Understanding Societies
We believe that social structures of different animal species and different human
cultures were evolved following certain rules of the interactions among the individuals with
themselves and their environment. These rules would be certainly more complex than the only
two in I&I, but we believe that they are similar, and understandable at a short-medium term
following a similar approach as the one presented in this work.
With this, we could understand why some animals gather in herds, some are
monogamous, others polygamous, societies where only the female raises the siblings (e.g. polar
bears), or where they are raised by both male and female (e.g. penguins).
In a similar way, artificial societies and complex systems could help us understand the
family structure, the role of the men and women, why some human cultures are monogamous
or polygamous, etc.; issues which have a very important role in the development of human
cultures and societies and their individuals.
Artificial societies, as the one presented here, have been very important for social
sciences. This is because natural societies are very hard to control due to their high complexity,
and thus, theories were contrasted with unprecise observations, and sometimes were judged as
being mere speculations. Since in a virtual laboratory, one can adjust every parameter, repeat
experiments easily, and control the environment and each situation, theories can be contrasted
synthetically (Steels, 1995; Verschure, 1998; Castelfranchi, 1998) in order to be validated. Of
course, natural societies are not less important, since artificial societies are inspired in them,
and created among other things for understanding natural societies.
Future Work: The Path to Cognition
“Nature likes to hide itself”
—Heraclitus
We are interested in the research of the evolution of cognition. In a similar way that with
animal adaptive behaviour, we plan to build artificial systems basing ourselves in ethology,
neurophysiology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics, not only to understand
better cognition, but to build systems with cognitive capabilities in open environments.
The work presented in this thesis is very important for our future plans, because we
argue that we need to model and understand first adaptive behaviour in order to attempt to
understand cognition and its evolution.
Adaptive behaviour is a behavioural basis of cognition, in the sense that animals
evolutionally developed cognition as an extension to adaptive behaviour.
We humans are not that far from other animals (Clark, 1997; Pepperberg, 1991). We are
understanding animal behaviour. We are not that far from real artificial intelligence. But the
step between adaptive behaviour and cognition is not small. If our brains are not that different
from higher animals, our tools are. By tools I mean culture, language, and society. Our brains
are not that evolved compared to other animals. We make the world around us smart (Clark,
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