Related papers: Culture, Computation, Morality
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
Culture fundamentally shapes people's reasoning, behavior, and communication. As people increasingly use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite and automate personal and professional tasks, cultural values embedded in AI models…
Abductive reasoning, reasoning for inferring explanations for observations, is often mentioned in scientific, design-related and artistic contexts, but its understanding varies across these domains. This paper reviews how abductive…
We propose a theory that relates difficulty of learning in deep architectures to culture and language. It is articulated around the following hypotheses: (1) learning in an individual human brain is hampered by the presence of effective…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
The theory that all processes in the universe are computational is attractive in its promise to provide an understandable theory of everything. I want to suggest here that this pancomputationalism is not sufficiently clear on which problem…
Recent research in mathematics education points to an "epistemic clash" when programming and computational thinking (CT) are leveraged alongside more established forms of mathematical thinking (MT). The emergence of generative AI emphasises…
Large language models trained under diverse objectives and architectures have been shown to develop increasingly similar internal representations, an observation formalized as the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Whether this…
The question that how cultural variation emerges has drawn lots of interest in sociological inquiry. Sociologists predominantly study such variation through the lens of social contagion, which mostly attributes cultural variation to the…
This paper proposes a rigorous framework to examine the two-way relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), human cognition, problem-solving, and cultural adaptation across academic and business settings. It addresses a key gap by…
Collective memory is a common representation of the past shared by a group of people that modulates its identity. Recent literature on computational social science quantifies collective memories using expressions of those memories…
Understanding how knowledge is created and propagates within groups is crucial to explain how human populations have evolved through time. Anthropologists have relied on different theoretical models to address this question. In this work,…
Breiman organizes "Statistical modeling: The two cultures" around a simple visual. Data, to the far right, are compelled into a "black box" with an arrow and then catapulted left by a second arrow, having been transformed into an output.…
By nature, transmissible human knowledge is enumerable: every sentence, movie, audio record can be encoded in a sufficiently long string of 0's and 1's. The works of G\"odel, Turing and others showed that there are inherent limits and…
I discuss some general aspects of the creation, interpretation, and reception of mathematics as a part of civilization and culture.
Insightful interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to the principled governance of technology. When such efforts address the interaction between computation and society, they often focus on modeling, the process by which computer…
The notion of programming paradigms, with associated programming languages and methodologies, is a well established tenet of Computer Science pedagogy, enshrined in international curricula. However, this notion sits ill with Kuhn's classic…
Improving cultural competence of language technologies is important. However most recent works rarely engage with the communities they study, and instead rely on synthetic setups and imperfect proxies of culture. In this work, we take a…
Cultural code-switching concerns how we adjust our overall behaviours, manners of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. We defend the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in…