Memes, according to Dawkins' original conception (in The Selfish Gene), are
fragments of replicable cultural artifacts, like advertising jingles,
rhymes, songs, etc, which mutate and propagate. Such a characterisation of
thought, concepts, or consciousness seems to lead to a neo-Cartesian view
of culture and consciousness as being somehow separate from people and
evolving symbiotically: interdependent but ultimately unconnected.
As far as autocatalysis, hypercycles and ultracycles and the like go, I
fail to see the relevance of pre-biological chemical reactions to highly
abstract thought, other than to note that "autocatalysis" is itself a
concept made by a conscious, socially embedded, historically specific
cultural process of observation/classification. My opinion is that
autocatalysis is to consciousness as crystal formation is to the evolution
of sight. At the very least, it's an asocial view of what consciousness is
or might be.
The idea of "conceptual fitness" is interesting. In my reading, the author
views conceptual fitness as a function of the chain-of-concept's
(hereinafter "concept") fit to synaptic operation, even though this
"synaptically configured" consciousness that the author posits is socially
and environmenally constrained. Once again, this implies that the concept
and the synaptic configurations are co-evolutionary, thereby separating one
from the other. Furthermore, such a view implies the brain-as-computer
model.
IMO, this is a rather nonsensical view to take. It would seem, from this
perspective, that our technology is the highest expression of our culture
and consciousness; a bit like (in their time) Newton's clockwork Universe
and the dualist "deux ex machina". "Path recall" is a mechanistic "batch
processing" view of human cognition that finds its roots in a metaphor of
the computer.
If the mind is a computer, what is the body? An appendage of the mind, or
vice versa? Here we have an entelechy, a vitalistic nonsense that sees
cognition as asocial and separates the internal from the external (although
the author does acknowledge that he is doing this).
"given the picture of evolving paths, one can see that if there were
stimuli that did not trigger paths then one might expect paths to evolve to
exploit this fact; and
if there were separate and mutually exclusive parts of the network of
paths, then one might expect one set eventually to win out over the other".
Here, the author attributes teleological vitalism to the "paths"
themselves. This, apparently, results in a "self-triggering stream of
thought" in the individual. A "self-triggering stream of thought" is also
an inexplicable perspective. An co-ontogenetic perspective might be more
appropriate, but only if cultural phylogenesis is considered as a
co-emergent, co-determining phenomenon. But even then, there are problems.
What the author ends up suggesting, really, is two somewhat indefensible
positions:
1. Thought evolves somewhat separately from persons; that "paths" exploit
the environment of the human brain for the purpose of their own survival.
Culture suppposedly emerges from this relationship.
2. The individual, then, precedes culture; a nonsense by any account. I
think Vygotsky, when he dealt with Piaget's inconsistencies in Thought &
Language, does away with the validity of any such notions.
Note that language/communication plays an incidental role in the author's
treatment here. Rather, the "memetic population" - the sum of all possible
paths or trajectories that the self-triggering thoughts might take -
becomes the "Hilbert Space" for socio-cultural cognitive possibilities. The
paths, themselves, are given an entelechy; a vitalistic teleology for
survival and propagation by exploiting synaptic configurations in humans
based on their neo-Darwinian fitness (within what environment? culture? the
human mind? the world?).
Whether such a view can be validated is another matter altogether. Is
consciousness a product or a producer of culture, or both? Can
consciousness be nailed down to synaptic activity alone? I don't think so,
but perhaps it can. But it seems like confused idealism to me.
Nevertheless, it seems that culture and thought are, indeed, living
systems. Being a materialist, I have a different perspective. Trying to
trace the origins of culture using a perspective which is modeled on a
synthesis of pre-biological chemical reactions and Darwinian evolution
seems to me to be a somewhat ill-conceived approach to an impossible task.
Phil
At 11:58 02-02-99 -0800, you wrote:
>PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
> Copyright 1999 Bruce Edmonds
>
> JOINING THE DOTS: EXTENDING THE AUTOCATALYTIC PICTURE
> TO A CREDIBLE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS
> Commentary on Gabora on Origin-Culture
>
> Bruce Edmonds
> Centre for Policy Modelling
> Manchester Metropolitan University,
> Aytoun Bldg., Aytoun St.
> Manchester M1 3GH, UK.
> http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce
> b.edmonds who-is-at mmu.ac.uk
>
> ABSTRACT: Gabora's picture of the kick-starting of culture is
> reinterpreted and extended in order to make the subsequent internal
> evolutionary process credible. This is done by changing the unit of
> replication from a concept to a path consisting of a series of
> concepts, where each concept in the path has a tendency to cause
> the next to be recalled into the stream of thought. Mechanisms of
> selection and variation are suggested. The extended picture is
> shown to explain how an autocatalytic set of concepts might become
> a `world-view' in a more meaningful sense.
>
> KEYWORDS: evolution, meme, path, association, autocatalytic,
> world-view, selection, variation
>
>1. In her target article on the origin of culture, Gabora (1998),
>presented an innovative account of the co-emergence of world-views and
>streams of thought. Regardless of whether her account turns out to be
>correct, it is important because it posits credible and specific
>mechanisms whereby human culture may have come about. It simultaneously
>opens up the possibility of other computational models and provides a
>reference point for them. In this commentary I would like to interpret
>and extend Gabora's account so as to substantiate the claim that the
>resulting process could have an evolutionary nature.
>
>2. Gabora's scenario shows how a sufficient `density' of concepts in an
>associative memory structure (e.g. one with the structure of the Sparse
>Distributed Memory model) may allow the emergence of an autocatalytic
>process consisting of a self-triggering stream of thought. She suggests
>that an ability to abstract may have been a critical factor in crossing
>this density threshold. Once such a stream is established it then
>shapes and is shaped by the `world view' which is composed of the
>network of the concepts residing in an individual's memory.
>
>3. The mutual interaction between the stream of thought and this
>network is characterised as an internal evolutionary process: the units
>are the concepts (which correspond to the points in an SDM
>architecture); the fitness of these is the frequency of recollection
>into the stream of thought (which is strongly correlated with its
>entrenchment in memory); replication is provided by the "correlation
>between consecutive memes; "selection is via "associations, drives,
>social pressures, affordances and limitations of the environment," and
>variation is a result of "sensory novelty, blending, expressive
>constraints." This process in turn allows an evolutionary process
>between individuals to develop. The internal and external processes are
>somewhat conflated in Gabora's account; here I will concentrate only on
>the internal process.
>
>4. The characterisation of the internal process as evolutionary does
>not quite work since there is no reason why a successful concept (i.e.
>one that occurs in a stream of thought) should be more likely to be
>reselected via the replication mechanism suggested (the correlation
>between this concept and the next). In other words, there would be no
>correlation between this fitness and the probability of its
>replication. Furthermore, it is unclear exactly how the proposed
>mechanisms of variation will act on the concepts.
>
>5. However, if one focuses upon paths consisting of a sequence of
>concepts, such that each item in the sequence is likely to invoke the
>next, then one can build a more obviously evolutionary picture. In
>contrast to a concept, a path has a mechanism by which, if it is
>selected as the contents of a stream of thought, it can increase the
>chance that it will be reselected - it can form a loop. It can do this
>either on its own or in conjunction with other paths. In this
>interpretation, each such path would be a meme - the unit upon which
>this evolutionary process acted.
>
>6. The set of all such paths would be the memetic population. The
>fitness of each path would be the frequency with which it was recalled
>(and hence how entrenched it was in memory). There are several methods
>by which a path could encourage its own re-selection. First, it could
>form a loop so that it directly caused its own recall. Second, it could
>form a loop in conjunction with other paths so that its own selection
>caused the selection of other paths which had a propensity to cause it
>to be reselected. Third, it could be a path that tended to be recalled
>with certain stimuli from outside the organism, given that those
>stimuli where themselves frequent. These three possibilities are
>illustrated in figure 1 below.
>
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/em1.html
>
> FIGURE 1. SOME WAYS IN WHICH A PATH MAY CAUSE ITS OWN RECALL.
>
>7. Variation could be introduced in a number of ways. First, there
>could be a simple addition of new concepts, so that an extra `point' is
>added to the path. Second, a `short-cut' could be discovered, cutting
>out a point. Third, there could be something similar to genetic
>crossover. This could occur when two paths pass through the same small
>locality, allowing a `derailment' from one path onto the other. Now the
>first section of the first path would lead on to the second part of the
>second path. These are illustrated in figure 2.
>
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/Pictures/em2.html
>
> FIGURE 2. SOME WAYS IN WHICH VARIATION COULD BE INTRODUCED.
>
>8. In this way we have all the requisites for an evolutionary process
>(Calvin 1997), but one where we would expect paths to be evolved rather
>than individual concepts. In all other respects it is compatible with
>the picture painted by Gabora.
>
>9. The extended picture I have presented seems to have strong parallels
>with Adam's (1998) "synaptic Darwinism." They both posit an
>evolutionary process occurring to populations of pathways. However, his
>is at the neuronal level and is a general mechanism of learning which
>(if it turned out to be correct) would underlie learning in animals as
>well as humans. My picture represents a further evolutionary process
>between pathways of concepts which may (or may not) be implemented by a
>process of synaptic Darwinism.
>
>10. My evolutionary picture also throws light on the question of why
>the mutual interaction of a dense set of concepts and a continuous
>stream of thought might result in a world-view. A world-view implies
>something more than just an autocatalytic set; for example, it is
>associated with pervasiveness and coherence. Pervasiveness is the
>property that whatever stimuli are encountered by the individual, there
>will be paths that will be triggered by it; there is no inherent reason
>why this would be true of an autocatalytic set. Coherence is the
>property that there will not be different sections of the population of
>paths that tend to be mutually exclusive; in Gabora's picture it is
>possible for two or more separate autocatalytic sets to emerge
>(although the probability of this could be a function of the
>connectiveness of the concepts). However, given the picture of evolving
>paths, one can see that if there were stimuli that did not trigger
>paths then one might expect paths to evolve to exploit this fact; and
>if there were separate and mutually exclusive parts of the network of
>paths, then one might expect one set eventually to win out over the
>other. In this way, once an autocatalytic process has occurred so as to
>stimulate a continuous stream of thought, an evolutionary process
>acting on paths will tend to develop this into a pervasive and coherent
>system -- one that might be meaningfully called a `world-view'.
>
>11. Of course, the above picture is simplistic. There are many other
>organisational forces at work, including: a continuing autocatalytic
>process; a process of endorsing paths as to their adaptive value (i.e.
>learning about the environment); inter-individual memetic processes;
>the effect of the emotional and chemical state of the brain; and
>possibly meta-devices such as a mechanism of boredom to prevent small
>loops dominating.
>
>12. Gabora's target article has showed us how functional models of the
>emergence of culture are possible, and even profitable to consider.
>This commentary has attempted to follow from her lead.
>
>REFERENCES
>
>Calvin, W. H. (1997). The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the
>Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality. Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary
>Models of Information Transmission, 1.
>http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1997/vol1/calvin_wh.html
>
>Gabora, L. (1998). Autocatalytic Closure in a Cognitive System.
>PSYCOLOQUY 9(67).
>ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/
>psyc.98.9.67.origin-culture.1.gabora
>http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?9.67
>
>Adams, P. (1998). Hebb and Darwin. Journal of Theoretical Biology,
>195:419-438.
>
>
Phil Graham
pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html