The Origin of Cultures

The Origin of Cultures investgates how information is acquired, processed and transmitted by the human mind and, based on this knowledge, formulates an original theory of cultural evolution to understand phenomena such as altruism, morality, ideology, and religion. Highly original and covering a wide range of subjects in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, it addresses the obstacle faced by memetic theorists in their analysis of culture: that nobody really knows what goes on inside the mind or how mental experiences may direct cultural evolution. Part 1 of the book, How to Build a Conscious Robot with Feelings, breaks down information processing in the mind into purely mechanical components for analysis and implementation. Part 2, Cultural Evolution, uses the results to build a theory of cultural evolution to understand cultural phenomena.