Mythemesis: The Human Way of Knowing and Believing

Although science, philosophy, literature, and religion each have a different way of formulating explanations, they are all telling stories of why and how. The author describes how the human propensity to seek explanation through narrative can he understood as the product of an embodied mind. He offers a hypothesis ( \"mythemesis\" ) to explain the process and goes on to show that it may provide an opportunity to reduce scientific-religious conflict by transcending the dichotomy between first- and third-person modes of experience

Dismantling Lamarckism: why descriptions of socio-economic evolution as Lamarckian are misleading

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer.This paper addresses the widespread tendency to describe socio-economic evolution as Lamarckian. The difference between Lamarckian and Darwinian replication is clarified. It is shown that a phenotype-genotype distinction must first be established before we can identify Lamarckian transmission. To qualify as Lamarckian inheritance, acquired properties at the phenotypic level must be encoded in a genotype that is passed on to the next generation. Some possible social replicators (or genotypes) are identified, with a view to exploring possible distinctions between genotype and phenotype at the social level. It is concluded that the Lamarckian label does not readily transfer to socio-economic evolution, despite the fact that social genotypes (such as routines) may adapt within any given phenotype (such as an organisation). By contrast, no such problems exist with the description of socio-economic evolution as Darwinian.Peer reviewe

Embodied Artificial Intelligence through Distributed Adaptive Control: An Integrated Framework

In this paper, we argue that the future of Artificial Intelligence research resides in two keywords: integration and embodiment. We support this claim by analyzing the recent advances of the field. Regarding integration, we note that the most impactful recent contributions have been made possible through the integration of recent Machine Learning methods (based in particular on Deep Learning and Recurrent Neural Networks) with more traditional ones (e.g. Monte-Carlo tree search, goal babbling exploration or addressable memory systems). Regarding embodiment, we note that the traditional benchmark tasks (e.g. visual classification or board games) are becoming obsolete as state-of-the-art learning algorithms approach or even surpass human performance in most of them, having recently encouraged the development of first-person 3D game platforms embedding realistic physics. Building upon this analysis, we first propose an embodied cognitive architecture integrating heterogenous sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence into a unified framework. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how major contributions of the field can be expressed within the proposed framework. We then claim that benchmarking environments need to reproduce ecologically-valid conditions for bootstrapping the acquisition of increasingly complex cognitive skills through the concept of a cognitive arms race between embodied agents.Comment: Updated version of the paper accepted to the ICDL-Epirob 2017 conference (Lisbon, Portugal

Active causation and the origin of meaning

Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad sense of the term) could arise from a physical world has proven to be a tough problem. The basic scheme of Darwinian evolution produces adaptations that only represent apparent ("as if") goals and meaning. Here I use evolutionary models to show that a slight, evolvable extension of the basic scheme is sufficient to produce genuine goals. The extension, targeted modulation of mutation rate, is known to be generally present in biological cells, and gives rise to two phenomena that are absent from the non-living world: intrinsic meaning and the ability to initiate goal-directed chains of causation (active causation). The extended scheme accomplishes this by utilizing randomness modulated by a feedback loop that is itself regulated by evolutionary pressure. The mechanism can be extended to behavioural variability as well, and thus shows how freedom of behaviour is possible. A further extension to communication suggests that the active exchange of intrinsic meaning between organisms may be the origin of consciousness, which in combination with active causation can provide a physical basis for the phenomenon of free will.Comment: revised and extende

The Evolving Human and Dream-like, Screen-based Media

With rare exceptions, film theorists have traditionally focussed on culturally symbolic criticism in a persistent denial of the biological function and benefit of film-going. There has been a recent reversal of this trend, however, with the development of a cognitive theory of film, which Nicolas Tredell describes as an approach whereby "A film can be regarded as a simulation of a (possible) real-life situation that engages the viewer’s intellect, emotions and body, and that involves a complex negotiation between fiction and reality" (2002: 259). One aspect of this attempt to include science in the understanding of film has been neoteric work by William Evans on the evolutionary aspects of film-going. He argues that "humans have evolved to prefer television and film to print media [… because] it seems real to us [and because] humans are hardwired to attend and respond to visual stimuli, especially when visual stimuli include other people [...] engaging in salient behaviour" (2005: 200-201). But this elegantly simple explanation of the evolutionary significance of film and other screen-based media needs further elaboration. Firstly, Evans fails to consider the evolutionary benefits that accrue from Revonsuo's 2005 theory of the threat rehearsal function of film-going, in that films are like dreams. Secondly, in emphasizing the reality of the screen's moving image, he neglects to consider why humans attend to unrealistic film such as animations, which I argue are even more dream-like than non-animated films, using the example of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). Thirdly, he omits consideration of the evolutionary function of a film auteur who is assigned the virtual status of tribal elder. Hence I make a tendentious claim regarding the evolutionary benefit of film-goers assigning the status of 'auteur' to an individual writer/director, despite the well known collaborative nature of film-making, and (dare I say) the out-of-fashion Barthesian notion of the death of the author. Regarding Disney once again, one notes the absence of certain genres of cinema in his otherwise heterogeneous body of work: he has never made a war film or action movie. Such exclusions, only apparent when the huge oeuvre he has helmed are considered as a single text emanating from an individual author, generate an understanding of the Disney worldview, in which family values are prioritised and prompts attitudes toward this auteurial individual akin to meaning-seeking villagers genuflecting to a wise tribal elder as he offers advice for survival of the species in the evolutionary struggle for survival of the fittest. In addressing these three omissions, my paper aims to gain credibility for a more comprehensive evolutionary theory of film

Learning and adaptation from a semiotic perspective

This paper discusses the relation between learning and adaptation, arguing that the current state of the art in semiotics suggests a continuity between the two. An overview of the relevant theories in this regard, as considered in semiotics, reveals an embodied and environmental account of learning, where language plays an important but nevertheless limited role. Learning and adaptation are seen as inseparable cases of semiotic modelling. Such a construal of these opens up new pathways towards a nondualist philosophy and theory of education

From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF)