Autocatalytic networks in cognition and the origin of culture
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic networks, developed for understanding the origin and organization of life, may also help explain the origin of the kind of cognitive structure that makes cultural evolution possible. In this setting, mental representations (for example, memories, concepts, ideas) play the role of 'molecules', and 'reactions' involve the evoking of one representation by another through remindings and associations. In the 'episodic mind', representations are so coarse-grained (encode too few properties) that such reactions must be 'catalyzed' by external stimuli. As cranial capacity increased, representations became more fine-grained (encoded more features), which facilitated recursive catalysis and culminated in free-association and streams of thought. At this point, the mind could combine representations and adapt them to specific needs and situations, and thereby contribute to cultural evolution. In this paper, we propose and study a simple and explicit cognitive model that gives rise naturally to autocatalytic networks, and thereby provides a possible mechanism for the transition from a pre-cultural episodic mind to a mimetic mind.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it