Creativity: linchpin in the quest for a viable theory of cultural evolution

Gabora, Liane

doi:10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.09.013

Cited by 47 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…A more 'ecological' view is that they function not as fixed representations or identifiers, but as bridges between mind and world that are sensitive to context, and actively participate in the generation of meaning (Gabora, Rosch, & Aerts, 2008). This view is central to the Honing Theory of creativity (HT) (Gabora, 2010(Gabora, , 2017(Gabora, , 2018(Gabora, , 2019a(Gabora, , 2019b, which grew out of a particular mathematical approach to concept interactions (Aerts, Sozzo, & Veloz, 2016;Aerts, Broekaert, Gabora, & Sozzo, 2016;Aerts, Gabora, & Sozzo, 2013;Aerts & Gabora, 2005a, 2005bBusemeyer & Bruza, 2012;Gabora & Aerts, 2002;Pothos, Busemeyer, Shiffrin, & Yearsley, 2017). HT posits that we know ideas only indirectly, by how they appear from particular perspectives or contexts, but each context unavoidably influences how the idea is experienced and understood.…”

Section: Honing Theory Of Creativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The form of a ‘half-baked’ creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations

et al. 2020

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Creative thought is conventionally believed to involve searching memory and generating multiple independent candidate ideas followed by selection and refinement of the most promising. Honing theory, which grew out of the quantum approach to describing how concepts interact, posits that what appears to be discrete, separate ideas are actually different projections of the same underlying mental representation, which can be described as a superposition state, and which may take different outward forms when reflected upon from different perspectives. As creative thought proceeds, this representation loses potentiality to be viewed from different perspectives and manifest as different outcomes. Honing theory yields different predictions from conventional theories about the mental representation of an idea midway through the creative process. These predictions were pitted against one another in two studies: one closed-ended and one open-ended. In the first study, participants were interrupted midway through solving an analogy problem and wrote down what they were thinking in terms of a solution. In the second, participants were instructed to create a painting that expressed their true essence and describe how they conceived of the painting. For both studies, naïve judges categorized these responses as supportive of either the conventional view or the honing theory view. The results of both studies were significantly more consistent with the predictions of honing theory. Some implications for creative cognition, and cognition in general, are discussed.

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Section: Honing Theory Of Creativitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The form of a ‘half-baked’ creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations

et al. 2020

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“…It has been proposed that autocatalytic networks hold the key to understanding the origins of any evolutionary process, including the OOC (Gabora, 1998(Gabora, , 2000(Gabora, , 2013Gabora & Aerts, 2009;Gabora & Steel, 2017). 3 This kind of evolution has been referred to as Self-Other Reorganization (SOR) because it interleaves internal self-organization with external interactions with other self-organizing networks (Gabora, 2019). In application to the OOC, the products and reactants are not catalytic molecules but MRs 4 of experiences, ideas, and chunks of knowledge, as well as more complex mental structures such as schemas and scripts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling a Cognitive Transition at the Origin of Cultural Evolution Using Autocatalytic Networks

Gabora

Steel

2020

Cognitive Science

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Autocatalytic networks have been used to model the emergence of self‐organizing structure capable of sustaining life and undergoing biological evolution. Here, we model the emergence of cognitive structure capable of undergoing cultural evolution. Mental representations (MRs) of knowledge and experiences play the role of catalytic molecules, and interactions among them (e.g., the forging of new associations) play the role of reactions and result in representational redescription. The approach tags MRs with their source, that is, whether they were acquired through social learning, individual learning (of pre‐existing information), or creative thought (resulting in the generation of new information). This makes it possible to model how cognitive structure emerges and to trace lineages of cumulative culture step by step. We develop a formal representation of the cultural transition from Oldowan to Acheulean tool technology using Reflexively Autocatalytic and Food set generated (RAF) networks. Unlike more primitive Oldowan stone tools, the Acheulean hand axe required not only the capacity to envision and bring into being something that did not yet exist, but hierarchically structured thought and action, and the generation of new MRs: the concepts EDGING, THINNING, SHAPING, and a meta‐concept, HAND AXE. We show how this constituted a key transition toward the emergence of semantic networks that were self‐organizing, self‐sustaining, and autocatalytic, and we discuss how such networks replicated through social interaction. The model provides a promising approach to unraveling one of the greatest anthropological mysteries: that of why development of the Acheulean hand axe was followed by over a million years of cultural stasis.

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“…It may thereby play an important role in fostering group identity, cohesion and cooperation [66] (see also [49]). 6 It has been suggested that creative cognition occurs through a Darwinian process [68], but this theory has been sharply criticized [69][70][71][72], and its current primary proponent now advocates a non-Darwinian version of the theory [73]. 7 Note that vertical and horizontal transmission must be defined with respect to the relevant evolutionary process.…”

Section: Concluding Commentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An evolutionary process without variation and selection

Gabora

Steel

2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change—e.g. cultural evolution, and earliest life—acquired traits are retained; these domains do not face the problem that Darwin’s theory was designed to solve. Lack of transmission of acquired traits occurs when germ cells are protected from environmental change, due to a self-assembly code used in two distinct ways: (i) actively interpreted during development to generate a soma, and (ii) passively copied without interpretation during reproduction to generate germ cells. Early life and cultural evolution appear not to involve a self-assembly code used in these two ways. We suggest that cumulative, adaptive change in these domains is due to a lower-fidelity evolutionary process, and model it using reflexively autocatalytic and foodset-generated networks. We refer to this more primitive evolutionary process as self–other reorganization (SOR) because it involves internal self-organizing and self-maintaining processes within entities, as well as interaction between entities. SOR encompasses learning but in general operates across groups. We discuss the relationship between SOR and Lamarckism, and illustrate a special case of SOR without variation.

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Creativity: linchpin in the quest for a viable theory of cultural evolution

Cited by 47 publications

References 50 publications

The form of a ‘half-baked’ creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations

The form of a ‘half-baked’ creative idea: Empirical explorations into the structure of ill-defined mental representations

Modeling a Cognitive Transition at the Origin of Cultural Evolution Using Autocatalytic Networks

An evolutionary process without variation and selection

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