Behavior and Culture in One Dimension examines how evolution builds intelligence from simple materials arranged in the right order. This simple idea of one-dimensional patterns guiding three-dimensional behavior delivers food for thought across many fields of research:
Artificial Intelligence
- Large Language Models comprise sequences of tokens, but they do not constrain three-dimensional activity without the intervention of interactors like humans or robots. Sequences themselves are impoverished without access to perception and action.
- Sequence processing in evolved complex systems is entangled with and grounded in the underlying physics. Only in abstract computation do we find Vygotsky’s “deliberate semantics.”
- Computation anchors one end of a continuum with physics at the other end. In between are arrayed natural symbol systems displaying distinctive levels of abstraction.
Complexity Science & Complex Systems
- Permanent storage media like DNA and written text are necessary for the open-ended evolution of complexity. Abstract grammars allow sequences to constrain other sequences, but only if they are stable enough to be searched.
- If you are handed a recipe, do you know whether you are supposed to actually prepare the dish or simply photocopy the recipe? Von Neumann’s Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata showed that interpretation and replication of one-dimensional patterns are logically and physically independent activities.
Linguistics
- Human language is neither a tool of “communication” nor a tool of “cognition.” Rather, like all one-dimensional patterns, language is a tool of constraint, a boundary condition on the behavior of interactors.
- “How do children acquire language?” gets the question backwards. The more interesting question is “How does language acquire children?”
Ecological Psychology
- Language is grounded in perception and behavior, and James J. Gibson’s idea of affordance is crucial to understanding grammar. Shuffling one-dimensional patterns allows affordances to be composed and then extended in time and space.
- Biological and cultural evolution are processes of affordance discovery, exploitation, and memorialization.
Origin of Life & Astrobiology
- How do we know if something on another planet is alive? Life is defined by one-dimensional patterns constraining three-dimensional activity.
- The transition from the RNA world to the DNA-RNA-protein world parallels the evolution of culture from preliterate to literate through the invention of writing, measurement, and tools.
Genomics & Molecular Biology
- Sequence replication can be holistic or piecemeal. In cell division the entire genome sequence is replicated all at once; in horizontal gene transfer and human language, short subsequences are replicated differentially.
- Abstract concepts in human language behave like pleiotropic genes in the cell. They can have many different meanings in different contexts
- Alternative splicing arranges and rearranges the nouns and verbs of the genome.
Evolutionary Biology
- Following Hull, sequences constrain the physical world through interactors, which recognize affordances and respond appropriately. Interactors function at all scales of the living and civilized worlds, from enzymes to complex institutions like the legal system.
- Interactors can either be constructed, like enzymes, or configured, like humans.
Anthropology & Cultural Evolution
- Biological evolution and cultural evolution are not two different things, but rather two examples of one sort of thing. The same is true of DNA molecules and human texts.
- As described by Dawkins, “meme” fails to capture the important difference between the rate-independent and rate-dependent elements of human culture, the difference between composing an email and changing a tire.