting a new world system, info-computationalist naturalism, that is poised to replace the traditional mechanistic world system. We try to figure out what the info-computational paradigm…
Large Language Models produce sequences learned as statistical patterns from large corpora. In order not to reproduce corpus biases, after initial training models must be aligned with human values, preferencing certain continuations over…
Computing education widely applies general learning theories and pedagogical practices. However, computing also includes specific disciplinary knowledge and skills, e.g., programming and software development methods, for which there has…
Analogy has been shown to be important in many key cognitive abilities, including learning, problem solving, creativity and language change. For cognitive models of analogy, the fundamental computational question is how its inherent…
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…
As belief around the potential of computational social science grows, fuelled by recent advances in machine learning, data scientists are ostensibly becoming the new experts in education. Scholars engaged in critical studies of education…
Large language models have become the latest trend in natural language processing, heavily featuring in the digital tools we use every day. However, their replies often reflect a narrow cultural viewpoint that overlooks the diversity of…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
In a landmark paper published in 2001, Leo Breiman described the tense standoff between two cultures of data modeling: parametric statistical and algorithmic machine learning. The cultural division between these two statistical learning…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
This chapter synthesizes evidence from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychological studies, and computational models for a complex systems inspired theory of creativity, and its role in cultural evolution. Creativity…
This piece plays with the idea of the Computocene: an era defined not merely by the ubiquity of computers, but by their deepening role in how we observe, interpret, and make sense of the world. Rather than emphasizing automation, speed,…
Greater theorizing of methods in the computational humanities is needed for epistemological and interpretive clarity, and therefore the maturation of the field. In this paper, we frame such modeling work as engaging in translation work from…
We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental…
Measures of textual similarity and divergence are increasingly used to study cultural change. But which measures align, in practice, with social evidence about change? We apply three different representations of text (topic models, document…
It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But how exactly can we characterize such discrepancies in interpretation? For example, are there any specific features of an image that makes person A regard an image as beautiful while…