The Leo Apostel Center

in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme of the VUB invites everyone to
the 30th of its interdisciplinary seminars in the Foundations series. In
this series CLEA invites scholars that are actively engaged in the research
on the foundations of a particular discipline. Their lectures will always
be directed to an interdisciplinary audience, and the discussions aim at
confronting the foundations of the different disciplines.


THE EMERGENCE OF INDIVIDUAL WORLDVIEWS AND CONSENSUS REALITY DURING EVOLUTION


by Liane Gabora

(Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, UCLA)


Wednesday, July 1, 1998 at 5 p.m. in room 5B 407 (building B, 5th floor)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus Oefenplein


About the lecture

Like genes, mental representations, or "memes", adapt to environmental
constraints through the processes of variation, selection, and
transmission. (That is: create new stuff, choose the best ones, and spread
them around.) In this talk we will explore the extent to which epistemology
and culture are evolutionary processes, and ask whether the concept of
evolution can provide the kind of overarching framework for the humanities
that it has provided for the biological sciences. Of course, there are
differences between biological and cultural evolution. For example, the
creative, variation-generating component of culture is driven by minds that
continually assimilate new experiences and ideas. However even this
seemingly unique feature of culture can be understood more clearly through
careful examination of the biological parallel. Kauffman's theory of how
information-evolving systems emerge through the formation of autocatalytic
networks, originally put forth to explain the origin of life, also provides
a plausible explanation for what many believe to be the bottleneck to the
origin of culture. That is, it answers the problem of how discrete memes
become woven into a dynamic, interconnected conceptual web, or worldview.
We will discuss the possibility that the capacity for autocatalytic
cognition may have fueled the transition from episodic to memetic culture
with the arrival of Homo erectus 1.5 million years ago, and look at how
coevolution and competition between individual worldviews result in
consensus reality.


About the speaker

Liane Gabora's primary area of research concerns how cultural information
evolves in a society of interacting individuals through the emergence and
transformation of individual worldviews. She received a M.Sc. in biology
from Queen's University (Canada) and then worked as a research fellow at
the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition (Indiana University) with
Douglas Hofstadter, and at the Center for the Study of the Evolution and
Origin of Life (University of California at Los Angeles). At UCLA she
became concerned with the issue of how to apply concepts from ecology and
population genetics to culture without reducing the mind to a passive
receptacle for the transmission of memes. Her desire to merge cognitive
science with an evolutionary perspective on culture led to the development
of what is probably the first computational model of cultural evolution,
"Meme and Variations". She has published articles on her research in books,
journals and magazines, including Philosophica, Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, Humor, Wired, and the Journal of Memetics. She has been co-editor
of the Artificial Life Digest, and is member of the editorial board of the
Journal of Memetics. She is currently writing a book entitled "MemeStreams".


The presentations with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards, an
hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the topic.
More info at the CLEA office: phone 02-644 26 77 or via the Web-page:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/


________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen, Systems Researcher             fheyligh@vub.ac.be
CLEA, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel +32-2-6442677; Fax +32-2-6440744; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html