Humans prefer mutual information. Further, I suspect that this is the same mechanism that drives our desire to reproduce.
The core of my intuition is that we instinctively want to propagate our genetic information, and also seem to want to propagate our cultural information (e.g. the notion of not being able to raise my daughter fills me with horror). If this is true of both kinds of information, it probably shares a cause.
This seems to have explanatory power for a lot of things.
Why do people continue to talk when they have nothing to say, or spend time listening to things that make them angry or afraid? Because there are intrinsic rewards for speaking and for listening, regardless of content. These things lead to shared information the same way sex leads to children.
Why do people make poetry and music? Because this is a bundle of their cultural information propagating in the world. I think the metaphor about the artwork being the artist’s child should be taken completely literally.
Why do people teach? A pretty good description of teaching is mutualizing information.
This quickly condensed into considering how important shared experiences are, and therefore also coordinated groups. This is because actions generate shared experiences, which contain a lot of mutual information. Areas of investigation for this include military training, asabiyah, and ritual.
What I haven’t done yet is really link this to what is happening in the brain; naively it seems consistent at first blush with the predictive processing model, and also seems like maybe-possibly Fristonian free energy applied to other humans.
Humans prefer mutual information. Further, I suspect that this is the same mechanism that drives our desire to reproduce.
The core of my intuition is that we instinctively want to propagate our genetic information, and also seem to want to propagate our cultural information (e.g. the notion of not being able to raise my daughter fills me with horror). If this is true of both kinds of information, it probably shares a cause.
This seems to have explanatory power for a lot of things.
Why do people continue to talk when they have nothing to say, or spend time listening to things that make them angry or afraid? Because there are intrinsic rewards for speaking and for listening, regardless of content. These things lead to shared information the same way sex leads to children.
Why do people make poetry and music? Because this is a bundle of their cultural information propagating in the world. I think the metaphor about the artwork being the artist’s child should be taken completely literally.
Why do people teach? A pretty good description of teaching is mutualizing information.
This quickly condensed into considering how important shared experiences are, and therefore also coordinated groups. This is because actions generate shared experiences, which contain a lot of mutual information. Areas of investigation for this include military training, asabiyah, and ritual.
What I haven’t done yet is really link this to what is happening in the brain; naively it seems consistent at first blush with the predictive processing model, and also seems like maybe-possibly Fristonian free energy applied to other humans.