Article

Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology

2018-09-03

Abstract excerpt

<p>Bows and arrows, houses, and kayaks are just a few examples of the highly-optimized tools that humans produced and used to colonize new environments. Because there is much evidence that humans’ cognitive abilities are unparalleled, many believe that such technologies resulted from our superior causal reasoning abilities. However, others have stressed that the high dimensionality of human technologies make them...

Topics

Open a Topic to create a Post that cites this publication.

Identifiers and source

Literature Corpus work: 7090b075-1c5e-5075-a0da-776bc960d13b
DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/nm5sh

Open publication

Related research

Semantic proximity does not establish scientific evidence.

Click a neighbor to travelStep 1 · 12 closest

Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technologyDOI 10.31234/osf.io/nm5shRead

Cultural evolvability and cognitive technologiesSemantic proximity Read

Do institutions evolve like material technologies?Semantic proximity Read

Language enables cumulative cultural improvement by transmitting mental modelsSemantic proximity Read

Discovering and transmitting abstract knowledge over generationsSemantic proximity Read

Applying the Cultural Ratchet to a Social Artefact: The Cumulative Cultural Evolution of a Language GameSemantic proximity Read

Instrumental Causal LearningSemantic proximity Read

Building Compressed Causal Models of the WorldSemantic proximity Read

Productive causation and compositionalitySemantic proximity Read

Evidence from the futureSemantic proximity Read

Reconciling Novelty and Complexity through a Rational Analysis of CuriositySemantic proximity Read

Powering up causal generalization: A model of human conceptual bootstrapping with adaptor grammarsSemantic proximity Read

The Wiring of IntelligenceSemantic proximity Read