Objective
"Compositionality and cumulative culture are two foundations of human intelligence that have separately been proposed as ""the singular factor"" differentiating human cognition from other animals or AI. Compositionality is a core concept in cognitive science, allowing us to solve new problems by recombining familiar elements in novel ways. Cumulative culture is deeply rooted in anthropology, highlighting humanity's unique capacity to massively improve on the wisdom of past generations. Here, C4 (pronounced cee-four in a nod to the explosive compound) seeks to unify these domains under a mathematical framework for compositional compression, offering ground-breaking new predictions by accounting for synergistic interactions between representations. Just as information-theory provided foundational insights across numerous domains, C4 promises broad applications for understanding how humans encode and transmit recombinable fragments of knowledge --- internally within our brains, interpersonally between individuals, and multi-generationally across societal timescales. The goals are threefold: 1) To develop a framework for compositional compression that can explain curriculum effects in individual learning; 2) To predict complementarity in dyadic interactions between diverse individuals; 3) To develop a model of compositional culture, with a causal account of the leaps and bounds that characterize cultural evolution. These goals are only now possible due to recent advances in program induction and large language models, facilitating the transcription of natural language explanations into an explicit and compositional Language of Thought. In sum, C4 proposes fundamental innovations to our understanding of how humans encode and transmit information, where a framework for compositional compression can unite individual cognition with societal evolution under the common understanding of reuse, recombination, and creative re-engineering of past solutions."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
64289 Darmstadt
Germany