ERC Starting Grant · 2024
Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture
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…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.