It's not exactly AGI ... but if anyone is looking for an interesting,
funded PhD project, this could be worth applying for ... I know Liane
and she's pretty open-minded and interesting...
-- Ben G
----- Original Message -----
From: Liane Gabora
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:20 AM
Subject: [DIV10] opportunity for graduate studies in evolution of
human creativity
PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE POTENTIALLY INTERESTED:
I have funding for one or two bright, motivated graduate students
interested in either experimental studies or computer modeling related
to the evolution of human cognition with an emphasis on human
creativity. An outline of the funded project is provided below, but it
is completely acceptable that the project deviate from this original
proposal according to the interests of the student and the demands of
the project as it unfolds. It is still potentially possible for the
student to begin in the fall of 2008 but it would be necessary to
contact me more or less immediately by email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] if
we were to make this happen. A 2009 start date is also possible.
Liane
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Liane Gabora, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
University of British Columbia
Okanagan campus, 3333 University Way
Kelowna BC, V1V 1V7, CANADA
Ph: (250) 807-9849 Fax: (250)807-8439
www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane
Summary of Proposed Research
It has often been proposed that life is not the only thing to have
evolved on our planet, that the stories, ideas, beliefs systems, and
artifacts that make up culture also evolve. However it has not been
established in what sense culture constitutes an evolutionary process.
The goal of this research is to definitively establish the mechanisms
by which human culture evolves. I aim to bring forward a theoretical
framework for cultural evolution that is as sound as our theoretical
framework for biological evolution, and apply it to the task of
reconstructing our past and exploring possible futures.
It is widely assumed that what evolves through culture is discrete
units of information (e.g. culturgens or memes). The alternative
investigated here is that what evolves through culture is the mind as
a whole, or more specifically, individuals' internal models of the
world, including habitual ways of thinking and communicating (Gabora,
2004, 2008). This internal model is referred to as a worldview. Of
necessity, a worldview acquires and expresses cultural information in
the form of discrete units (e.g. gestures or artifacts), but the
processing of it reflects the multifaceted web of knowledge,
experience, needs and perspectives that constitute the worldview. It
is proposed that the worldview is to cultural evolution what the body
is to biological evolution: a self-organizing, self-mending,
self-regenerating structure. It is further proposed that a worldview
evolves not—like modern-day organisms—through natural selection
(survival of the fittest), which operates at the level of populations
(Gabora, 2004, 2005, 2008), but—like pre-DNA life forms—through
piecemeal transformation at the level of individuals (Gabora, 2006;
Vetsigian, Woese, & Goldenfeld, 2006). In other words, cultural
evolution evolves through a Lamarckian process more akin to the
evolution of the earliest life than present-day life.
This theory will be developed and tested in the proposed research
program. The first project builds on a computer model of culture that
showed that the invention and imitation of ideas in a group of neural
network based agents exhibits change that is cumulative and adaptive
but of limited complexity, and not open-ended (Gabora, 1995). Agents'
cognitive architecture will be modified to facilitate the blending of
concepts, the chaining of ideas and actions, and implementation of
actions that cumulatively modify their environment. They will also be
given the ability to shift according to the demands of the situation
between top-down and bottom-up modes of information processing,
thereby simulating the human capacity to spontaneously and
unconsciously shift between analytic (convergent) and associative
(divergent) forms of thought. I will assess the degree to which the
resulting cognitive architecture has the self-organizing,
self-mending, self-regenerating structure proposed to make Lamarckian
evolution possible. I will investigate whether the modified agents
exhibit cultural evolution that is not just cumulative and adaptive
but open-ended, i.e. generate inventions that are unanticipated, and
that create niches for new inventions. The second project will result
in a psychologically informed software program for reconstructing
human material cultural history. The program allows the user to enter
the attributes of artifacts associated with one or more distinct or
interacting cultural groups. It provides information about this
pattern of artifact distribution that is not evident from the
attribute level because it reflects understanding at the conceptual
level, such as analogical transfer (e.g. of the concept HANDLE from
KNIFE to CUP), or the knowledge that two artifacts are complementary
(e.g. MORTAR and PESTLE). The program then postulates 'lineages', i.e.
patterns of relatedness, amongst the artifacts that takes into account
both externally driven change (e.g. trade) and internally driven
change (e.g. blending of different traditions) using as an initial
data set decorated ceramics from Easter Island. The program has the
potential to be used for other elements of culture (e.g. gestures or
languages); indeed to reconstruct the cultural evolution of the
various interacting facets of human worldviews.
In sum, the proposed research advances a promising and innovative
approach to the study of cultural evolution, with implications that
extend across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It
tackles questions that lie at the foundation of who we are and what
makes us distinctive.
--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
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agi
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