Does culture evolve in the same sense as early life--论文代写范文精选

也许第一类术语认为，文化涉及生态相互作用，表现出类比化学物种，在催化生物分子之间的相互作用反应。同样,塞利诺(1991)提出一个共同的问题，解决生命的起源和思想的起源。下面的paper代写范文进行论述。

Abstract
  The next question is: might elements of culture possess the same kind of autopoietic structure as a protocell, which replicates (albeit haphazardly) without a self-assembly code? The answer is again no. Neither a frisbee nor a business contract, nor the ideas behind them, consist of parts that catalyze or evoke or in some other way regenerate one another such that together they form an integrated whole that can reconstitute itself. The transmission of an idea is more akin to the transmission of a radio signal and its reception by one or more radios; neither an idea nor a radio signal self-replicates, not in the von Neumann sense of present-day life, nor in the autocatalytic sense of early life.

  Another possibility is that autopoietic structure does exist in culture, but it is not the cultural trait, nor the idea behind it, but the web of interrelated ideas that constitutes an individuals internal model of the world. It has been suggested that much as the autocatalytic set is an uncoded self-replicating structure that brought about biological evolution, the human mind is an uncoded replicator that brought about cultural evolution (Gabora, 1998, 2000, 2007b). 

  Intimations of this theory can be found in diverse sources. Fleissner and Hofkirchner (1996) describe cognition as a process of self-organization cycles and cultural systems as self-structuring, self-reproducing, and self-creating. Perhaps the first to think in such terms was Geiger (1985) who writes Culture is argued to involve ecological interactions exhibiting analogies to the interaction of chemical species in autocatalytic biomolecular reactions. In a similar vein, Sereno (1991) proposes that a common problem was solved by the origin of life and the origin of thought: a unique single-celled symbolic representational system first arose from a pre-biotic chemical substrate at the origin of life, permitting Darwinian evolution to occur.  A similar autonomous symbolic-representational system did not emerge on any intermediate level until the origin of thought and language from the substrate of prelinguistic neural activity patterns in the brains of Pleistocene hominids.

  We start by noting that a socially situated human memory is sparse, distributed, and content-addressable (Hinton, McClelland, & Rummelhart, 1986; Hopfield, 1982; Kanerva, 1988; Lin et al., 2006). Thus elements of culture are not stored in memory as discrete chunks (Goldman-Rakie, 1992; Miyake & Shah, 1999) but overlap, and as such are woven into a flexible, integrated model of how different aspects of the world relate to one another, and how to make ones way in it: a worldview. 

  The distributed nature of the memory structure in which a worldview is encoded is what enables us to reason about one situation in terms of another, adapt ideas to new circumstances or different audiences, evaluate new experiences in terms of previous ones, and blend information from different domains, as in a pun or double entendre or the construction of an item that has both a useful and a decorative function (Gabora, 2007c). All these depend on the ability to forge an association between two things and thereby see one through the lens of the other. But this leads to a chicken-and-egg paradox. Until memories are woven into a worldview, how can they generate the remindings and associations that constitute a stream of thought? Conversely, until a mind can generate streams of thought, how does it integrate memories into a worldview? How could something composed of complex, mutually dependent parts come to be?

  The proposal that it comes about through a process referred to as conceptual closure follows straightforwardly from the concepts of autopoiesis and closure. Applying them to cognition, just as polymers catalyze reactions that generate other polymers, retrieval of an episode or other item from memory evokes another, which evokes yet another, thereby forging new associative paths. In a distributed memory, this increases the probability that episodes connected by a dense web of associative paths start to get treated as instances of a particular concept (Rummelhart & McClelland, 1985). Concepts facilitate streams of thought, which forge connections between more distantly related clusters. The ratio of associative paths to concepts increases until (due to the threshold effect discussed in the origin of life context) it becomes almost inevitable that a giant cluster emerges. When for any one item in memory there exists a possible associative path to any other, they form an integrated conceptual web, that can be described by a connected closure space.

  The theory that cultural evolution is mediated by the uncoded replication of worldviews speaks to a concern raised by Boone and Smith (1998: S142-3) and others that In adopting the Darwinian framework, evolutionary archaeologists have simply substituted phenotypic variation for genetic.With uncoded replication, the genotype/phenotype distinction has no apt equivalent. Since the mode of change is not template-driven, there is no portion of an artifact that is (like a genome) shielded from acquired change. And there is no portion that is (like a body) shed at the end of a generation. The mistake of evolutionary archaeologists and other cultural Darwinists may not be the notion that artifacts evolve, but that they evolve the way present-day life evolves. Their evolution may be more akin to the evolution of these earliest forms of life, and the unit of replication the web of memories and knowledge that constitutes a worldview.

The idea then is that the self-replicating structures in culture are not memes but minds, or more accurately, worldviews. A worldview is not the coded sort identified by von Neumann; it is uncoded, like the autocatalytic sets postulated to be the earliest forms of life. A worldview replicates not all-at-once but in a piecemeal manner through social learning via the exchange of knowledge, stories, perspectives, actions, artifacts, and so forth. Worldviews are therefore not so much replaced by as transformed into (literally) more evolved ones. The current evolutionary state of a worldview is reflected in the things one does, says, or makes; different situations expose different facets of a worldview (like cutting a fruit at different angles exposes different parts of its interior). As with protocells in metabolism-first origin of life scenarios, the process is bottom-up rather than top-down (dictated by self-assembly instructions), and therefore characteristics acquired over a lifetime are passed on.(paper代写)

  The proposal that the worldview evolves as a unit is consistent with the view that the contents of the mind are interactive (Aerts & Gabora, 2005a,b; Bickhard, 2000; Gabora & Aerts, 2002; Gabora, Aerts, & Rosch, in press; Rosch, 1999). That is, they are not fixed until elicited by a context, and it is contextual interaction that causes the relevant representations to take on a well-defined form. The social self can be said to emerge through the assimilation of norms, values, and conventions over the course of this interactive process (Bickhard, 2004). This brings us to a version of the extended mind view in which elements of culture are not duplicated across minds but assimilated into different autopoietic structures where their potential to interact and provide meaning is differently realized.(paper代写)

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