Related papers: Culture, Computation, Morality
Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging…
It is generally agreed that one origin of machine bias is resulting from characteristics within the dataset on which the algorithms are trained, i.e., the data does not warrant a generalized inference. We, however, hypothesize that a…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…
Many cultural traits characterizing intelligent behaviors are now thought to be transmitted through statistical learning, motivating us to study its effects on cultural evolution. We conduct a large-scale music data analysis and observe…
Why should moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and machine ethicists care about computational complexity? Debates on whether artificial intelligence (AI) can or should be used to solve problems in ethical domains have mainly been…
Humans interact with each other on a daily basis by developing and maintaining various social norms and it is critical to form a deeper understanding of how such norms develop, how they change, and how fast they change. In this work, we…
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…
Categorization is a fundamental function of minds, with wide ranging implications for the rest of the cognitive system. In humans, categories are shared and communicated between minds, thus requiring explanations at the population level. In…
There are growing uncertainties surrounding the classical model of computation established by G\"odel, Church, Kleene, Turing and others in the 1930s onwards. The mismatch between the Turing machine conception, and the experiences of those…
The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a…
Cooperation is one of the foundations of human society. Many solutions to cooperation problems have been developed and culturally transmitted across generations. Because immigration can play a role in nourishing or disrupting cooperation in…
An emotional version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that differences in language emotionalities influence differences among cultures no less than conceptual differences. Conceptual contents of languages and cultures to significant…
Misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication often arise from subtle differences in interpretation, but it is unclear whether these differences arise from the literal meanings assigned to words or from more general pragmatic factors…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information…
AI is flattening culture. Evaluations of "culture" are showing the myriad ways in which large AI models are homogenizing language and culture, averaging out rich linguistic differences into generic expressions. I call this phenomenon…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
How can one recognize coordination languages and technologies? As this report shows, the common approach that contrasts coordination with computation is intellectually unsound: depending on the selected understanding of the word…
Divergent cumulative cultural evolution occurs when the cultural evolutionary trajectory diverges from the biological evolutionary trajectory. We consider the conditions under which divergent cumulative cultural evolution can occur. We…