A Proximate Mechanism for Communities of Agents to Commemorate Long Dead Ancestors

Bill Tomlinson ()
Additional contact information
Bill Tomlinson: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2009, vol. 12, issue 1, 7

Abstract: Many human cultures engage in the collective commemoration of dead members of their community. Ancestor veneration and other forms of commemoration may help to reduce social distance within groups, thereby encouraging reciprocity and providing a significant survival advantage. Here we present a simulation in which a prototypical form of ancestor commemoration arises spontaneously among computational agents programmed to have a small number of established human capabilities. Specifically, ancestor commemoration arises among agents that: a) form relationships with each other, b) communicate those relationships to each other, and c) undergo cycles of life and death. By demonstrating that ancestor commemoration could have arisen from the interactions of a small number of simpler behavioural patterns, this simulation may provide insight into the workings of human cultural systems, and ideas about how to study ancestor commemoration among humans.

Keywords: Agent Based Models; Ancestor Commemoration; Dominance Relationships; Communication; Cooperation; Memory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01-31
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jasss.org/12/1/7/7.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jas:jasssj:2008-25-3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation from Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Renzini ().