Social learning ability and the emergence of myths

tanichu “I believe that the collective predictive coding hypothesis in scientific theory (based on symbolic emergent systems theory) encompasses social constructivism and scientific realism in a distributed free energy principle/active reasoning framework. I believe that …

heat_1nt Dr. Taniguchi, sorry for the sudden contact in your busy schedule!

I was watching this video a while ago and was getting a little paranoid when I saw Taniguchi Sensei’s post and thought it might overlap a little with what I was thinking about right now, so I am writing this message. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-1LtBOzYFo The content of the video is about how we humans were able to survive and dominate other primates.

In an experiment comparing orangutans, chimpanzees, and humans, we found that there were no significant differences in three of the four abilities: spatial cognition, calculation, causal recognition, and social learning. However, there was one ability in which humans were outstandingly high.

That was social learning ability.

The term social learning can be interpreted in many senses, but it is generally defined as “learning to acquire conventions, values, and behaviors under the influence of others.

In other words, what is remarkable about our human capacity is not the size of our brains or the excellence of our cognitive abilities per se, but the fact that we have developed by being able to update and learn from each other’s internal models, learning conventions, values, and behaviors while being influenced by others. I believe that this is a good way to interpret the above.

It’s a bit of a crude idea, but from a free-energy principle perspective, species that have a high predictive capacity for their environment (species that can minimize Surprisal) are likely to have a higher probability of survival.

Then, furthermore, humans have shared their knowledge, values, and customs through the invention of language and writing, and have passed them on to their descendants by rotating hypotheses and tests over a long time frame, so that the entire human race has meta-learned and continued to stock knowledge, wisdom, and culture for future generations, which is compounding the benefits of this process.

I was wondering if this might overlap with different fields such as collective predictive coding, free energy principle, evolutionary theory, game theory, etc., etc.

That was the inspiration I felt when I watched this video. I apologize for the length of my rambling at your busy schedule.

tanichu I watched the video too! Very nice video! That’s exactly what I think. Symbolic Emergent Systems is a thought that I think has a range of norms, narratives, and the emergence of myths. The essence of human intelligence lies in the adaptation at the social level by creating and following stories and norms as imaginary structures of imagination, memory, and fictitious structures that are not reducible to the individual. I believe that the essence of human intelligence lies in the adaptation to the social level by creating and following stories and norms as such imaginations, memories, and fictional structures that cannot be reduced to individuals. I think that to be adaptive at the social level (collectively), it is not enough to be selfish, but it is inevitably necessary to have an aspect that is inexorably influenced by symbols (language, narrative). There is an aspect like “weakness as an individual is collective strength”. However, the video was very thought-provoking because it covered well the exclusionary aspects of the group that such aspects can create, the fear of propaganda, the problems that people in power tend to have, and so on. I feel like I just want to see it from time to time. Thank you 😊

tanichu This video was very good …

The following is what I was thinking while watching the video. (This is not a commentary on the content of the video.)

I am reminded once again of the nature of human intelligence and that symbolic emergence, including norms, narratives, and the concept of God, is still an issue to be explored, and that collective predictive coding as an explanatory principle/mathematical modeling of such emergence is probably not the wrong line of reasoning.

While words like sociality, empathy, and imitation are important in their own right, the perception of the world and intelligence cannot move a step forward without a systems theory that captures these dynamics as parts. At the root of this is the arbitrariness of symbols, and at the foundation of this arbitrariness is the expressive learning and active reasoning abilities of human beings. I believe that this is the basis for the ability of human beings to learn expressions and to make active inferences.

I thought it contained a lot of good elements, but I also thought it was nice to mention the front and back sides, such as the powers that be having a sociopathic component, or empathy having a negative effect.

heat_1nt Since you got Dr. Taniguchi’s response, I will write one more thought.

In modern times, religion is a secure subset. When I think about the concept of “God,” I am always reminded of the lyrics of the song “Oshakasyama” by Radwimps.

“We will always be God’s I hope and worship, but before I know it. Yeah, that’s what we humans do when we find ourselves in the presence of God. I’ve never seen it. I see it in paintings here and there. “Plus, all the gods we hear about in the stories are in human form.”

My own parents divorced when I was two years old, and my single-parent mother, who took custody of me, suffered from mental illness and was born into a financially strapped single-mother family. Compared to my peers around me, I was often unreasonably hurt by factors that were clearly not my own fault. I didn’t feel very happy about life at that time, as I had been continuously faced with painful realities many times since my childhood. If there really is a God, why is he doing this to me, who hasn’t done anything that bad? I couldn’t get the normal things in life, such as a happy family life. For me at the time, I just wanted the normal things that people around me enjoyed. I don’t think my simple desires as a child were that greedy. And I kept thinking, “If there really is a God, why doesn’t he satisfy this simple desire and save me from this painful situation? I have been thinking about it for a long time.

In junior high school, when I was thinking about such things in a roundabout way, I felt a great deal of empathy when I heard the RADWIMPS song I mentioned earlier. At that time, I wondered what God was after all. I began to wonder if God is a grand fiction created by mankind in the past, and so on. I began to think about it even more.

Orangutans, chimpanzees, etc. do not pray and probably do not believe in the existence of God. If anything, they may not even understand the concept.

So what is God, after all? Why was he born?

If you go back in human history, just surviving in the first place was very hard. Crop failure, natural disasters, epidemics, wars, death of family and loved ones, and all kinds of bad luck were waiting for us just to live. However, before the development of science, human beings did not find causality or interpretability in such bad luck.

If neither interpretability nor causality can be found for the phenomena and events in front of us, then humanity can only endure the bad luck that awaits us because we cannot predict, and we cannot take action to reduce risk.

So mankind invented God, a being who gives cause and effect and interpretation to all events.

Then, in order to pass on the invention of God to future generations for a long time, they may have created scriptures and invented prayers and rituals to make the agent’s internal model learn strongly.

In terms of the free energy principle, God may have been a being that minimizes surprisal and even establishes a code of conduct for the real world, where all causal relationships are unknown and seem disorderly. I believe that this is the case. And it may have worked to the advantage of the group’s survival. I believe that this is the case.

However, this is not to criticize God or religion, but only that the existence of God is like a complex number, both imaginary and real.

To use another example, paper money is essentially worthless, but if the entire human race believes in it, then it has value and function. I believe that “God” has value and function only when it is shared by a large number of agents and believed in by a group of them.

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