
TL;DR
This paper explores three major transitions in the development of social complexity, linking animal behavior, historical societies, and online communities through the evolution of social facts, norms, and information processing.
Contribution
It introduces a unified framework for understanding societal evolution based on coarse-grained information and top-down causation, connecting biological and cultural transitions.
Findings
Identification of three key social transitions
Linking social facts to norm emergence and self-assembly
Highlighting the role of lossy information compression
Abstract
We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human history, including 18th Century London and the contemporary online phenomenon of Wikipedia. From the first awareness and use of group-level social facts to the emergence of norms and their self-assembly into normative bundles, each transition represents a new relationship between the individual and the group. At the center of this relationship is the use of coarse-grained information gained via lossy compression. The role of top-down causation in the origin of society parallels that conjectured to occur in the origin and evolution of life itself.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
