A model of the emergence and evolution of integrated worldviews

Abstract

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 to the fine-grained memory of Homo erectus enabled limited representational redescription of perceptually similar episodes, abstraction, and analytic thought, the last of which is modeled as the formation of states and of lattices of properties and contexts for concepts. The transition to the modern mind of Homo sapiens is proposed to have resulted from onset of the capacity to spontaneously and temporarily shift to an associative mode of thought conducive to interaction amongst seemingly disparate concepts, modeled as the forging of conjunctions resulting in states of entanglement. The fruits of associative thought became ingredients for analytic thought, and vice versa. The ratio of associative pathways to concepts surpassed a percolation threshold resulting in the emergence of a self-modifying, integrated internal model of the world, or worldview.

An evolutionary framework for cultural change: Selectionism versus communal exchange

“…The ill-defined idea can be said to be in a 'state of potentiality' because it could actualize different days depending on the different perspectives or contextual cues taken into account as it takes shape. Honing theory is derived from the notion that individuals' internal models of the world, or worldviews, self-organize to achieve a more stable equilibrium state [31,32,44]. Creative outputs are viewed as the external byproducts of this internal, transformative, entropyminimizing process; thus the theory is consistent with the therapeutic nature of the creativity [48].…”

“…So long as exposure to highly similar items or events causes the formation of abstract concepts that connect these instances, an associative memory that meets certain criteria is expected, sooner or later, to reach a critical percolation threshold such that the number of ways of forging associations amongst items in memory increases exponentially faster than the number of items in memory. This is an entropy-minimizing process and the outcome is that the worldview achieves a more stable equilibrium state that (following Kauffman's use of the term 'autocatalytic closure') has been referred to as conceptual closure [31,32,44].…”

“…The qualitative behavior of the system is characterized in terms of phase states using notions from graph theory and algebraic analysis. Another avenue involves expanding formal models for describing the non-compositional manner in which concepts interact to generate complex conceptual aggregates such as ideas [44]. Two other avenues for future work are described in more detail in the following two sections.…”

Toward an evolutionary-predictive foundation for creativity

“…Though the basic idea of framing creativity in evolutionary terms is promising, the authors' proposal to model creativity as a Darwinian process of trial and error presents theoretical problems, and their suggested implementation using a Bayesian network is not sufficiently fleshed out to enable evaluation. An alternative is to model the evolution of creative ideas as a Lamarckian process, drawing on formal models of concept combination (which lends itself to mathematical modeling more readily than some other creative processes) (e.g., Aerts & Gabora, 2005;Gabora, 2013;Gabora & Aerts 2009). The approach addresses the challenge of modeling the emergence of new attributes (such as emergence of the concept of a spout during the invention of a teapot) (Gabora, & Carbert, 2015;Gabora, Scott, & Kauffman, 2013).…”

Toward a Quantum Theory of Humor

“…The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of applications of quantum models to psychological phenomena that feature ambiguity and/or contextuality [2][3][4]. Many psychological phenomena have been studied using quantum models, including the combination of words and concepts [5][6][7][8][9][10], similarity and memory [11,12], information retrieval [13,14], decision making and probability judgment errors [15][16][17][18][19], vision [20,21], sensation-perception [22], social science [23,24], cultural evolution [25,26], and creativity [27,28]. These quantum inspired approaches make no assumption that phenomena at the quantum level affect the brain, but rather, draw solely on abstract formal structures that, as it happens, found their first application in quantum mechanics.…”