Related papers: Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are

Social contagion is the process in which people adopt a belief, idea, or practice from a neighbor and pass it along to someone else. For over 100 years, scholars of social contagion have almost exclusively made the same implicit assumption:…

This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…

Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…

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,…

Language enables humans to share knowledge, reason about the world, and pass on strategies for survival and innovation across generations. At the heart of this process is not just the ability to communicate but also the remarkable…

The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of…

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…

The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful…

Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…

This is not a typical survey of world models; it is a guide for those who want to build worlds. We do not aim to catalog every paper that has ever mentioned a ``world model". Instead, we follow one clear road: from early masked models that…

It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…

Reproducibility is an ideal that no researcher would dispute "in the abstract", but when aspirations meet the cold hard reality of the academic grind, reproducibility often "loses out". In this essay, I share some personal experiences…

Replication is a key technique in the design of efficient and reliable distributed systems. As information grows, it becomes difficult or even impossible to store all information at every replica. A common approach to deal with this problem…

For the most of my life, I have earned my living as a computer vision professional busy with image processing tasks and problems. In the computer vision community there is a widespread belief that artificial vision systems faithfully…

Are LLMs cultural technologies like photocopiers or printing presses, which transmit information but cannot create new content? A challenge for this idea, which we call bibliotechnism, is that LLMs generate novel text. We begin with a…

According to the honing theory of creativity, creative thought works not on individually considered, discrete, predefined representations but on a contextually-elicited amalgam of items which exist in a state of potentiality and may not be…

Sensemaking and narrative are two inherently interconnected concepts about how people understand the world around them. Sensemaking is the process by which people structure and interconnect the information they encounter in the world with…

Up to now both information and its connection to reality have not scientifically conclusive definitions neither implicit origin. They emerge in observing multiple impulses interactive yes-no actions modeling information Bits. The observed…

The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…

The words of a language reflect the structure of the human mind, allowing us to transmit thoughts between individuals. However, language can represent only a subset of our rich and detailed cognitive architecture. Here, we ask what kinds of…