Related papers: Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are
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…
While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
Humans have an innate ability to decompose their perceptions of the world into objects and their attributes, such as colors, shapes, and movement patterns. This cognitive process enables us to imagine novel futures by recombining familiar…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
There is a vast supply of prior art that study models for mental processes. Some studies in psychology and philosophy approach it from an inner perspective in terms of experiences and percepts. Others such as neurobiology or…
The evolution and function of imitation have always been placed within the confines of animal learning and associated with its crucial role in cultural transmission and cultural evolution. Can imitation evolve as a form of phenotypic…
It is proposed that the ability of humans to flourish in diverse environments and evolve complex cultures reflects the following two underlying cognitive transitions. The transition from the coarse-grained associative memory of Homo habilis…
Can artificial intelligence discover, from raw experience and without human supervision, concepts that humans have discovered? One challenge is that human concepts themselves are fluid: conceptual boundaries can shift, split, and merge as…
A world model is an AI system that simulates how an environment evolves under actions, enabling planning through imagined futures rather than reactive perception. Current world models, however, suffer from visual conflation: the mistaken…
This paper proposes a theory of creativity, referred to as honing theory, which posits that creativity fuels the process by which culture evolves through communal exchange amongst minds that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and…
People react differently to inspirations shown to them during brainstorming. Existing research on large-scale ideation systems has investigated this phenomenon through aspects of timing, inspiration similarity and inspiration integration.…
Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular generative models, are transformative tools for knowledge work. They problematise notions of creativity, originality, plagiarism, the attribution of credit, and copyright ownership. Critics of…
I'll show that the kind of analogy between life and information [argue for by authors such as Davies (2000), Walker and Davies (2013), Dyson (1979), Gleick (2011), Kurzweil (2012), Ward (2009)], that seems to be central to the effect that…
Understanding the origin and influence of the publication's idea is critical to conducting scientific research. However, the proliferation of scientific publications makes it difficult for researchers to sort out the evolution of all…
There is surely some truth to the notion that culture evolves, but the Darwinian view of culture is trivial. Gabora does two things in this paper. First, she levels a reasoned and devastating attack on the adequacy of a Darwinian theory of…
Imagining what life on other planets, and intelligent life in particular, may be like is a long-running theme in human culture. It is a manifestation of the innate human curiosity about the Cosmos, and it has inspired numerous works of art…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…