Communicative modelling of cultural transmission and evolution by using abstract holographic cognition

Abstract

This article addresses the problems of specialization and fragmentation that are presently threatening the future of human civilization as we know it - with the aim to contribute towards enabling a more informed and unified perspective on the 'big' questions that confront us today, the answers to which will determine our future. We present communicative ways to model the transmission and evolution of the processes and artefacts of a culture as the result of a sequence of interactions between its members - both at the tacit and the explicit level. The overall purpose of communicative modelling is to create models that improve the quality of communication between people, and we try to do so here by providing a set of semantically rich conceptual 'placeholders' for modelling the intra-, inter-, and supra-actions of any organizational or cultural entity that is considered to be "important enough to deserve attention" within a certain context. In order to capture the subjective aspects of Gregory Bateson's definition of information as "a difference that makes a difference," the article adds novel features to holographic cognition by abstracting away from the underlying neurophysics of Karl Pribram's Holonomic Brain Theory. Instead we introduce an abstract Holographic Cognition Model that uses holography exclusively as a metaphor or analogy for human cognition - with the object beam of holography corresponding to the first difference (the situation that the cognitive agent encounters), and the reference beam of holography corresponding to the subjective experiences that the agent brings to the situation, and which makes the second difference - the "holographic interpretation pattern" - unique for each agent. Hence, we do not assume the in-brain existence of counterparts of the patch holograms in Pribram's model, but we note that the metaphor of patch holograms provides a basis for modelling human biases and limitations in noticing things, as well as in recalling the memories of those things, at the individual, organizational and cultural levels. This inclusion of both individual and collective human biases increases the scope and the psychological plausibility of the present models. Moreover, by combining our abstract HCM with a semantically rich and recursive form of process modelling, based on Ikujiro Nonaka's SECI theory of knowledge creation, we arrive at a way to model cultural transmission and evolution processes that is consistent with Wolfgang Hofkirchner's Unified Theory of Information and the related Triple-C model with its emphasis on intra-, inter- and supra-actions.