Motivation:

While the concept of compositionality describes the human ability to solve new problems by recombining familiar elements in novel ways, cumulative culture refers to the capacity to build on the knowledge of previous generations. Both features have been proposed separately as unique characteristics of human intelligence, distinguishing it from other animal cognition and from AI. The funded project aims to unite these two core concepts in a single mathematical framework. “My goal is to provide transformative insights into how we encode, transmit, and creatively build on knowledge across generations,” says the grant recipient Charley Wu. “This could revolutionize our understanding of human intelligence.”

Project 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.

Contact: Charley Wu