Ideas Worth Spreading: A Free Energy Proposal for Cumulative Cultural Dynamics

While there is a fast growing body of theoretical work on characterizing cumulative culture, quantifiable models underlining its dynamics remain scarce. This paper provides an active-inference formalization and accompanying simulations of cumulative culture in two steps: Firstly, we cast cultural transmission as a bi-directional process of communication that induces a generalized synchrony (operationalized as a particular convergence) between the internal states of interlocutors. Secondly, we cast cumulative culture as the emergence of accumulated modifications to cultural beliefs from the local efforts of agents to converge on a shared narrative.